So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (24 page)

Fifteen minutes later, I was driving up Fifteenth Street Northwest, figuring I’d hit the embassy sometime. News on the radio seemed to have nothing beyond the initial wire reports. “Could this be the sort of ‘unforeseeable’ thing that makes it impossible for me not to oppose Johnson?” Kennedy said. He continued, “If this is as bad as it seems like it might be, lots of people, lots of GIs, will die, and no one’s going to want to listen to what a
politician
is saying.”

I did not answer. He seemed to be asking the questions of himself, and besides, I had no answers. Far more immediately, I wasn’t sure where the Italian embassy was, and when Fifteenth Street began to slant and carry us over to Sixteenth Street, hiding that I was lost became impossible. “I’m going to have to pull over and ask someone where the Italian embassy is,” I said.

“Great,” Robert Kennedy said. “I’m glad it occurred to someone to do something simple like getting directions beforehand.”

When we found the embassy—it was indeed on Fifteenth Street—it was a building that came almost right up to the sidewalk and offered no driveway or parking places. “There’s no parking place, nothing,” Senator Kennedy said, as we both looked up and down both sides of the street.

About half a dozen photographers, probably alerted by the Italian press office, were waiting at the entrance to the embassy. I double-parked the car, and as we got out, the Italian ambassador emerged. He was quite warm and engaging, and Robert Kennedy, after accepting his embrace, began talking about how President John F. Kennedy had loved all things Italian. But he soon waved me over to whisper in my ear, “This man has no idea why I’m here.”

About an hour and a half later, as we drove back to the Senate, radio news reports made it clear that the enemy’s military offensive had already called into question the Johnson administration’s months-long reassurances that the war was essentially won. “Do you think Johnson will be going on TV today, or will he wait a few days in hopes this somehow gets turned around?” RFK asked me. The trip to the Italian embassy, or at least everything about it that could have gone better, was, for Robert Kennedy, long forgotten.

*   *   *

Whenever Robert Kennedy went missing, I knew an important issue was at stake and where to find him if I had to.

Kennedy kept an open-door policy in his office. The door was normally kept closed, even when the senator was in there alone, but key staff members could walk in anytime they wanted, with or without a preemptory tap on the door. Sometimes, one of us would walk in and find him gone; the room would be empty, his chair pushed back, and documents on his desk folded as though abandoned in mid-sentence. He could have gone anywhere, because his office had another door leading directly out to the hallway. But we always knew where he’d gone and that he’d most likely be back in fifteen to twenty minutes. If something profoundly urgent was at stake, we could find him, but I always just waited.

Disappearances almost always occurred when a key vote was scheduled on the Senate floor or something big was breaking in the news media, but they were part of our normal work lives. At least two or three times a week, and when the Senate was in session much more frequently, Kennedy would be in the across-the-hall office of his younger brother, Ted, or, as RFK always said when mentioning him, “Senator Edward Kennedy.”

Bob always went to Ted’s office; it was never the other way around. “He’s been here longer than me, and even if he hadn’t, he knows his way around much better,” RFK once told me. But I knew it was much more: a consistent, unplanned effort to show special respect.

I would sometimes chat with Senator Edward Kennedy. He was tall and trim and young—a little more than six years younger than Robert, who was himself only thirty-eight when elected to the U.S. Senate. Ted (I always called him “Senator Kennedy” in those days) had already been at the center of much senatorial action. While his brother John was president, he had voted for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and, with Lyndon Johnson in the White House, had voted to support all civil rights and War on Poverty legislation, often trying to push the Johnson administration further to the left. But Ted Kennedy was still very much in his brothers’—living and dead—shadow. None of the iconic news coverage of the Kennedys involved Ted. Where brothers were concerned, it was all Jack and Bob. After the Cuban missile crisis, the world emotionally connected to a photograph of these two brothers conferring. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, nine months after the assassination, television cameras focused tightly on Robert Kennedy’s face as he stood at the podium, tears moving down his cheeks and the delegates refusing to let him speak; they stood and cheered and shouted and clapped and cheered again as if by sheer force of will they could negate John Kennedy’s death.

