Read So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life Online
Authors: Frank Mankiewicz,Joel L. Swerdlow
So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (29 page)
* * *
One day during the presidential campaign of 1968, Kennedy was talking to some reporters on the campaign plane. One of them—probably prompted by some criminal trial in progress—asked his views on capital punishment. “Oh, I’m against it—in all cases,” RFK replied.
Reminded he had held and expressed quite different views when he was attorney general, Kennedy thought for a moment and then replied, “That was before I read Albert Camus.”
I have thought about that answer for more than forty years, and it still stands as the best example of one big reason so many of us dropped whatever we were doing in order to help RFK be a better attorney general or be a U.S. Senator or run for the presidency, or all three, and why those years still mark the high, promising moment of our lives.
We meet, it seems to me, very few adults—and even fewer politicians—who keep on learning, who continue to seek and acquire new knowledge, new insights, after reaching maturity. Most of us bank our intellectual capital sometime in our mid-twenties and then live off the often-meager income thereafter.
And even fewer public men and women not only keep on acquiring knowledge but actually use it to shape new views, express new ideas, change intellectual direction.
Robert Kennedy was clearly one of those. He had no fear of being accused of flip-flopping, of changing positions once firmly held, or of having earlier been on another side of an issue. He saw, in fact—whether the issue was capital punishment or Vietnam—not vice but virtue in being first on one side, then on the other.
For example, he was a strong early supporter of our effort in Vietnam. But he began to doubt, and as he absorbed the ideas of critics like Bernard Fall and John Paul Vann and as he talked to returned critical correspondents whose opinions he valued (David Halberstam and Walter Cronkite among them), doubt turned to passionate opposition as he began to see the moral rot of South Vietnam’s government and society and the shame of bombing villages and burning children to support it. He spoke often of the refusal of the government of South Vietnam, our “gallant ally,” to draft its own young men to serve in the armed forces as an obvious enough reason to oppose the war.
So when it was pointed out to RFK, by President Johnson and his pro-war followers in politics and journalism, that he had been an early supporter of President Kennedy’s policy in Vietnam, his response was to agree and to point out soberly, “There is blame enough to go around.”
RFK’s changing attitudes—this constant searching for new ideas with which to challenge ancient beliefs and then acting on them—have been called by some existential, a sort of constant re-creation of oneself. I think it might have been simpler than that; he was a man who liked to experience life as well as study it, and his “new ideas” were always more than a platform—they were things to
do
.
This capacity of his to grow through change—to look at issues in a totally different way—was nowhere better demonstrated than by his action on the great issue of his time: the emerging awful gulf between the races. RFK was, after all, a consummate
politician
(not a label he, or I, would count as criticism), and his views on black/white relations in the United States, until he became attorney general, were those of the more orthodox northern Democratic politician. That is to say, he favored “civil rights” legislation, but he tended to distrust most militancy on the issue.
But somewhere in those years—through the violence on the campus at Mississippi, the confrontation “at the schoolhouse door” in Alabama, Birmingham, Selma, Neshoba County, the march of August 1963, the urban uprisings—he became a militant himself.
He came to realize the depth of the feelings on both sides, and his heart and his energies were with the outcasts, the outsiders. And he had solutions as well as soaring oratory; no violence, tax credits and concessions to businesses who would invest in the inner cities (what are now called enterprise zones), and public-private partnerships like the Bed-Stuy Gateway Business Improvement District. Moderate ideas admittedly, but he meant to carry them out, and both blacks and whites knew he would act if he could. When he said the costs of urban poverty—children bitten by rats, the rotten schools, welfare dependency, joblessness—were “unacceptable,” people inside and outside the ghetto knew he would not—as president—accept them. And he would ask Americans to pay whatever the financial—and psychic—cost of that change.
That’s why so many hated him—and why so many of us loved him.
* * *
Not many people realized it then, and probably no one would give credence to it today, but before he decided to run for president, Robert Kennedy was sometimes quite worried about his reelection to the U.S. Senate in 1970. He thought his probable opponent would be New York City mayor John Lindsay, who was, among other things, outspoken in opposition to LBJ’s policies in Vietnam—and thus perfectly positioned to pick up support from antiwar Democrats frustrated by RFK’s unwillingness to confront Johnson.
* * *
“What was lost when RFK was killed?” I’ve been asked. “Robert Kennedy, if he had been elected president? What difference would it have made? Could he have done anything, for example, about the militarism in our economy and foreign policy?”
Probably not. And he was concerned about that. During the 1968 presidential campaign, Bob said more than once to us in private, “I’m worried about people being too disappointed even if we win. They expect so much, especially in terms of peace, and as president I’d have very little ability to change the country. They’d probably be very disappointed in me.”
He thoroughly recognized realities. Once, this was more vigorously, if humorously, demonstrated by RFK. As the Six-Day War began in 1967, CBS abandoned its regular programs and spent all day live from the UN Security Council debate—such an interruption was quite dramatic in those days of only three national networks on commercial television. These were spirited sessions, led at times by the Saudi ambassador, who chose to cast the war in terms of the New York senator Robert Kennedy’s political instincts. “This all is for Senator Kennedy’s New York Jews,” he roared. “Bobby will do anything for the Jews of New York—everybody knows that.” The Saudi ambassador and his Arab colleagues were clear that RFK was a “tool” of New York’s Jews, now and then called Zionists. One result, of course, was a veritable deluge of phone calls to our office by offended Democrats and even some nonpolitical Jews, attacking the Arab ambassador and asking us to “do something” in reply.
Finally, I went to his office, told Senator Kennedy what was happening—on network television—and asked to talk about how he could retaliate. He thought for a moment, grinned, and said, “See if you can get CBS to play it again—in prime time.”
