So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (26 page)

I learned many things from that Reagan experience. The interviewer on one of the Sunday morning talk shows later started out by asking, “Senator Kennedy, do you think President Johnson is doing everything he can to try to end the fighting in Vietnam?” And Bob looked at him and said, “No.” That was it; the whole answer. The interviewer just didn’t know what to do; he didn’t have another question quite ready. There was actual silence for maybe six or seven seconds.

Reporters, particularly on television or radio, don’t really listen to the answer when they ask a question. They know the answer will take about half a minute or even forty-five seconds, and they’re thinking about the next question. Those seconds of silence that followed Senator Kennedy’s “no” seemed like hours, in which he looked decisive and the reporter looked lost. So Bob did catch on to this technique, finally. I kept saying to him, “The best answer to any question is ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ And if it’s capable of having that kind of answer, say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

Rarely does a long answer work as well. A long answer can eat up the airtime and seem to take control of the interview. But people don’t remember what you’re saying. Long answers turn off a TV audience, because they’re likely to get more interested in how you’re dressed, or in analyzing your glances, maybe even in the books or the American flag on the shelf behind you, than in what you’re actually saying. They think they know all about the interviewer, whom they’ve seen so often. In general, don’t explain your plan for changing the health-care system; say something like “My plan would keep people insured” or “I want to cut costs, not increase them.” Stick to simple generalities. And just leave it at that. The shortest answer is the best. You stop and wait for the reporter to change the subject.

In addition to short answers, I have three more rules for being interviewed on television. Never “first name” the reporter or person asking the questions, even if he or she does it to you. It makes you seem too “inside the Beltway”; it’s like a juror seeing the opposing lawyers go out to lunch together. The jurors don’t believe anything either says afterward.

The second rule is the reporter is not your friend. He is also not your enemy. He doesn’t want you to give a complete answer as much as he wants conflict.

The third rule is the reporter is always biased, not for you or against you, but biased in favor of a good story, biased in favor of getting attention, airtime, and on the TV equivalent of page one. This means controversy, conflict, and, if possible, violence.

Two more aspects of television news seem everlasting. The first, which you can verify on almost any “news” show, is a sort of Gresham’s law for TV: “The trivial always drives out the serious.” The second, easily verifiable on any local evening news program: “If there is film of a nighttime fire, it will be on the air.” The dirty little secret of local—and often national or international—news programming is that there is a bias, not for or against liberals or conservatives, but simply an overriding rule: The main purpose of television is not to educate or entertain, or inform, or titillate, or even to tell a story, but simply, at all times, to deliver the maximum possible audience to the advertiser.

I’m a serious person; I read books; I care about issues, and yet, I advise people not to give thoughtful answers on television. Give long and thoughtful answers on radio, which has an audience that listens and isn’t distracted by lapel pins or hair coloring. Radio, after all, appeals to just one sense—hearing. Listeners can fill in their own details, such as age, demeanor, and dress, so these other variables do not distract from the sound and the meaning of what the audience hears. Television viewers, on the other hand, spend precious seconds admiring a man’s tie, or a woman’s earrings, or trying to figure out whether that is sweat or hair spray on someone’s forehead.

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My favorite RFK speech for sheer content was made on January 4, 1968, to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. This was more than three months before Kennedy announced he would challenge Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination. It was a time of great tension in the country and for RFK, who seemed trapped by party loyalty and thus unable to confront Johnson directly and yet felt under great pressure, much of it internal, to express, free from political calculations, his vision for America. The January 4, 1968, speech was largely ignored by journalists at the time and since then has been overlooked by commentators and historians and is thus now as forgotten as a nearly half-century-old political speech can be.

But like so many documents, the speech is readily available via an Internet search. Reading it reveals why I remember it with such feeling. RFK began by focusing on Vladimir Bukovsky, a young Soviet dissident who went on to lead resistance to Communism throughout the Cold War and then quickly asserted American exceptionalism. (The degree to which Robert Kennedy deeply believed in this exceptionalism, and would have used it to justify foreign economic, cultural, and military policies, remains unknown. In 1968, as is still true now, professing faith in the United States as mankind’s “last best hope” was essential for virtually all politicians.) RFK then observed that Johnson administration officials were complaining about “a deep malaise of the spirit,” and this speech is a long-overlooked prelude to Jimmy Carter’s much-maligned “malaise” speech in 1979.

