The Last Patrician (31 page)

He was winning in part because he had rediscovered a familiar theme—the theme of the individual, the theme of Emerson and Lincoln. He was almost proud of the fact that he had “every establishment in America against him.”
25
The vast anonymous bureaucracies of big business and big labor filled him with an obscure dread; he did not trust the complacent men who led them, and they did not trust him. Although he “wasn't anti-union,” Fred Dutton said, he was “un-union.”
26
He didn't believe that “middle-class labor leaders” had “any of the answers.”
27
His own investigative work in the fifties had made him thoroughly familiar with corruption and waste in the labor movement, and the movement's leaders could never forgive him for having aired their dirty linen in public. George Meany “would barely speak” to Bobby, and the candidate was neither surprised nor upset when big labor sided overwhelmingly with Hubert Humprey that year.
28

He was no less skeptical of the bureaucratic fiefdoms of much of corporate America. In the old progressive view, big government was supposed to counterbalance the power of big business. In practice, however, big government, so far from acting as a counterweight to the power of the largest corporations, bolstered their power at the expense of smaller businesses and entrepreneurial enterprise. Before a series of regulatory, market, and tax reforms undermined the cozy reciprocity between congressmen and conglomerates, big business thrived on the great dollops of corporate welfare that its allies on Capitol Hill served up to it. Corporate pashas grew lazy and fat on lucrative government contracts and generous tax subsidies, and were in many instances insulated from the pressures of competition by irrational regulations.
29
The world, of course, has changed since then; the era of the giant conglomerate and the faceless organization man is over; entrepreneurs, freer than ever before to create jobs for others and make money for themselves, have forced the nation's biggest businesses to become leaner, more competitive, and more responsive enterprises than they were in the past. Bobby, I think, would have been pleased with these changes. When he declared that his purpose in the '68 campaign was “to show that the individual
does
count in a society where he actually appears to count less and less,” it was not, as Schlesinger maintained, yet another indication that he “had become the tribune of the underclass.”
30
It was, on the contrary, an indication of his antipathy to the soul-killing spirit of bureaucracy. A paternalistic
tribunus plebis,
eager to save the world with welfare payments and government programs, is precisely what Bobby was not. He wanted individuals to develop the confidence to help themselves.

California Republic

E
UGENE
M
C
C
ARTHY BEAT
him in Oregon. After Oregon came California. For several frenzied days he campaigned as hard as he had ever campaigned, and then on Saturday, June 1, 1968, one of those clear cloudless days that he loved, he rested. He spent most of the day in his suite at the Fairmont Hotel, alternately preparing for his debate with McCarthy that evening and staring out the window, entranced by the spectacle of San Francisco shimmering in the sunshine.
31

The debate itself was not a memorable one. At one point the two candidates argued about how best to solve the problem of the ghetto. McCarthy advocated moving people out of the inner city and resettling them in less troubled areas. Bobby said that this was a bad idea; he favored policies that encouraged people not to move out of their shattered communities, but to rebuild them. To “take ten thousand black people and move them into Orange County” was simply wrong, Bobby said. “To take these people out, put them in suburbs where they can't afford the housing, where their children can't keep up with the schools, and where they don't have the skills for the jobs, it is just going to be catastrophic.”
32
He had been the underdog going into the debate; McCarthy was thought to be the superior debater. By holding his own against a man renowned for his wit and intellect, Bobby emerged the victor in the eyes of a majority of Californians.
33
Relieved and happy, he and Ethel dined at the Fairmont.
34

On Sunday, June 2, he campaigned at Buchanan Field near Concord, California, and in Orange County. In the early evening he took six of his children to Disneyland.
35
The next morning he woke to begin a final arduous day of speeches and motor tours. From Los Angeles he flew to San Francisco, where he toured Chinatown and spoke at Fisherman's Wharf. Then he traveled to Long Beach, addressed a rally there, and pressed on to Watts. By the time he spoke at the El Cortez Hotel in San Diego, his speeches were disjointed and his sentences nearly incoherent. Exhausted and sick to his stomach, he flew to Los Angeles and collapsed at John Frankenheimer's house on the beach at Malibu. He slept late into the morning of Tuesday, June 4, a cool, sunless, overcast day. The polls were open. Bobby lunched with Teddy White at Frankenheimer's and went swimming in the ocean. His son David nearly drowned in the Pacific surf, but Bobby managed to bring him safely out of the water. In the afternoon he fell asleep beside Frankenheimer's swimming pool; when he woke he learned that CBS had predicted that he would win the primary with close to 50 percent of the vote. He napped again, woke, dressed, and around half past six was driven to the Ambassador Hotel downtown. Frankenheimer was at the wheel, and as he sped along the Santa Monica Freeway, Bobby told him to slow down.
36
“Life is too short,” the candidate said.
37

