My Life on the Road (17 page)

As a freelancer, I finally did get one assignment in our nation’s capital—to write about the style of the Kennedy White House. It paid less than I would spend traveling back and forth from New York, but I was as fascinated as anybody with the Kennedys. Also I would be reading otherwise tedious research in the West Wing office of Ted Sorensen, JFK’s speechwriter, someone I knew from campaigning. Just being in that political energy field was reward enough. Since Sorensen felt humor was his weak point, there was a small chance I could contribute a word or two to a speech he was finishing on a deadline.

A man of sober Nebraska stock, Ted purchased his own stamps, just in case a letter might not be deemed job-related. He was definitely not part of the glamorous Kennedy social life. Indeed, he disapproved of Kennedy’s affairs, especially since he sometimes had to serve as a cover. He also thought smoking made a woman look immoral, and since I thought a cigarette made me look like a writer—though I couldn’t inhale without getting sick—I smoked and felt judged by him. Far more important was his mastery of parallel construction, with sentences as elegant and inspiring as “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” If I hung out in his office for a day or two, I hoped I might learn, contribute, or both.

That’s why, on a November day, I was sorting clippings while Ted hurried to finish a speech for Kennedy’s trip to Dallas. He ran the final copy out onto the White House lawn, where a helicopter waited to take the president to
Air Force One.
I watched as Kennedy, that familiar man I’d never met, walked into the wind from the whirling blades.

It was the last time Ted or I would ever see him.

In New York the next day, I could tell, from the faces of people in the street, who knew about the shooting and who did not. Ted called to say the bullet had shattered the president’s skull. There was no hope.

I thought,
When the past dies, we mourn for the dead. When the future dies, we mourn for ourselves.

O
NCE
V
ICE
P
RESIDENT
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
was president, Bobby Kennedy stepped down as attorney general to give LBJ the right to name his own. Then this younger Kennedy declared his candidacy for U.S. Senate from New York State. It seemed to be a painful effort to fill his brother’s shoes. Bobby Kennedy hated even public speaking. I once heard him give a brief talk, and I related to his uncomfortable voyage from one sentence to the next.

Hoping to publish a freelance article, I followed Bobby Kennedy around for a day of campaigning in New York City. He was a very unusual candidate. When avoiding a reporter’s question, for instance, he didn’t just give a skillful nonanswer, as most politicians do. “As you can see,” he would say, “I’m trying to avoid that question.” He seemed interested in engaging only with people who asked questions to which they really didn’t know the answers.

Jack Newfield of
The Village Voice
told me the secret of interviewing Bobby: Bring along someone who doesn’t know the subject—or better yet, who disagrees. Then Bobby will see a purpose in explaining, and you’ll get lots of quotes.

In Manhattan, two famous writers, journalist Gay Talese and novelist Saul Bellow, joined Kennedy’s Senate campaign for the day. I knew Talese and had recently met Bellow when I interviewed him and followed him around his beloved Chicago. The three of us shared a taxi to Kennedy events. Sitting between them on the backseat, I was in the midst of passing along Jack Newfield’s useful advice when Talese leaned across me—as if I were neither talking nor present—and said to Bellow,
You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.
Then they began to discuss the awful traffic.

My initial response was to be embarrassed. Would Bellow regret having given an interview to someone now being called an unworthy writer?

But once I was out of the taxi and away from their self-assured presence, I got angry. How could Talese behave as if I weren’t even there? Why didn’t I object? Yell? Get out and slam the door?

F
OUR YEARS LATER
I
was volunteering for Eugene McCarthy’s primary bid for the Democratic nomination—not imagining I would ever write about it—when I climbed up to a barren, third-floor campaign headquarters in Manhattan. I sat in a circle of rickety chairs with other writers and editors who were helping with press releases and position papers for a candidate we hadn’t met. McCarthy had been the third choice of the anti–Vietnam War peace movement, but he was the only one who said yes to challenging President Johnson in New Hampshire, the first primary of the 1968 campaign. Senator Robert Kennedy and then Senator George McGovern had been asked first, but both had refused. For anyone opposed to the Vietnam War, this reserved, sardonic senator from Minnesota was the only game in town.