The body of the speech is a long and eloquent iteration of three key points, which had been slowly developing in RFK’s speeches as a U.S. Senator: that for too long the United States had put a misguided focus on accumulation of material wealth; that societies are remembered more for their poems and plays than for their military victories; and that big bureaucratic government in Washington, D.C., necessitated a return to power at the local level. Robert Kennedy closed with a portion of his 1966 speech to students in apartheid-dominated South Africa, calling for individual acts of courage that, together, could change history.

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As measured by the content of today’s college textbooks, the most popular Kennedy speech during the 1968 campaign came on the trip to Kansas. There, RFK said, “Too much and for too long, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things,” and then elaborated on why he felt that way.

To tell people they care too much about material possessions and too little about their communities is not a logical or customary way to attract them or appeal for their votes. But Kennedy pushed even further, talking in detail about the “accumulation” of material things.

My oral history interviews contain nothing about the Kansas trip, and the vast academic and popular literature on Robert Kennedy also ignores it. For example, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s two-volume biography, published nearly ten years after Kennedy’s assassination, devotes one sentence to Robert Kennedy’s entire day in Kansas.

Here’s how the speech process would work (this was long before cell phones or even faxes; in 1968, area codes had just been introduced, but making a long-distance call could still be a semi-major undertaking, relying upon the use of an operator in many parts of the country). When we left Washington, D.C., on a campaign trip, I would usually be given a draft of all upcoming speeches. It was my job in the next day or days to read through each speech, raise questions with Bob or key staffers about anything that might cause problems with the press, and suggest changes in wording or focus that might increase the likelihood of good press coverage. Of course, that was just the basic framework. In real life, especially during a political campaign, circumstances or the issues on everyone’s mind might change, and I might make an effort—usually involving Bob, other staffers on the trip, and many conversations with the speech staff back at the office—to make sure the speech kept us with, or even ahead of, breaking news.

“Better reserve the Senate majority Caucus Room for tomorrow,” Bob had told me around eleven in the morning on March 15, 1968.

I knew what he meant. For more than six months, I and many, many others had been urging him to run for president. The Caucus Room was where Robert Kennedy’s older brother John had declared his candidacy in 1960. So, Robert Kennedy had made his final decision; the campaign was about to start. The next day as he announced his candidacy, Bob knew he faced some big battles. No one had successfully challenged a president of his own party since 1884, when America and American politics were quite different, still feeling the aftershocks of the Civil War.

Now began what we called at the time our “free at last” period. For years, out of loyalty to the principles of the Democratic Party and a deep desire not to make his profound disagreements with President Johnson public, RFK had tempered his remarks. Now he was free to speak.

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A day later, I sat next to Senator Kennedy in the economy section of a commercial flight to Kansas City. I was still a heavy smoker, and all flights had a smoking section; Kennedy would tease me about this but didn’t seem to mind. “Security” consisted of me and Bill Barry, a retired FBI agent, whose principal job on the plane was to control the flow of people who recognized Kennedy and came over to say hello or tell him their opinions.

The purpose of this first campaign trip was to honor a long-standing commitment to deliver the Alfred Landon Lecture at Kansas State University on March 18. Landon, the 1936 Republican nominee who lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in a landslide, would be present; a former Theodore Roosevelt “Bull Mooser,” Landon had established a good relationship with Senator John Kennedy.

The day’s schedule included a second speech at the University of Kansas. We expected the crowds would be small and unfriendly. Inhospitality in Kansas, in turn, would generate negative television coverage—exactly what Kennedy did not need. But we had no choice: The schedule was firm.

We worked on the drafts of the two major speeches to be delivered the next day, now the first day of the campaign. I edited and rewrote on the plane with a pen, counting on his being able to read written changes and additions.

