True Compass (23 page)

He delayed returning to his duties as attorney general; he found it difficult to concentrate on anything or do substantive work. Hope seemed to have died within him, and there followed months of unrelenting melancholia. He went through the motions of everyday life, but he carried the burden of his grief with him always.

I was so worried about Bobby that I tried to suppress my own grief. I felt that I had to be strong for my parents and the family. Maybe it's more accurate to say that I was afraid to allow grief to swallow me up. So I just pushed it down further and further inside.

In mid-January 1964, while Bobby was still attorney general and before he made up his mind to resign and run for the Senate from New York, President Johnson asked him to visit the Far East to negotiate a cease-fire between Indonesia and Malaysia. He was to meet in Japan with Sukarno, the enlightened but volatile Indonesian president who had helped his country win its independence from the Netherlands. Now Sukarno, suspicious at Malaysia's recent federation agreement with Great Britain, had launched a guerrilla war against the neighboring state. Bobby's official mission was to act as peacemaker; but Johnson also hoped that the assignment would lift his spirits.

Johnson, so often perceived by Bobby as an adversary, had on this occasion performed a valuable act of compassion. Bobby invited Ethel along, and her companionship, along with the trip itself, broke my brother's cycle of depression. In Japan, Bobby and Ethel witnessed a tumultuous outpouring of friendship from the people, who wanted to show their respect and love for John Kennedy through Bobby's presence. I believe that that reception restored his faith that life was worth living after all, and that President Kennedy had achieved something lasting and worthwhile.

Late in 1964, Bobby asked me to review the Warren Commission's newly released report on the assassination because emotionally he couldn't do it. The commission had been established by President Johnson seven days after Jack was killed in Dallas, and was charged with determining who had shot Jack, and why. Johnson appointed Earl Warren, the former California governor and chief justice, to chair the commission. Its conclusion, made public in an 888-page document released in September, was that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing Jack and wounding the Texas governor John Connally, who was riding in the open limousine with my brother and the wives of both men.

When I reached him by telephone, Warren told me he would be glad to give me a briefing and go over the parts of the report that were particularly contentious and likely to generate the most questions from the press and public. I remember the commission's office as large but spare, about half the size of the attorney general's office. I believe that Warren had one aide, perhaps a law clerk, present at the meeting. I almost certainly brought an aide along with me.

Warren gave me a full briefing, as I'd requested. I asked many questions. The whole process took about four hours. Afterward, I reported to Bobby that I accepted the commission's report and thought he should too.

Bobby agreed readily. He did not want to continue to investigate Jack's death. Earl Warren, moreover, was a strong advocate for the accuracy of the report. He told me quite persuasively that he'd felt a responsibility to the nation to get it right. He personally made the case to me, showing me its weaknesses and walking me through the thinking of the commission members.

I am well aware that many scholars and others have questioned the findings ever since they were released. There have been hundreds of socalled conspiracy theories. I was satisfied that the Warren Commission got it right: satisfied then, and satisfied now. I'm always reluctant to speak for my brother, but I know how strongly Bobby felt that it was imperative that this inquiry be thorough and accurate. In all my subsequent conversations with him, when all was said and done, I believe that Bobby accepted the Warren Commission findings too.

I must speak of what I believe to be another tragic outcome of the bullets fired in Dallas that November. Toward midsummer 1963, I was aware that my brother had qualms about Vietnam. He felt that we needed a new and different direction. He had a growing understanding that the conflict could not be resolved militarily, and I feel very strongly that he certainly would not have escalated it. I witnessed elements of this process unfolding, and Jack affirmed it to me himself in private conversations. The situation troubled him. He said that Vietnam must belong to the Vietnamese. He had spoken with McNamara about a plan for withdrawal within two or three years.

Jack's antenna was set up to find a way out. And I am convinced that he was on his way to finding that way out. He just never got the chance.

In the days and weeks following Jack's death, I sought to keep the grief from disabling me. After the funeral, I returned to the Cape to look after my parents. In fact, this time with my father proved a tremendous source of comfort to me. Even though he was disabled, Dad could find ways to communicate his thoughts, and I was there to hear them. My father had reserves of strength that I could draw upon.

