So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (28 page)

At the same time, I was keeping track of the speech that became what was, in my opinion, perhaps the best speech Robert Kennedy made during the campaign, and certainly one of the best in his career. He had been scheduled to speak to a group of business executives—the City Club—in Cleveland at noon on April 5, which turned out to be, of course, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King. All of us agreed the best course would be for Bob to deliver that speech as scheduled and then to suspend the campaign and return to Washington, D.C., until after Dr. King’s funeral. The question then became, what should the speech say?

The answer took almost all night amid off-and-on (mostly on) conversations at the Indianapolis hotel among Adam Walinsky, Jeff Greenfield, and occasionally me and phone discussions with Ted Sorensen, ending in the early morning with a draft by Walinsky and considerable final RFK emendations while en route to Cleveland early the next morning. That Cleveland speech, largely ignored in news coverage of the King murder, remains to me the most eloquent and memorable of RFK’s view of humanity and the threats to its flowering and, indeed, its survival.

He began the Cleveland speech by noting the day as “a time of shame and sorrow” and immediately went on to say that violence is not the concern of any single group or race but one that “stains our land and every one of our lives.” The victims of this violence are black and white, young and old, rich and poor, but “most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed.” To me, that use of the word “needed” took this speech forever out of politics and into an intense analysis of the human condition.

He then observed that violence accomplishes nothing except to breed more violence. “No martyr’s cause,” RFK noted, “has ever been stilled by his assassin’s bullet,” an allusion, of course, to Dr. King’s killing, but he added, in a strong admonition to those angered by it, “No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders.” The taking of one life by another, he warned, whether by law or in defiance of law, causes the whole nation to be thereby degraded. Yet, he elaborated, we tolerate a rising level of violence “that ignores our common humanity,” and here he specified—certainly for the first time by an American politician seeking public approval—“newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands,” and how we “glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire.” The answer, he said, lay not in a search for scapegoats, or conspiracies; rather, he said, only a “cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.”

He then spoke of “another kind of violence, slower but just as destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor.… This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.”

Kennedy did not call for specific actions or a series of policies or programs; instead, he spoke once again of human nature itself. He spoke as though he and this collection of Cleveland businessmen shared a common vision—“we know what we must do.” And what must be done was not an unfamiliar recital. “When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as citizens but as enemies … men with whom we share a city, but not a community.”

He reiterated what we must do. To achieve “true justice” among our fellow citizens, he said, “we must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all.… [W]e can perhaps remember … that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life; that they seek—as do we—nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness.”

And he concluded, with words I shall never forget: “Surely we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.”

These words were especially important because they reveal Robert Kennedy’s careful and considered reaction to the death of Martin Luther King Jr. Kennedy’s remarks in Indianapolis the night before are indeed memorable, in large part because they show what was in his heart, but the Cleveland speech was the product of thought and reflection. It is a much more careful and practical prescription—meant then for the violent, tenuous days after the assassination but still very much a guide for us.

This speech is today, as it was at the time of its delivery, almost entirely unnoticed and seems quite likely to remain so. Nearly half a century has passed, and now, of course, it is readily available online.

*   *   *

The Cleveland speech can be found on the Internet. But for the most part, it is gone—which is understandable, given the power of Robert F. Kennedy’s words the night before and the speed with which new events superseded even the King assassination. But its sentiments—for example, expanding the definition of “violence” to include “the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay”—can still instruct us. Then there is the heart-lifting finish to the Cleveland speech. “In our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.”

*   *   *

My most memorable and revealing stories about Robert Kennedy often involve mundane, long-forgotten events.

Many years ago, an editorial in the now-extinct
Washington Daily News
had caught my eye. It made the point that the government, through an implausible spokesman, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, was acting cruelly and unfairly in the case of one Robert Thompson.

Thompson, it appeared, was a World War II veteran who had just died. His wife, noting he was not only a veteran but a decorated one—Thompson had earned a Silver Star for gallantry in action; he had assaulted an enemy position on a Pacific island by wading across a stream while firing a submachine gun—wanted him buried at Arlington.

But Thompson, alas, had been more than a heroic World War II veteran. He had also been the chairman of the Communist Party in New York state and in that capacity had been indicted, tried, and convicted under the Smith Act and had served his time in a federal penitentiary. And there was Nick Katzenbach, a former RFK deputy, talking about some obviously made-up-for-the-occasion ruling that no one could be buried in Arlington who had served time for a Smith Act–type offense.

I was then working for the Peace Corps, and I thought of Senator Robert Kennedy, the true leader of the opposition on all important matters, and I called my friend Adam Walinsky, who worked for RFK. As I started to explain the Thompson case—he was a New Yorker, and maybe Senator Kennedy could do something—Adam cut me off. “Yeah,” he said, “the senator has already moved on that one. He put the editorial in the [
Congressional
]
Record
this morning with a speech about how outrageous it is to exclude Thompson, and he’s already spoken to Nick about it.”

Within a day or two, the matter was resolved, and Thompson’s body was laid to rest at Arlington, where it belonged, and I was set to wondering, and not for the first time, why so many people felt and talked so venomously about Robert Kennedy. I could understand the anti-Kennedy attitudes of LBJ’s supporters and from Vietnam hawks generally, and from those who called themselves conservatives, but what was unfathomable was the hostility on the left. Liberals who had never defended jury tampering were quick to take up the cudgels for Jimmy Hoffa, people who had spent hours watching a running television skirmish between RFK and Roy Cohn were, nevertheless, ready to link RFK with Joe McCarthy, and many who hated organized crime were full of condemnation for the attorney general’s “riding roughshod” over the civil liberties of gangsters. Even Kenneth Keating, an otherwise undistinguished New York Republican, became a bit of a hero to the hard-core Bobby haters, because Kennedy had replaced him in the Senate.