At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, convened less than three months after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff received headline coverage when he nominated George McGovern for president. Saying that Robert Kennedy had called McGovern the “most courageous of senators” who “would have been one of our greatest presidents,” Ribicoff triggered an exchange with Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley. Ribicoff’s assertion that “with George McGovern as president of the United States we wouldn’t have to have gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago”—a reference to police brutality against antiwar demonstrations—elicited from Daley a standing, angry, vulgar response, to which Ribicoff responded with a stern but calm “How hard it is, how hard it is to accept the truth.”
Television cameras captured all this and broadcast it live to the nation, as they did the speech of the man who seconded the nomination of George McGovern. This man was I, who stood at the lectern and said of McGovern, “He is the candidate, not of the clubhouse but the schoolhouse, not of nightsticks and tear gas and the mindless brutality we have seen on our television screens tonight, and on this convention floor”—a line I had to repeat because applause from the delegates was so loud and boisterous.
Later that day, in interviews with television networks, I called for the convention to be suspended until the bloodshed caused by unprovoked and indiscriminate police beatings was ended.
* * *
Four years later, in 1972, I was active in helping McGovern win the Democratic presidential nomination.
When Senator George McGovern, fresh from a hard-fought first-ballot nomination for the presidency at the Democratic Party convention in 1972, named Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri as his vice presidential running mate, he trailed President Richard Nixon by five or six points in the national polls looking to the November election. After it was revealed Senator Eagleton had concealed from Senator McGovern that he had been admitted three times to a hospital in St. Louis for the treatment of mental illness—at least once for electroshock therapy—and had resigned from the ticket, forcing Senator McGovern into a hasty search for a replacement, Nixon’s margin had grown to twenty points, and the race was substantially over. The whole episode dragged out for nearly three weeks, at exactly the same time the Democrats, under McGovern’s leadership, should have been healing wounds left over from the presidential primaries, building up strength, and generating day after day of positive news coverage.
And this, remember, was at a time when the word “Watergate” referred only to a rather ugly hotel and office building in Washington, well before the scandal bearing its name broke into public consciousness. Indeed, with proper press coverage of Watergate, McGovern might well have won the election in 1972 and, even had he lost, would easily have emerged four years later as the obvious Democratic candidate and become, instead of Jimmy Carter, the thirty-ninth president of the United States.
In any event, with more than forty years gone by, with ample (many would say, more than ample) time for analysis, testimony, even recollection, all observers are now agreed that the single most overwhelming cause of Senator George McGovern’s fall in 1972 from his surprising (for some of us, thrilling) first-ballot nomination for president at the Democratic convention to one of the greatest defeats in the history of American politics only a few months later were the events—the catastrophe—surrounding the nomination of Senator Thomas Eagleton for vice president and his withdrawal from the ticket after only eighteen days.
First of all, it’s important to understand that 1972 was—by today’s standards—a fairly primitive time: no Internet, no cell phones; none of the instant communication devices and programs we now take for granted. In addition, no Secret Service or FBI staff assistance for primary election candidates for president, even after the number had been reduced to one—only for the president himself. It was also a far more innocent time. Now presidential nominees request tax returns and hire private detectives as they consider prospective running mates; back then, none of that occurred. Maybe it was part of the now old-fashioned “boss”-driven era, but political leaders assumed they knew each other.
In addition, to properly set the scene for Senator McGovern’s selection of a vice presidential candidate, one must remember the result of the convention itself had only been finally settled with a contested vote on the makeup of the delegation from California, whose 271 delegates were very much at stake until just before the final balloting for president late on the Wednesday of convention week.
The timing of the convention—as well as TV time and the travel schedules and reservations of a few thousand delegates, officials, journalists, and party and TV executives—was such that adjournment was set for the end of vice presidential balloting and speeches by the nominees.
There was little speculation about likely number two possibilities until after a presidential nominee had been selected, and that left McGovern scarcely twenty-four hours to make his choice. Recent history shows that such circumstances yield very few distinguished choices, many selected on the basis of current—even instant—political conditions, at least one for physical attractiveness, and that there are obvious trade-offs so that tickets reflect balance (North-South, older-younger, East-West, rural-urban, even, in late years, Catholic-Protestant and male-female). Candidates for the presidential nomination rarely, if ever, talked about preferences for the veep spot on the ticket, because to do so would almost automatically create some enemies as well as friends and perhaps make more difficult the choice (or even the support) of a defeated rival. Finally, unlike today’s situation, none of the assets of government were available—no secret screening by the FBI or even the Treasury or the IRS—and media coverage from past years wasn’t available at the click of a button.
And so it was that after a late nomination and a short evening of celebration Senator McGovern asked me to “spend a few hours” with a small group of aides and advisers early the next morning to discuss the vice presidential possibilities and come up with one or two names for him to consider, bearing in mind that a decision had to be made by the next afternoon. I got such a group together, and we met early the next morning. A name had to be filed by four
P.M
.
Why hadn’t any attention been paid to this before the nomination had been settled? Precisely because the presidential nomination was very much in doubt until almost before the first ballot began, and full use of our staff was needed, involving and implementing the incredibly intricate and complicated details of the balloting. The issue of course was whether to accept or reject the credentials committee’s political decision (the committee, made up, for the most part, of Humphrey partisans, appointed back in the LBJ-dominated party days) to reject most of the elected McGovern delegates from California. In addition, it would have attracted public and political scorn to be picking a veep when the battle was still going on, and a search for a vice presidential nominee before the contest for president was settled would surely have upset some supporters or even some undecided delegates.