I felt that I was needed by my parents now more than ever. And so I would say to myself in moments of despair,
There might be a time when you can give way to your own feelings, but not now, not in front of Dad
. And so, hour by hour, I learned to contain my grief, to not give way to it.

I drew from my parents both strength and inspiration. I would say to myself,
Mother is holding up. The last thing she needs is for me to break down or give way to a flood of tears
.

I took long walks on the beach. I was still filled with such disbelief that Jack was gone. And then the truth of it would burn through this illusion. It was in those moments, when I was out of sight of anyone else, just the sea on one side of me and the sand on the other, that I would let go of my self-control.

It never occurred to me to seek professional help or grief counseling of any kind. The times were different then. But I prayed and I thought and I prayed some more.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Falling to Earth

1964-1965

In the end, the best way to honor Jack's memory was to take up his unfinished work.

His great dreams had included sending an American to the moon, nuclear disarmament, and the passage of a landmark civil rights bill. A lunar quest was years from feasibility. The checkered progress of disarmament was to be measured across decades.

The civil rights bill, by contrast, virtually cried for enactment. President Johnson supported it. A majority of Congress, including several Republicans, seemed to recognize that its time had come. Its main provisions would strike down restraints imposed in an agrarian age when most living Americans had witnessed slavery as a sanctioned practice. The affection that most Americans still harbored for the late President Kennedy and his dreams lent a timely backdrop for the effort to topple segregation in schools, employment, and public places.

Yet passage in the Senate remained far from a sure thing. No important civil rights legislation since Reconstruction had ever made it past the stone wall of southern resistance. Generations of senators from the old Confederacy, although a minority, had even managed to torpedo an antilynching bill. No signal existed that 1964 would be any different.

The southerners' weapon of choice on civil rights bills was the filibuster, that time-honored tradition of preventing a vote on legislation by holding the Senate floor and orating on any subject until silenced by a "cloture" vote--or, more commonly, until a compromise is forged or the opposition gives up. In the early 1960s, cloture required assent by at least sixty-seven of the Senate's one hundred members. Sixty-seven Senators were Democrats in 1964; but of these, twenty-one were from the "solid South." Among the current Republicans, only twelve of the thirty-three were moderates; the rest were conservative. A filibuster against the bill was inevitable, and we knew that the math was against us: we were nine votes short of cloture, which by all previous indicators was a hopeless gap.

The math did not in any way impede the determination and tactical shrewdness of President Lyndon Johnson, abetted by Senators Hubert Humphrey and Mike Mansfield.

Johnson sought to bolster public acceptance of the civil rights bill with speeches, appeals to the clergy, and by jawboning newspaper editors and publishers to call for its passage. He worked through Mansfield, the majority leader, to name Humphrey as manager of the bill. Humphrey homed in on the bill's most powerful adversary outside the South, Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the Republican minority leader. Playing to Dirksen's aspirations to be recalled as a great man of the Senate, Hubert flattered the senator publicly, claiming in broadcast interviews that
as
a great man, he would naturally do the right thing on civil rights. Dirksen voted for the bill.

The House of Representatives passed a strong version of the bill in February 1964. Mansfield fielded it and adroitly steered it around its natural Senate starting place, the Judiciary Committee, where Richard B. Russell of Georgia awaited with the intention of shoving it into limbo. Mansfield found a creative pretext for rushing the bill directly to the Senate floor for debate. When it arrived there on March 10, Russell and his fellow Dixie Democrats launched their filibuster.

Russell was anything but subtle about his aims. He and his allies clung to the spirit of a speech he made in 1946 while filibustering a bill that would have permanently created the Fair Employment Practices Commission: he would resist "to the bitter end" any measure that would bring about "social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races" in the southern states.

The end this time would indeed be bitter for them. Over fifty-seven days of argument, arm-twisting, pressure, and persuasion in April, May, and June of that year--"the longest debate," as it came to be called--we virtually willed the bill to passage.

When I first entered the Senate, new members usually did not make floor speeches for at least two years. Today, they all speak almost immediately. But not in 1964. And when they finally did take the podium, members usually spoke on issues of local concern. So it was something of a break with tradition when I decided to make my maiden speech on April 9, 1964, and use it to advocate for the passage of the Civil Rights Act. But it seemed to me that civil rights was
the
issue and this was
the
time. I was increasingly involved in both the substance of the discussion and the debate and felt it was very important to speak out.