News stories predicted small and unfriendly crowds in Kansas, which was in the nation’s conservative heartland; even college students there, some experts said, would oppose Kennedy’s antiwar views. But thousands of people waited in Kansas City, Missouri, where Senator Kennedy only changed planes. They surged past barriers, eager to see him and hear him; many reached out to touch him. Similar crowds awaited in Topeka, Kansas. We did not know (this was long before cell phones, laptops, cable television, or the Internet) that LBJ was traveling that same afternoon to Minneapolis. The president had not addressed the American people on television since the Tet Offensive began on January 30, 1968. In what is now clearly known to be a major political and public relations error, LBJ had made no direct, personal effort to affect or shape the emerging Vietnam-is-falling-apart story beyond his weekly televised press conferences in which he made statements like “We are living in a very dangerous time that is taxing.” Thus, his last-minute decision to fly to Minneapolis and address the annual convention of the National Farmers Union made it seem as if Johnson might be getting ready to speak out more aggressively. To avoid large anti-LBJ crowds, his plane landed not at Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport but at the U.S. Naval Air Station just outside Minneapolis. Streets in Minneapolis–St. Paul were empty as his motorcade drove by. About two dozen protesters, most carrying antiwar signs, greeted him at the convention center. In his speech, LBJ spoke about “cowardice” and proclaimed, “We don’t plan to surrender or let people divide our nation in times of national peril.” He extemporaneously added to his prepared text the accusation that Americans who failed to support his government were being “misled by propaganda.”

But all of this we did not learn. News, let alone things like the content of speeches, traveled much more slowly then, if at all. At about the same time Johnson was speaking, Kennedy was delivering his first speech of the day, at Kansas State University, in the small town of Manhattan, Kansas. The speech was scheduled to start at nine
A.M.
, earlier than many students would have been willing to wake up even for classes. But by dawn, seats in the field house were already filling, and by the time Kennedy stepped to the lectern about fifteen thousand people filled the seats of the arena, with thousands more who stood and flowed out to fill every empty space. Roars rolled out one after the other as Kennedy entered. I had never seen anything like it. The crowd was alive and cheering, stomping, clapping, reaching out; a constant roar seemed to inhabit the field house. The field house was built to hold sellout crowds for Kansas’s perpetual championship-level basketball teams, but now thousands more had crowded in.

As was my custom, I sat with the traveling press; space reserved for them was in the first upper level, mid-court—good seats for basketball, not so hot for a political speech. “Astonishing,” a veteran television network correspondent muttered about the crowd.

When RFK began to speak, his hands shook and his voice was flat. He rarely seemed at ease in front of large groups, but this seemed extreme. However, he soon settled down, picking up a rhythm with the crowd’s responses. Kennedy began by offering what could have become a memorable formulation, “new politics out of old illusions,” if the press had picked up on it. After detailed discussions of tactics and policy in Vietnam and the terrible destruction being visited upon the Vietnamese people, he asked, “Will it be said of us, as Tacitus said of Rome, ‘They made a desert and called it peace’?”

“Made a desert” worried me. The American people, for the most part, are schooled in America’s role as a moral beacon to the world and are not accustomed to hearing that kind of criticism. But the Kansas State University students, presumably conservative, stood and shouted their approval.

We quickly boarded buses to caravan eighty miles to Lawrence, home to the University of Kansas. Thunderstorms were starting, but police and fire marshals there were reporting at least sixteen thousand people already crammed into the field house—many more than the town’s entire population. Thrilled with the reaction to the morning speech, RFK decided to repeat the focus on Vietnam in the afternoon address. Standing in another field house, also packed past capacity, Kennedy began with a joke, then sharpened his attacks on the war in Vietnam, quoting the American major in South Vietnam who told reporters his troops had to “destroy a town in order to save it.” Of course, seriousness did not impede Bob’s humor. After the speech, when a student prefaced his question by saying, “Putting yourself in President Johnson’s place,” Bob interrupted by saying, “That’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”