As I came to know RFK, much of the mystery was resolved (and so was much of the hostility) but by no means all. He was, simply, a successful
politician
of the Left (in the context of his time), and his values, accordingly, were far more personal and less ideological than those whose “purity” and dislike of politics often put them in a position of preferring defeat.

In 1966, for example, he traveled the country, speaking for Democratic House and Senate candidates wherever he went—Iowa, Indiana, California, Oregon—preaching a message that was clearly the most radical offered in that year of dominant support for the war and for the emerging “white backlash.”

To call, as RFK did in that season, for renewed commitment to civil rights, to equality in housing and employment, and above all to a sacrifice by the rest of us in order to bring “blacks” (he was, so far as I know, the first white elected official to thus use that word) into a position within, rather than outside, our dominant society was to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom, liberal and conservative.

But he did it. More than that, however, he did it in a curiously
political
way. He did it for candidates who had supported John Kennedy in 1960 (“He’s a good fellow” became for me an understood synonym for “He helped us in 1960,” and an “awfully good fellow” referred to those who helped before the 1960 New Hampshire presidential primary) and in places that might help RFK himself in the primaries of 1968. This combination of clubhouse skill and big-city loyalty with almost recklessly radical positions on issues is a unifying thread in this complex story of an often hard-to-understand career.

Indeed, when RFK came to run for president in 1968, much of the hostility from the party regulars can be ascribed to fights in the Department of Justice against organized crime and labor racketeering—a fight that led to RFK’s getting convictions of two Democratic congressmen, three judges, five mayors, and a host of lesser officials. Party leaders understood that RFK meant what he said and that his political judgments would be suspended when they conflicted with moral ones.

*   *   *

On a lighter side, I recall a time when I had arranged to fly to Los Angeles and surprise my mother at a party celebrating her eightieth birthday, and Bob offered to call and congratulate her. I warned him I would not walk into her apartment—surprising her—until at least six
P.M.
California time, which would be nine
P.M.
RFK’s time. But, as often happened when left on his own to handle details, he very wellmeaningly called her early, hours before I’d even landed in L.A. No guests had arrived for the party yet. He couldn’t stop laughing later when he told me what had happened: He said, “Hi, this is Robert Kennedy. I understand you’re having a party this evening. Was it a nice surprise when your son Frank walked in?” And she responded, “That’s wonderful, Frank, you really
do
have him down,” referring to how I would sometimes entertain family and friends with imitations of Bob’s unique accent and style of speaking. “No, no, Mrs. Mankiewicz,” Bob said. “This really is Robert Kennedy calling to wish you a happy birthday.” My mother replied, “Really, really, wonderful, Frank. Now do Johnson.” To which, Bob reported, he could only say to her, “I can’t do Johnson.”

When I returned to D.C., I was given a new responsibility. Now, when an upstate Democratic county chairman would call to invite the senator to an awards dinner, or a judge would call asking him to attend some kind of event, and the answer had to be no, Angie, his secretary, would say, “Wait a moment, please, I’ll put him on,” put the call through to me, and I’d be the senator. Or Bob would stop by my desk and say something like “This guy has called asking if I’d attend this roast he’s organizing. Could you please call him back and say I can’t make it?” It was always for unimportant stuff, never with reporters, and Bob knew every time I did it. We had to be careful, though, to never get into a situation in which someone would read the newspaper or see the TV news and learn that the senator with whom he had just “spoken” was traveling through Mississippi—or even Japan—as part of his work for a Senate subcommittee.

*   *   *

I don’t think that RFK was closely interested in what we ordinarily think of as “history”—textbooks, details of events, military victories or defeats—at least as chronologically described and written by historians. Certainly, many of the academics closest to him, such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., were modern historians, chroniclers of an immediate past that living people could have experienced. And RFK himself joined the list with
Thirteen Days,
an effort he took very seriously and of which he was quite proud. But his work almost fit into a category we could call recollections rather than history; he somehow thought of history as the writings of older, indeed ancient, people in whose victories and defeats he took no great interest.

*   *   *

It was the custom of those of us who worked with RFK to gather as the workday ended in Senator Kennedy’s inner office if he was in town. He welcomed these sessions, which usually included Joe Dolan, Adam Walinsky, Peter Edelman, and myself, and most often lasted for an hour or so. Dolan was an unlikely mix—an urban Irishman from Colorado; in New York he would have been a classic Tammany leader, with a soft spot for reformers. Peter and Adam were young easterners (even though Peter had grown up in Minnesota), both of whom had served RFK at the Justice Department and who resembled, I thought, the young men who’d come to Washington in the 1930s, eager to work with FDR’s New Deal.

Senator Kennedy was the discussion leader and would usually begin by asking one of us what we were reading—meaning, of course, what serious book we were reading whose relevance to the here and now we were prepared to set forth. Depending on the subject of the book, we would then head into a discussion of the problem—or, occasionally, the solution (rarely; after all, this was the 1960s, and problems far outweighed solutions) raised by the book. From there, RFK might ask who, in our opinion, was writing “good stuff” on a particular subject. This was important; a very favorable mention of an author or an analyst might produce an invitation to come in and talk, and often an expert mentioned in one of these late-afternoon sessions might turn up in a few days in the office to lunch with RFK.