All this helped to explain why we were such a disparate group, including a Republican woman who hoped that strengthening the antiwar cause would help a dovish Nelson Rockefeller beat the hawklike Nixon in the Republican primaries, and one other apostate Democrat I knew from our effort to organize writers and editors to withhold the percentage of our tax money going to Vietnam. Though we had imagined dire consequences, it turned out to be like punching a pillow: our unpaid taxes were just collected from our bank accounts, an odd form of voting.

Because McCarthy was coming to town for a benefit, four of us volunteer writers were assigned to interview him and write a Sunday newspaper supplement for his New Hampshire campaign. We met him at his suite at the St. Regis Hotel, all prepared with questions on his key issues. As it turned out, we might as well have stayed home. Whatever we asked, McCarthy just turned to an aide and instructed him to find this or that quote from the past. He was aloof and cool. Unlike Bobby Kennedy, he didn’t seem to care whether we knew the answer or not—only that he had once given it. This awkward session became more so when he cautioned us not to write about Vietnam. Why? Because New Hampshire was “a hawk state.”

We recovered enough to protest that his opposition to the Vietnam War was the source of his appeal, especially to kids all over the country who were volunteering to work in New Hampshire, even cutting their long hippie hair and adopting the motto “Clean for Gene.” Finally, he agreed that we could include Vietnam, but only if we put it right next to his support for veterans’ benefits. By the end, he reminded me of the executive at Household Finance who used to listen to my father’s plea for a loan, lean back, put his fingertips together in a steeple, and say, “No.”

F
OLLOWING
M
C
C
ARTHY’S SURPRISING SHOWING
in New Hampshire, Bobby Kennedy announced that he would run for president after all. Also LBJ, a sitting president embarrassed by this little-known senator from Minnesota, stunned the country by announcing that he wouldn’t run again. Now that Bobby Kennedy was the only other major outside contender, the McCarthy campaign set out to portray him as an opportunist for not having braved “the snows of New Hampshire.” His absence from that primary nullified all virtue, just as McCarthy’s presence in New Hampshire nullified all faults.

In the upstairs McCarthy headquarters where I was still volunteering, it was no longer enough to be for McCarthy as a candidate; one also had to be against Kennedy as a man. Bitter social divisions broke out among people who otherwise agreed on issues. Friends no longer spoke to friends, common goals were forgotten, and gossip about who had switched to whom politically was suddenly as juicy as who was having an affair with whom—but less tolerant.

Four decades later, I would be reminded of this painful tension when the followers of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama fell into a similar division. Though those two presidential candidates were far more the same on issues than were McCarthy and Kennedy—and though they actually liked each other, unlike McCarthy, who had contempt for Bobby Kennedy and considered him a bad Catholic—Obama became the face of the future, just as McCarthy had done after New Hampshire, and Hillary Clinton supposedly became a part of the past for sharing a political name, just as Bobby Kennedy had done.

Of course, this parallel was imperfect. Bobby Kennedy was not the “past” to the big majority of black and Hispanic voters who supported him as a symbol of hope, and McCarthy’s constituency for the “future” was overwhelmingly white and not poor. Also, neither McCarthy nor Kennedy embodied a huge and historic breakthrough, as did both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Their politics were also too organic to imagine either one metamorphosing, as Eugene McCarthy would later do, into supporting Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter, a stunner for aging idealists who had been “Clean for Gene.” But in each era, deep feelings about social justice at home and an unpopular war abroad produced candidates who were not so different in content, yet different enough in form and style to generate conflict among intimate allies. McCarthy/Obama came to symbolize hope because they were new and unknown, while Kennedy/Clinton seemed like pragmatists just because they had been near power. In fact, all four were both.