At his suite on the fifth floor of the Ambassador he discussed the future of his campaign and made a number of telephone calls. His friends and advisers were with him. The ever loyal Dave Hackett compiled lists of convention delegates. Steve Smith, who with John Seigenthaler had masterminded the California victory, worked on organizational matters. Adam Walinsky, Ted Sorensen, Fred Dutton, and Milton Gwirtzman plotted strategy. Dick Goodwin spoke to Kenneth Galbraith and Allard Lowenstein by telephone; he told them that the time had come for them to switch their allegiance from McCarthy to Bobby. They seemed willing to do so. Bobby himself spoke to Mayor Daley in Chicago; Daley implied that if Bobby won in California, the Illinois delegation would support him at the convention. Bobby was no doubt pleased; he had earlier said that “Daley means the ball game.” He was perhaps even more pleased when he learned that he had received a plurality of the vote in the South Dakota primary, which had also been held that day. South Dakota was the birthplace of Hubert Humphrey.

While the professionals worked in one room, his social friends—journalists, celebrities, assorted hangers-on—gathered in another. Jack Newfield, Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, George Plimpton, John Glenn, Theodore White, John Bartlow Martin, Cesar Chavez—they were all there, talking, listening, drinking, looking at the television set. The atmosphere became “like a party,” Newfield remembered. A “bar was set up in the corner” of the room, and most of those present were soon on their second or third drinks.
38
Just before midnight, after completing a series of radio and television interviews, Bobby went with a large entourage to the ballroom downstairs. Ethel was with him, and so were Rafer Johnson, Rosey Grier, and Bill Barry, who acted as his bodyguards. As he walked to the elevator, Bobby told Newfield that he would see him later at the Factory, a fashionable Los Angeles nightclub where the victory celebration was to be held. He made his way to the ballroom, and at the lectern he thanked those who had helped him to win. He said that Americans must work to end the divisions that sapped the republic's vitality and its strength. He declared that ours was a great nation and a compassionate nation.
39
He left the room and entered an adjoining pantry, where he shook the hand of a busboy named Juan Romero. He was then shot in the head, apparently by a young man named Sirhan Sirhan. He fell to the floor; the busboy placed a rosary in his hands.

Death and Burial

H
E DIED AT
a quarter to two in the morning of Thursday, June 6, 1968. President Johnson put a presidential aircraft at his family's disposal, and it was in this plane that Bobby's body was brought back to New York. The jet landed at La Guardia Airport on a hot summer's evening. The coffin was taken to Manhattan, to St. Patrick's Cathedral, and was there placed in the sanctuary. A vigil was maintained through the humid night. The next day a requiem Mass was said over the body. The archbishop presided in his episcopal seat, and the clergy wore vestments of violet. Leonard Bernstein conducted the music: a passage from the slow movement of Mahler's Fifth Symphony, a portion of Verdi's Requiem for Manzoni, César Frank's
Panis Angelicus,
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Edward Kennedy delivered the eulogy.

After Mass the casket was taken to Pennsylvania Station and put aboard a special train. Members of his family and many of his friends accompanied it on the journey south. Great crowds of people lined the railroad tracks and waited for hours in the hot sunshine to watch the train pass. Some carried roses, others signs. One read: “We have lost our last hope.” Some wept; others made the sign of the cross; still others fell to their knees in prayer. There were many nuns. Inside the train, separated from the crowds by steel and glass, the passengers sat and talked, their conversation mingling the tragic with the mundane.
40

The train arrived at Union Station at dusk. The coffin was placed in a hearse. The hearse made its way slowly through the twilight toward the river. At the Department of Justice the car halted for a moment, and then it moved on. It passed beneath the shadows of the Lincoln Memorial and crossed the Potomac into Arlington. His body was buried in the federal cemetery there, not far from the grave of his brother.

