True Compass (27 page)

Before that could happen, Congressman Howard "Bo" Callaway interrupted to declare that he was a West Point graduate, that he had some one hundred friends in Vietnam, that he'd spent two weeks there. He pronounced the president's bombing strategy long overdue. Morale among the boys on the aircraft carriers, after their strikes on Hanoi and Haiphong, had never been higher.

When the congressman was finished, the president said that that was the finest statement that he'd heard on Vietnam all evening. By this time in the evening, President Johnson had relaxed completely. His spirits rose as he became sure of the support of the House members.

I left the meeting with Senators McGovern, Mondale, and Tydings. McGovern shared my frustration, saying it was impossible for him to communicate effectively with the president about Vietnam: "Something happens to you when you get into the Cabinet Room with all those charts, maps, and aerial reconnaissance photos around the room."

And so Rolling Thunder continued.

A different thunder rolled through American cities in the hot summers from 1965 through 1969 and, sporadically, beyond: the thunder of gunfire and explosions and police tear gas canisters as Americans fought one another in urban streets; the thunder unleashed by the violent collision, as the Kerner Commission would later phrase it, of "two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal."

The inaugural of the 1960s race riot era--the six-day spree of fires, deaths, and terror in the Watts neighborhood of south-central Los Angeles--was almost a year old when, on August 8, 1966, I traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to address the annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I shared the platform with Martin Luther King Jr., the organization's first president (though unfortunately I never got to know him well).

I began with praise for the group's commitment to nonviolence. "You have been jailed and bombed, beaten, and stoned," I told them, "but your work has persevered."

I ticked off the recent milestones in black America's fight for equality: the passage of three civil rights bills since 1959 with a fourth soon to come, the registration of more than two million Negro voters in the South, the advent of the War on Poverty.

I acknowledged the realities that remained. "After all of the programs that Congress has passed," I asked, "how much has the life of the average Negro really changed? Not very much. What good is a desegregated motel if you can't afford to stay there? What use is the right to vote if you must risk your job and even your life in order to vote?"

None of us, perhaps not even the rioters themselves, could then fully imagine the breadth of combustible despair and anger that curled about the nation's most alienated streets, black and white, awaiting the spark of ignition. Parts of San Francisco, Omaha, Waukegan, Lansing, and Chicago went up that summer. The next year would see the conflagration of Newark--five days, twenty-six deaths, more than $10 million in property damage. No city, it began to seem, was safe: Tampa, Buffalo, Memphis, Milwaukee, Washington, Baltimore, Youngstown, Hartford, Fort Lauderdale--the list went on. As did the sniper fire, the clubbings, the flames, the deaths of police and civilians, the ruined small businesses and churches and schools, the incalculable economic devastation: $45 million in insured damages in one hundred cities by early 1968, to cite but one of many figures.

"How is it possible?" President Johnson asked. "After all we've accomplished? How could it be?"

It was a question that many in Congress must have asked themselves. It implied a crushing sense of betrayal. Here we were, by our own sights, a collection of affluent, well-educated, politically successful white men who had devoted years to a constellation of causes that might well have led to electoral defeat for any or all of us. School desegregation. Desegregation in universities. Desegregation in transportation and public gathering places. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. The poll tax repeal. We acted, as I have said, because we believed that the principle of equality and justice among the races was a cause larger than our own ambitions. We believed that our victories in these causes would change history. And at the very moment in American time when we were anticipating a mood of joyfulness and uplift, our cities were exploding in violence. How could it
be
?

There were no easy answers. There never are.

In early 1967, the tide of events began to pull the Kennedys again toward the responsibilities and perils of the highest office in the land. A January poll showed Bobby beating Lyndon Johnson, who was entangled in the coils of the Vietnam War. While it was Bobby alone who took on the burden of contemplating that ultimate choice, all the family reached out to share the weight with him. What he decided would transform all our lives.

