The Kennedy Half-Century (59 page)

Except for the Civil War period, it is difficult to identify a sadder year in U.S. history than 1968—twelve long-suffering months clouded by tragedies, disasters, disappointments, and broken dreams. Nothing underlined the transformation that the nation had undergone from JFK to LBJ better, or worse, than that year. The prelude to the presidential campaign was the Tet Offensive in January, a broad-based attack by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops on U.S. installations and thirty-eight provincial capitals throughout South Vietnam, including assaults on the U.S. embassy and the presidential palace in the capital city of Saigon. While some military historians have insisted that Tet was actually a major setback for Communist forces,
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the American public saw it quite differently. Instead of winning the war, the United States appeared
to be sinking ever deeper into the jungle quicksand of an endless conflict. One of the most trusted newsmen of his time, Walter Cronkite, reported, “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.” Lyndon Johnson supposedly remarked, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”
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The Tet Offensive’s aftermath effectively ended any real chance of reelection for President Johnson. On March 12, LBJ narrowly won the New Hampshire primary over antiwar candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, then shocked the nation on March 31 by announcing that he would “not seek, nor will I accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
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A presidency that had begun in blood and tragedy unraveled in much the same way. Johnson bowed out by quoting John Kennedy’s inaugural address in almost a plaintive way, reminding Americans that they would have to continue to “pay any price … to insure the survival and the success of liberty.” To the last, LBJ seemed to want his fellow citizens to understand that, at least in his mind, he was fulfilling JFK’s pledge to support freedom, at an admittedly high cost, in Southeast Asia.

Only two weeks before, the long-simmering feud between LBJ and RFK had broken out into total warfare, as Bobby Kennedy announced his candidacy for president on March 16. Wearing a gold PT 109 tie clasp and speaking in the same room JFK had used in 1960 for his White House announcement, Kennedy declared, “I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man … but to propose new policies.” This move enraged not only Johnson but also Gene McCarthy, who had decided to challenge Johnson after Kennedy had hesitated. The McCarthy backers viewed Kennedy as an interloper, a Bobby-come-lately who ran only because McCarthy had just demonstrated Johnson’s electoral weakness in New Hampshire. Vietnam, said Kennedy, and not the Granite State results, was the proximate cause of his fateful choice.
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Two days before his announcement, on March 14, an uncertain Kennedy and Ted Sorensen met with LBJ’s defense secretary, Clark Clifford, at the Pentagon. According to a revealing memo by Clifford:

[Kennedy] said that he had talked to [Mayor] Dick Daley in Chicago and had also talked to [JFK counselor] Ted Sorensen and his brother [Edward], and they thought that consideration should be given to a plan that he had evolved. He suggested that Sorensen present the plan. Sorensen said that if President Johnson would agree to make a public statement that his policy in Vietnam had proved to be in error, and that he was appointing a group of persons to conduct a study in depth of the issues and come up with a recommended course of action, then Senator Robert Kennedy would agree not to get into the race.

I said I thought there were three major points he should consider. 1. It was my opinion that the possibility of his being able to defeat President Johnson for the nomination was zero … 2. That I thought Senator Kennedy would be making a grave mistake if he assumed that the situation in Vietnam would be the same in August of this year as it is now … 3. That if by chance he were able to gain the Democratic nomination, I thought it would be valueless because his efforts in displacing President Johnson would so split the Democratic Party that the Republican nominee would win easily.
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Clifford, who had been advising Democratic presidents since Truman, was probably correct about Kennedy’s slim chances of defeating President Johnson for the nomination and winning the general election if he somehow dethroned Johnson. Of course, as it happened, RFK would instead be running against Johnson’s heir, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who was less politically sure to win than LBJ but, at a time when bosses ruled the party, was still the favorite for the Democratic nomination. Clifford was dead wrong about his second point. Vietnam was still a jungle quagmire come August, and if anything, domestic discontent had escalated to a fever pitch. Alas, Bobby Kennedy would not live to know that, or to joust with Humphrey and McCarthy in Chicago at the convention.

Lyndon Johnson had many sides to his complex persona, and one can see the good and bad within the prism of his relationship with RFK. Initially, as he told Doris Goodwin, the imperial Johnson was apoplectic, and feeling rather sorry for himself:

And then the final straw. The thing I feared from the first day of my Presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets. The whole situation was unbearable for me. After thirty-seven years of public service, I deserved something more than being left alone in the middle of the plain, chased by stampedes on every side.
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Once Johnson had withdrawn from the race, Bobby Kennedy quickly sought out LBJ, and a conciliatory president was on view. When LBJ hosted RFK in the White House on April 3, Johnson’s loyal aide Walt Rostow took notes, mainly from LBJ’s perspective, and they are worth citing at length:

The President went on to say that in fact he had not wanted to be Vice President and had not wanted to be President. Two men had persuaded him to run in 1960: [House Speaker] Sam Rayburn and
[Washington Post
publisher] Phil Graham. They had said that unless Johnson were on the ticket, John Kennedy could not carry the South. Without the South, Nixon would win. He would have greatly preferred to have continued to be the leader of the Senate.

The Vice Presidency … is inherently demeaning: although no one ever treated a Vice President better than President Kennedy had treated him.