C
ONCLUSION

The End of Aristocracy

Today the Stimsonians are largely gone, a vanished breed, as extinct, almost, as the dinosaurs. No one will mourn for them; they were the least colorful and most prosaic of political aristocracies; they lacked imagination. What a contrast to their counterparts across the ocean, the aristocrats whom they so adored and upon whom they vainly tried to model themselves. The British aristocracy was burnt upon a splendid pyre; Churchill preferred to immolate himself
*
rather than stoop to the subterfuges of FDR. It is true that Churchill had himself once sought a bureaucratic revenge on a nation that no longer had any use for his class. But he had later given this up and had left socialism and the welfare state to Mr. Attlee.
1
As told by its historian, David Cannadine, and its tragic and comic poet, Evelyn Waugh, the story of the decline and fall of the British aristocracy entertains and even (as the success of
Brideshead Revisited
on television demonstrated) moves us. But who will weep for Stimson?

The Stimsonians are gone; the somebodies of yesterday, Joseph Alsop observed, have by and large become the nobodies of today. The once august names still exist, but they are for the most part buried in the obscure pages of the
Social Register,
or in the payrolls of Wall Street firms that have grown so large as to have lost their once distinctive character as citadels of an elite. Bobby, of course, played a role in the demise of the Stimsonians, and yet even after a careful review of his actions during the period, it is difficult to say precisely what his role was. In recounting the final, tragical chapter of the Stimsonians' story—in reflecting upon the
infandum dolorem
of their fall, and upon their inglorious behavior in the catastrophe that forever ended their career as a governing class—in reviewing those dismal scenes, we cannot help but feel a certain disappointment with our protagonist's caution. He had embarked upon the difficult and dangerous path of the heretic, and had chosen the unenviable lot of the heresiarch: he had challenged the system of Roosevelt, and he had questioned the creed whose truths he had been brought up to believe. But the boldness he showed at certain times was diminished by the caution he displayed at others. In the same year in which he criticized the welfare state, he condemned President Johnson for failing to fund it adequately. He pointed out the shortcomings of the federal bureaucracy, and promptly called for its expansion. He praised private enterprise as the essential foundation of the country's greatness, and condemned businessmen and corporations as the disciples of Mammon. He celebrated the virtues of the free market, and denounced the cult of the GNP.
2
Was this ambivalence? Excessive prudence? An attempt to appease the liberals in his party? The kind of inconsistency we should expect from a politician?

He will always be a difficult man to understand, and I cannot pretend to have done more in this essay than identify a few threads in the complex pattern of his life. Although the qualities of Bobby's statesmanship that I have treated in this book have never gotten the attention they deserve, they were not the only qualities; indeed, they may not even have been the most important. But I believe that they are the qualities that are most likely to have a permanent value. They are the portion of his legacy that will survive, the piece of his politics that will endure, when other aspects of his career are forgotten. In spite of the sordidness of practical politics, in spite of the compromises, the equivocations, the embarrassments in which a statesman must necessarily involve himself if he is to succeed, it is still possible to discover, in the best and highest forms of statesmanship, the ideal to which the statesman's confused and often contradictory activity tends, the higher order to which it aspires, the coherent pattern that it tries to make good. Once that ideal is discovered, once that order is discerned, it becomes relatively easy to dismiss the false paths, the wrong turns, the dead ends, that inevitably mark a statesman's progress. It becomes relatively easy to separate that which is essential to the particular form of statesmanship in question from that which is irrelevant. Bobby's praise of Che Guevara (he called Guevara a “revolutionary hero”) is one example of such an irrelevancy: it is impossible to assign his admiration of a Marxist bandit a sensible place in a coherent interpretation of his statesmanship. It is a piece in the jigsaw puzzle that does not fit. And we should not try to force it to fit; should instead cast it aside, discard it as merely a daydream, one that had little to do with Bobby's real meaning as a man and a politician. His admiration of Lincoln and Emerson, on the other hand,
can
be connected, in a convincing way, to the highest purposes of his statesmanship; and we are therefore justified in treating that admiration as forming an essential part of that statesmanship.