But the convention cameras, with more than a hundred million viewers, never focused on Ted. And no myth of mourning and hard-earned wisdom had attached itself to Ted. By the time of Robert’s 1964 election to the U.S. Senate, in contrast, he was already known to be reading Greek tragedies and French existential novelists, working hard at coming to peace with life’s unfairness and brutality. All of us close to the Kennedys lived within this struggle, hardly pausing to notice that Ted Kennedy, too, had lost a much-beloved brother.

You could also see Robert’s respect for Ted on the Senate floor, which has no electronic voting. The clerk calls the roll, and senators shout “aye” or “nay” by alphabetical listing. “Edward,” of course, always came before “Robert,” and you could almost always see the two brothers communicate via facial expression and eye contact. They almost always argued for the same position during Senate debate and agreed on their votes, with some major exceptions. Ted Kennedy, for example, opposed the war in Vietnam more quickly—perhaps in part because the news media were not deconstructing his every word, looking for signs of opposition to LBJ and willingness to run against the president in 1968. And Ted, barely two years in the Senate, had joined ninety-seven colleagues to vote in support of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which LBJ, virtually without pause, began citing to justify expansion of Vietnam into a major U.S. ground war. Thus, Senator Edward Kennedy, with whom I would often chat, usually when we encountered each other in the hallway separating the two brothers’ offices, had extra reason to oppose the war: He felt personally manipulated and misled by Johnson.

Ted Kennedy and his staff focused their concerns on an area that had not attracted public attention: South Vietnamese civilians killed, wounded, and displaced by U.S. military actions. Until Ted Kennedy began to ask questions, no one in the U.S. government even pretended to try to count such casualties.

Even though they were in such ways “ahead” of Robert Kennedy and his staff, Ted Kennedy and his staff were always courteous and even deferential to people like me. Ted Kennedy often used “Bob” when talking to me about my boss, but a sense of natural order governed our lives. Bob was “next,” whatever “next” meant.

After the California primary as I left the hospital room—and RFK—for the last time, I noticed Ted Kennedy standing by the sink in the adjoining bathroom, in semidarkness. I had never seen—nor do I expect ever again to see—a human face so contorted in agony. Ted’s face twisted, his eyes unseeing and beyond tears, beyond pain, truly beyond any feeling I could bring myself to describe, a sight impossible to banish from memory.

*   *   *

Early returns from the 1968 California presidential primary looked fantastic. Robert Kennedy had said that if he lost, he would drop out of the race, and as the evening progressed, his lead narrowed a bit but held firm. Around 10:35
P.M.
, in his suite on the eleventh floor of the Ambassador Hotel, I handed him our usual yellow legal pad with some suggested things to say. He glanced at the list, saw the first item, looked back at me, and laughed.

Don Drysdale, a star pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers, had, earlier that same evening, achieved a baseball milestone: pitching six shutout games in a row. No one in the history of baseball had ever before done this (and few since have even come close; today, to pitch even three complete games during an entire season is considered monumental). RFK read the Drysdale item, laughed, and said, “Of course.”

We had, years earlier, worked out the baseball issue.

When we started to work together, it had immediately bewildered him that I was such a St. Louis Cardinals fan. Every day, during spring training and the baseball season, box scores were the first thing I would look for in the morning newspaper. I would ignore the headlines until I knew: How had Bob Gibson pitched? Were the Cards falling far behind in the loss column?

“I finally think I understand,” RFK had told me. “You get tired and frustrated and tense and even angry caring so much about things that are important; you want to be passionate about something that doesn’t matter at all. Like the Cardinals. At least then, when your heart is broken, no one
really
is hurt or suffers.”

Despite his image as a tough Irish cop, RFK did not care about professional sports and knew little about them. He’d never say something like, “What’d you think of the game last night?” even when the World Series was on. Once, the Yankees were playing their archrivals, the Red Sox, and the team owners invited Robert and Ted Kennedy, as their guests, to be introduced. Each brother rooting for the state that elected him might have seemed like a good idea, but I told RFK it was “the worst idea I’d ever heard.” Fans at a ball game love nothing more than the opportunity to boo a politician. I told Bob that no matter how much the crowd was made up of people who had voted for him and would vote for him again, announcement of his name would trigger record-setting boos. He scoffed at my advice, accepted the invitation, and, along with his brother, was roundly booed.