The President said, “I found myself in this place and did the best I could.” He had the feeling that perhaps Senator Kennedy did not understand his feeling about President Kennedy. When he accepted the Vice Presidency, he felt he went into a partnership with President Kennedy. They disagreed seldom, but … a few times President Kennedy was a little irritated with him and showed it; but no one ever knew …

As President he had continued to look on his task as a partnership with President Kennedy. He felt he had a duty to look after the family and the members of the firm which they had formed together. He had never asked a Kennedy appointee to resign. He had never accepted the resignation of a Kennedy appointee without asking him to stay. As President, he had felt President Kennedy was looking down on what he had done and would approve.

The President said he felt the press had greatly exaggerated the difficulties between Senator Kennedy and himself.

The President said that if there were any way in which he could have avoided being a Presidential candidate in 1964, he would have not run then. He wants Senator Kennedy to know that he doesn’t hate him, he doesn’t dislike him, and that he still regards himself as carrying out the Kennedy/Johnson partnership.
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LBJ’s remarks are not entirely credible. Johnson wanted the vice presidency in order to position himself to run for the White House eventually. No one who knew Johnson would ever have believed that, once president, he would not have run to continue in office in 1964. Most of all, Johnson disliked, even hated, Bobby Kennedy, and the mutual loathing and distrust were self-evident. When LBJ tried to secretly tape their April 3 meeting, Kennedy (or one of his aides) apparently smuggled in a scrambling device that prevented the magnetic tape from recording. This may or may not be true, but LBJ apparently
believed it to be so, and was furious that he had been outsmarted.
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But at that late date, Johnson’s goal was rapprochement with Kennedy, to the degree possible, since he had less than ten months left to mend his tattered presidential reputation. He planned to focus on achieving peace both in Vietnam and in America’s racially torn cities.

The following day, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot and killed in Memphis, and Johnson’s hopes for a statesmanlike exit became impossible. Riots raged across the country, and Johnson did not possess the stature in the African American community to calm the waters. His attempts to wind down the Vietnam War went nowhere, too, despite the beginning of peace talks in Paris in 1968. The country and the world, including the Communists, were waiting for a new president.

Bobby Kennedy would not be that president. On June 5, 1968, just after he declared victory over Gene McCarthy in the crucial California primary, Kennedy was gunned down in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, purportedly by a lone assassin, Sirhan B. Sirhan. Despite a gunshot wound in the head, he lingered for a little more than twenty-four hours before dying.
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The nation was in complete disbelief; the nightmare of Dallas had returned. People relived the horror and grief of November 1963, as the awful yet familiar rituals of political assassination and Kennedy family mourning played out.

Within hours, the Johnson White House was preparing talking points for a televised presidential address to the nation. Press Secretary George Reedy advised LBJ that he should stress two points above all. “The greatest immediate danger arising out of the attempted assassination of Senator Kennedy is the rapidly developing sense of national guilt and the feeling that there is a ‘sickness in our society.’… The danger of the ‘sickness in our society’ thesis is that it can breed further violence and acts of desperation. It can lead to widespread acts of violence committed from a sense of outrage and a warped determination to ‘avenge’ Senator Kennedy … It has nothing to do with ‘sickness in our society’ but with sickness in individuals …” Second, in an echo of the Johnson White House’s immediate impulse following JFK’s assassination, Reedy was already arguing—before all the facts could possibly be known—that Kennedy’s shooting was “a formless act committed by a psychopath [Sirhan] who found as his victim the most prominent man in sight … The truth is that no man in this, or in any country, can be prominent without risking his life.”
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(In fact, Sirhan expressed a clear motive in his own private writing. The assassin shot RFK on the first anniversary of Israel’s Six-Day War, and he fulminated over Kennedy’s positions that favored the Jewish state over the Palestinians.)

Johnson’s address on the evening of June 5 followed Reedy’s prescription for the most part. Kennedy was still clinging to life as LBJ intoned, “We pray
to God that He will spare Robert Kennedy and will restore him to full health and vigor. We pray this for the nation’s sake, for the sake of his wife and his children, his father and his mother, and in memory of his brother, our beloved late President. The Kennedy family has endured sorrow enough, and we pray that this family may be spared more anguish.”
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Johnson continued:

It would be wrong, it would be self-deceptive, to ignore the connection between … lawlessness and hatred and this act of violence. It would be just as wrong, and just as self-deceptive, to conclude from this act that our country itself is sick, that it has lost its balance, that it has lost its sense of direction, even its common decency.

Two hundred million Americans did not strike down Robert Kennedy last night any more than they struck down President John F. Kennedy in 1963 or Dr. Martin Luther King in April of this year.
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Throughout the one day that RFK lived after the shooting, people gathered before their televisions and in churches, hoping for a miracle. At my Catholic high school in Norfolk, Virginia, we said the rosary for RFK in between final exams, much as we had grasped our rosaries for a briefer time on a Friday afternoon in November 1963. Kennedy never regained consciousness and died at 1:44 A.M. on June 6, the twenty-fourth anniversary of D-Day. His body was flown to New York for a funeral Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on June 8, where a stirring eulogy was delivered by the lone surviving Kennedy brother. Paraphrasing the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, Senator Ted Kennedy said of Bobby, as his voice broke from the strain, “My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it … As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him, ‘Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.’ ”
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Many Americans, like my father, watched and remarked, “Ted’s going to be president one day.” The family torch, and the burden of expectations, had been passed to the youngest member of his Kennedy generation, the sole surviving son.