The background of Bobby's presidential campaign of 1968 probably had its roots two years earlier, when he and I were campaigning in the Midwest for Democratic senatorial candidates. One of them was Paul Douglas of Illinois. Douglas was a brilliant but aging figure, a decorated hero of World War II and a close friend of Jack's. He had good ideas about economic policy and urban redevelopment, but he remained a hawk on the war. In the late summer of 1966, embroiled in a close race with the Republican Charles Percy, Douglas asked my brother and me to come out and help him.

We arrived at a pivotal moment in a decade festering with pivotal moments. The antiwar movement, galvanized the year before by Johnson's bombing campaign over North Vietnam, had spread across the United States, with university campuses forming its central nervous system. Senator Douglas had been shocked by the vehemence from students that greeted his speeches. Because Bobby and I agreed with him on nearly all the other issues, we went to bat for him on the campaign trail.

We were both accustomed by now to the raw passions of the civil rights movement, but the fury of the antiwar demonstrators was new to us. The placards, the chants, the shaking fists, the interruptions as we tried to speak to crowds--all of this told us that something profound had taken root in American society.

Bobby returned East after a few days, but I moved on to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to speak on behalf of Gaylord Nelson, who, like Douglas, was up for reelection to the Senate. Nelson was considered a liberal--he founded Earth Day in 1970--and in this year was edging toward an antiwar position, but had not yet declared it. This was not good enough for the three thousand students who awaited us in the lecture hall.

Our first sign of trouble was a display at the back of the hall, whose broad contours were soon to become familiar: an array of white sheets with skeletons drawn on them in charcoal--graphic, and almost ghoulish. Other sheets depicted the explosions of bombs and artillery shells.

I was the first to speak--or try to speak. The crowd erupted in a roar as I walked to the microphone. I looked out at a sea of thrashing arms, writhing bodies. I asked, shouting into the mike, whether they were going to let me speak. "NO! NO!" they thundered. An antiwar chant welled up. Finally I shouted, "I'll let one of you come up! I'll listen to you speak, and then you listen to me!" A young man approached the stage from the crowd. To this day, I can remember his last name: Schultz. He was from New York. He took the podium and gave an impromptu antiwar talk--I must say, a
stirring
impromptu antiwar talk--that lasted about seven minutes. At the end, waves of roaring approval resounded in the hall.

I decided to honor the mood of the crowd. "You can keep going," I shouted to Schultz. "Keep going!" He cited a couple further facts, and then stopped again. I renewed my gesture: "Keep going! This is a major issue! Keep going!" But Schultz had run out of gas. "I don't have anything more to say," he told me. "You don't have anything more to say?" I repeated. "That's all you had to say?" I had made a tactical mistake: the crowd thought I was browbeating him, and directed boos at me.

At length, things quieted down enough that I was able to speak for the same amount of time as Schultz. My own doubts about the fundamental validity of the war--the seeds planted by Bernard Fall and my own concerns for refugees and the humanitarian aspects of the war--were forming themselves, but I had not yet declared a sweeping opposition. So I spoke critically about one of the two or three issues that orbited this central point: our military's lack of a coherent exit strategy.

Yet the time for declaring oneself was drawing near. By 1967, as U.S. troop levels in Vietnam topped four hundred thousand, the antiwar movement, ignited by the bombing of North Vietnam, swelled toward its peak. Returning veterans disillusioned by the war began to publicly burn their draft cards. In January Martin Luther King declared himself on the dissidents' side, arguing that the war was starving vital domestic legislation.

It was in this atmosphere that my brother, in the early spring of 1967, delivered the Senate speech that set him irretrievably on a course apart from that of President Johnson. Its message was simple: Stop the bombing. Negotiate with North Vietnam for peace.

Bobby had spoken with Johnson before his speech. He'd traveled through Europe weeks earlier, meeting with President Charles de Gaulle, the Socialist leader Francois Mitterrand, and the Far Eastern specialist Etienne Manac'h in France; Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger and then foreign minister Willy Brandt in Germany; and, in Italy, the Italian foreign minister Amintore Fanfani and President Giuseppe Saragat. All had expressed variations of the same conviction: that America's course in Vietnam was wrong, and that it was harming U.S. relations with Europe. The wellconnected Manac'h had added the provocative view that Hanoi, though it had lost trust in President Johnson's peace overtures, was prepared to negotiate without preconditions except one: that America halt its bombing of the North.