I
FLED THIS UNCIVIL
civil war and went to California, where Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers had asked me to help get the word out about the consumer boycott that they hoped would pressure growers into giving farmworkers the same rights as other workers. And it was Cesar and his main organizer, Dolores Huerta, who reminded me of what I’d learned in India: the clearest view is always from the bottom. Kennedy’s compassion, his peculiar ability to identify with the excluded, was far more important than whether he had declared before or after a New Hampshire primary. Only Bobby Kennedy had supported the farm workers’ strike, even though the growers were key Democratic contributors. Only Bobby Kennedy had credentials and a track record acceptable to the Latino and African American nation-within-a-nation.

At home in New York a month later, I turned on the television to see Bobby Kennedy delivering the news of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, murder to a largely black crowd in Indianapolis. Security forces and his own campaign staff had urged him not to be the one to tell this volatile crowd, but he went on stage anyway. He stood quietly at the microphone until the crowd understood something was wrong—and quieted, too. Then he announced the death of Martin Luther King. Over cries and shouts, he just kept on talking in a low voice—about King’s legacy as a man dedicated to “love and justice,” about the white man who shot him and had been caught, and about the country’s choice now between revenge and healing.

Finally he said, “For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust…I had a member of my family killed…by a white man.”

There was silence. Then applause that went on and on.

L
ESS THAN TWO MONTHS
later, just after a victory in the California and South Dakota primaries probably would have given Bobby Kennedy the Democratic nomination, a self-described Arab nationalist assassinated him as he left a victory speech in Los Angeles. From a hotel room on the road, I had been watching Kennedy’s speech and the familiar faces of friends like Dolores Huerta and Rafer Johnson, who were celebrating with him. Then there were shots, his body on the concrete floor…I just kept watching. Seeing the same lethal scenes over and over again had become a form of national mourning.

W
ITH
M
C
C
ARTHY ONCE AGAIN
the only antiwar candidate, Clay Felker suggested that I join the press corps on his campaign plane and write a piece for
New York
magazine titled “Trying to Love Eugene.”
2
Truthfully, that’s what I and many others were trying to do.

Flying to four states in five days, I saw a traveling political culture that would prepare me for many campaigns to come. First, the candidate’s staff was divided into professional pragmatists and true believers, with each group worrying about the other’s influence on the candidate. Second, there were locals at every stop who were good or not so good at getting the right crowds to disparate events in venues that were a little too small, so reporters would write, “Speaking to an overflow crowd…” Third, there were journalists themselves, a traveling press corps who hid their emotions under the armor of objectivity, and jockeyed for a seat next to the candidate with the goal of getting some unique tidbit before filing time.

As the lowest person on this journalistic totem pole—a position I hoped was unrelated to the fact that I was also the only woman—I had just one turn at the seat next to McCarthy. Since his political appeal was based on opposing LBJ’s war, I asked what I’d been wondering:
Was he glad now that he hadn’t become LBJ’s vice president?
“Yes,” he said ambiguously, “vice presidents don’t have much influence on policy.” If he had been chosen as he once sought to be, could he still be a peace candidate? There was a long pause. In an earlier interview, I’d asked another question when he failed to answer a first one. Now I’d figured out that the key to getting an answer was to outwait him. “I would have had to stay silent,” he said. Nothing about protesting the war, much less resigning.

Only my question about the recent firing of some of his youthful aides elicited emotion. He was angry at press criticism of a firing that he saw as routine and justified. As McCarthy put it, “Some of them are like ski bums in summer. They ought to go home and get jobs. They just like to hang around.”

I was surprised at his description of young men whose belief in him had turned a political campaign into a movement. After that interview, I began to pay more attention to the few young staffers on the plane who had survived. Unlike the enthusiasts who had been the ground troops in New Hampshire, they had adopted McCarthy’s cool, his cynicism, and his disdain for emotion.