In any event, Robert Kennedy, after asking for quiet, began his 1968 California victory statement with, at my suggestion, “I want to express my congratulations to Don Drysdale, who pitched his sixth straight shutout tonight.” It was sincere and sounded good, but as I stood next to him, looking at the camera and at the reporters writing down his exact words, I thought, “If one of you were to ask him what it means to ‘throw a shutout,’ he might have no idea.” He knew Drysdale had achieved something amazing, admired by tens of millions of Americans; he just had no idea what that something was. When Drysdale died in 1993, his family reported that the kind words from Kennedy had been among his most prized possessions, kept on tape with him when he traveled.

My friendship with Ted Kennedy started as political and became personal. We never worked together officially, but we grew close because I immediately acquired unofficial “family” status as someone who had been important (and loyal) to Robert. With John and Robert Kennedy dead, the number of people available to Ted and other family members as living links to their love and loss was, by definition, limited. Ted always treated people like me especially well; in an unspoken way, we even carried some of the “big brotherness” with us. Thus, for example, in the 1990s, when he certainly had many more and far more important things on his mind, he pushed the Pentagon to find some of my “lost” records from combat during World War II. He let me thank him once and then changed the subject. His silences were emblematic. In the first decade or so after Robert Kennedy’s death, for example, I always found myself with many members of the extended Kennedy family as the gates to Arlington National Cemetery opened on the anniversary of his murder. But in more recent years, as I stood at RFK’s grave in the early-morning light, I would be alone until I felt a presence next to me, and it was Ted (or, if I happened to arrive a few minutes later, it was my walking up next to him). Of course, we would eventually talk about many things, especially while walking back to our cars. We might even meet at a nearby diner for breakfast. But moments when we were closest were when we stood together in silence, maybe looking at each other once in a while and reaching over with a touch.

To define Ted Kennedy by silence has, for me, carried well past his own death. I had, for example, always mourned what I thought were the deaths of three people who got too close to the tracks as the funeral train carried Robert Kennedy from New York City to Washington, D.C., in 1968. I had, at the time, gathered all the reporters on the train and elicited their commitment not to let Ethel, Ted, or anyone else from the Kennedy family know until after the interment at Arlington. The deaths of these three people, of course, had pushed me even deeper into sadness that day, and I thought about them for a long time afterward.

But from a documentarian doing a film on this funeral train, I recently learned, very happily, that one of the three people—a twenty-year-old who had climbed up and crawled along a signal facility and fallen onto a live electric wire—had lived and that, unknown to virtually everyone, Ted Kennedy had paid for the victim’s many surgeries and had done whatever he could to assist in the young man’s struggle to recover. Again, silence from Ted Kennedy, who never mentioned such things.

*   *   *

Ted Kennedy was, of course, the only Kennedy brother who lived long enough to leave an extensive legislative record. I knew him and Robert Kennedy quite well and got to know John F. Kennedy through their eyes. These three Kennedy brothers can be seen from two perspectives: the personal and the political. The personal seems by far to be the most popular and durable, to have what show business lingo calls “legs.” This bewilders me, in large part because I consider it essentially irrelevant, but I imagine the Kennedys in part brought it on themselves by projecting so much glamour as they walked onto the national stage—and by doing such an initially good job of hiding their faults.

As the son—a close and loving son—of a highly creative and compelling man who died at an early age largely from alcohol addiction, I have full and deep respect for human foibles. But personal foibles, to me, seem extraneous to the Kennedy story. JFK, we now know, was a womanizer who was often heavily medicated. Ted Kennedy would, at times, drink and eat heartily and had an unhappy first marriage. What Robert Kennedy did in such a regard escaped me. Day after day after long day, I did not see such things. Of course, RFK was dead before more revelations about JFK’s conduct and before the fatal accident at Chappaquiddick, but by the presidential campaign of 1968 news media’s interest in personal faultfinding was clear. One typical story angered me at the time: It was early in the campaign, and we were still flying on regularly scheduled air flights, which meant reporters accompanying us could easily wander up to RFK’s seat. Kennedy had given so many speeches and personal interviews he had nearly lost his voice and was, on doctor’s orders, not using his vocal cords for anything nonessential. The end of the day had arrived, and a flight attendant asked if we wanted anything to drink. Kennedy traced a
B
for bourbon with his fingers. The result: a wire service story in newspapers across the country describing how Robert Kennedy was such a big drinker he simply used quick hand signals to show what he wanted next.