On his return, Bobby had met privately with Johnson and told him frankly what he thought the president should do--told him, in essence, the thrust of the speech he was contemplating.

And then Bobby made a serious offer to Johnson. He proposed that the president give him the authority to personally negotiate for peace. He would shuttle back and forth between Washington and Saigon, and would even travel to Hanoi and China if necessary--and Moscow--if Johnson would trust him to be the U.S. government's agent in these secret negotiations.

If the president had accepted his offer, Bobby certainly would have been too immersed in the peace process to become involved in the 1968 presidential primary. But Johnson just couldn't accept his offer at face value. He worried about Bobby's sincerity and whether he had ulterior motives. Bobby didn't. He just wanted to end a war.

And so on March 2, 1967, after a night of drafting and redrafting his speech, with the knowledge that American opinion tilted against him and that the political repercussions would be harsh, Senator Robert Kennedy stood up in the Senate and spoke for the record about his break with America's conduct of the Vietnam War.

He absolved Johnson of personal responsibility for the conflict, and accepted some responsibility, along with the late President Kennedy, for failures of policy. Yet this ever-widening war must end, he declared, and it was Congress's and the president's responsibility to end it. Given that Hanoi was reported to be ready to negotiate, the United States should test that readiness by a cessation of the bombing. An international group should monitor the borders for signs of further escalation by the North, and United Nations forces should gradually replace U.S. troops as negotiations moved forward.

Johnson increased the bombing missions.

I respected the courage and moral clarity that Bobby displayed with this declaration. And I was moving closer to my own public break with the administration's war policy. I had privately urged the administration to pursue diplomacy instead of bombings, but those efforts had obviously been futile. I then publicly declared that the Great Society itself had become a casualty of the Vietnam War. We had been forced to spend so much militarily that there were no longer resources for domestic programs.

In May, I disputed the official estimates of war casualties among South Vietnamese civilians. I reported to Neil Sheehan of the
New York Times
that my subcommittee staff and I had determined that the dead and wounded amounted to more than one hundred thousand a year--double the figure announced by the administration.

I also kept up my criticism of the deplorable state of medical care available to Vietnamese civilians, and in July the president responded--or appeared to respond--by sending a team of physicians over to study the situation. The doctors' findings proved nearly as worthless as the facilities they examined. To their credit, they called for increased spending, especially on surgical resources. But they dismissed my casualty estimates as far too high. They rejected my call for building three new hospitals in the country. I convened public hearings on the issue. The doctors again pointed to underfunding by the Johnson administration. We were getting nowhere.

In August McNamara admitted to a Senate committee that the bombing of the North was not working. In November he announced his resignation, and his intention to join the World Bank as its fifth president. Johnson replaced him with Clark Clifford.

Lyndon Johnson had reasons to resent the Kennedys, and Bobby in particular. Public opinion polls showed a tide of popular support for my brother's candidacy for president as 1967 went on, and a corresponding drop in LBJ's popularity. Bobby had said nothing about running for president then, although privately he had burned to challenge Johnson at least since the summer of 1967--not from personal animosity, but because he wanted to stop the war, among other priorities. I talked him out of it at that time. I did not see how we could pull things together to win the nomination against a sitting president, and even if we did, I didn't see how we could win in November.

Now my brother was beginning to attract people who agreed that Johnson must be challenged from within his own party: people such as activist Allard Lowenstein, who soon would head the Americans for Democratic Action, and California's Jesse Unruh. Bobby continued to hold back from any inclination to run, even as he kept up his criticism of the war, and Senator Eugene McCarthy seemed poised to declare as the candidate of the antiwar left. Yet the opinion polls, the urgings of friends, the rigidity of LBJ as his popularity sank--all this, coupled with Bobby's own anguish over the continued waste of humanity and resources in Vietnam--made it impossible for him not to contemplate the prospect.