I began with a note of homage to the time-honored protocols of the Senate: "It is with some hesitation that I rise to speak.... A freshman senator should be seen, not heard; should learn and not teach. This is especially true when the Senate is engaged in a truly momentous debate."

I voiced my respect for the quality of debate thus far and noted that I'd planned to focus my initial Senate speech on issues affecting my home state. But "I could not... [watch] this issue envelop the emotions and the conscience of the nation without changing my mind. To limit myself to local issues in the face of this great national question would be to demean the seat in which I sit, which has been occupied by some of the most distinguished champions in the cause of freedom. I feel I can better represent the people of Massachusetts at this time by bringing the experience of their history to bear on this problem."

I recalled the prejudice directed against my own Irish forebears. I cited the support for the bill among hundreds of religious leaders, most particularly Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston--who, I avowed, had made unparalleled contributions to my own racial and religious understanding.

Noting that wide areas of the South remained without integration years after the principle had been established, I warned that if Congress did not move quickly to expedite the integration decree, "it will be acquiescing in what has amounted in many places to a virtual reversal of the Supreme Court's decisions."

As for discrimination in federal programs--health, education, job training, for instance--I made what I believed to be a ringingly obvious point: "We cannot justify using Negro taxpayers' money to perpetuate discrimination against them."

After voicing a series of buttressing arguments to support these major points, I wound up my maiden speech as follows: "I remember the words of President Johnson last November 27: 'No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the Civil Rights Bill for which he fought so long.'

"My brother was the first president of the United States to state publicly that segregation was morally wrong. His heart and his soul are in this bill. If his life and death had a meaning, it was that we should not hate but love one another, and that we should use our powers not to create conditions of oppression that lead to violence, but conditions of freedom that lead to peace. It is in that spirit that I hope the Senate will pass this bill."

On June 19, 1964, a year to the day after my brother sent his civil rights bill to Congress, it passed into law on a vote of seventy-three to twenty-seven.

We knew that the Democratic Party would pay a price for this achievement. Lyndon Johnson himself put it most succinctly when he remarked, "We may win this legislation, but we're going to lose the South for a generation." And he was right; this marked the onset of the transformation of that region from Democratic to Republican.

Other Democratic leaders foresaw this as well, yet they acted to pass the bill nonetheless. I'm convinced that they acted, as had my brother in his speech, beyond political calculus: this was simply the right thing to do. Lyndon Johnson underscored his own progressive aims on May 22 when, at a commencement address at the University of Michigan, he described his vision of a "Great Society." His ideas, transformed into action by a Democratic Congress, produced a constellation of programs, laws, and agencies for social reform, some conceived by Jack and Bobby, but all championed and fought for by LBJ. They included the War on Poverty and the Economic Opportunity Act, the Job Corps, Project Head Start, Medicare, Medicaid, the National Endowments for the Arts and for Humanities, VISTA, and others.

All were landmarks in American history.

On Friday, June 19, 1964, the same evening that we passed the Civil Rights Act, the Massachusetts Democratic Party was opening its annual convention in Springfield. I had planned to fly there after the vote and accept the party's nomination to my first full term in the United States Senate. My friend Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana had agreed to deliver the keynote. The usual flurry of floor speeches in the Senate had pushed the Civil Rights vote further and further into the evening hours, delaying our departure for the state convention, and at one point I telephoned the delegates in Springfield, my voice amplified in their hall by a public address system, to assure them I would arrive later in the evening.

The Senate roll call began at 7:40 p.m. After proudly voting "aye," I hurried and headed to Washington National Airport. There, I boarded a chartered plane along with Senator Bayh, his wife, Marvella, and my longtime aide and friend Edward Moss. The pilot, Edwin J. Zimny, was a last-minute substitute for Daniel Hogan, the plane's owner, who had decided to attend a reunion of Yale alumni. The plane was an Aero Commander, a small twin-engine painted white with blue trim. Our destination was Barnes Municipal Airport in Westfield, Massachusetts, near Springfield.

The night was heavy and humid in Washington. We headed northeast on the 360-mile trip, with the pilot navigating on instruments. An Aero Commander is configured with seats for the pilot and copilot, plus room for five passengers. Directly behind the pilot and copilot are two rear-facing cabin seats that in turn face a bench accommodating three people. The Bayhs sat together on the bench, and Ed Moss and I both initially sat in the rear-facing seats. As we were coming in over Springfield, Ed Moss got up and said, "You people need more space, because you're working on your speeches." With that, he unbuckled himself and moved up into the empty copilot's seat. Birch worked on his speech and I went over mine, and as we were coming into Barnes airfield I turned in my seat to watch our approach for landing. I looked out in front of the plane and saw that the ground was blanketed in fog. As I knew from my own experience as a pilot, we should have been able to see the airport runway lights at about this time, giving the pilot a target for landing. But instead of runway lights as we came out of the mist, I saw a hill, scattered with large rocks, and we were about to crash into it.

The pilot glimpsed this terrifying sight at the same moment I did and pulled back on the stick to lift the plane up. Every muscle in my body tensed as I mentally went through the motions with the pilot.
Up. Up. Up, dammit!
I could see tall pine trees just beyond the rocky part of the hill.
If only the pilot can clear them...
He couldn't. We were flying at an altitude of only 177 feet. The whole plane was jolted as we struck the first treetop, and then we rode along the tops of those trees in what felt like a slow-motion nightmare. As we sped along and clipped those treetops, the plane teetered from side to side, until the left wing of the plane struck one of the trees with such force that the plane was thrown to the left. We crashed to the ground in an apple orchard and skidded into the earth between two rows of trees, plowing a trench two feet deep. That trench helped to slow the plane down, but we still slammed into a tree. The low branches acted as a knife, slicing open the front of the plane. The impact hurled my corkscrewed body forward into the cockpit, directly between the pilot and my friend Ed Moss.

Silence.

Silence.

On my left, I could make out the pilot slumped over the wheel. He looked in bad shape. I swiveled my gaze painfully to the right. Ed Moss looked in bad shape too. Behind me in the cabin, I could hear Birch Bayh saying, "Is there anybody alive up there? Is anybody alive?" I couldn't answer. The sleeves of my coat had come off from the impact, the shoelaces had broken on my shoes, and I couldn't move from my waist down.

Birch and Marvella managed to drag themselves out of the airplane. They were some distance away, but I could still hear them. And I still could not speak. I could hear Marvella crying in the darkness, "We've got to get help! We've got to get help! We've got to get help! We've got to get help!"

Then Birch's voice: "I smell gas. That plane might catch fire! I'm going back to see if there's somebody alive in there." It sounds very easy, as I describe it, to say that a plane's going to catch fire, we'd better hurry and get help, and for Birch to turn around, come back, and look in that plane again. But of course there was nothing easy about it. The plane could have exploded into a fireball at any moment, and Birch was risking his own life to try to save those of us still in the plane. He showed courage and compassion that I'll never forget.

When he came back to the plane, I opened my mouth and managed to say, "I'm alive, Birch!" He replied, "I can't bend over because of my back." But the prospect of the plane catching fire gave me some extra juice to try and get out of there. And so I summoned everything I had to turn around, even though I was paralyzed from the waist down. I crawled to the window and put my arm around Birch, and he dragged me out of that plane, far enough away to be safe if there were an explosion. Then I just let go and collapsed onto the ground. Birch left me to go back to the plane to try to rescue the others. But when they didn't move or answer his calls, he feared that Zimny and Moss were dead. The situation was very grim. I was having difficulty breathing as I lay on the ground in that apple orchard. I couldn't move and was fighting to remain conscious. We had crashed near a back road, and Birch and Marvella walked to the road to try to flag down a passing car for help. For a long time it seemed as though we would spend the night there. Nine cars passed them before one finally stopped. A man named Robert Schauer picked up the Bayhs and drove them to his home, where they called for help. Schauer lent them blankets and pillows and returned them to the crash site. Police and an ambulance finally arrived about an hour and a half after Birch had pulled me from the plane. I said, "You'd better go over to the others. See if they're still alive." They went to the plane and took Moss out, who was still alive. Zimny was dead.