True Compass (29 page)

National attention whipsawed from campus unrest back to the war again on February 27, when Walter Cronkite, at the end of his CBS newscast, famously editorialized that the war was likely to end in a stalemate.

The following day, the moderate Republican governor of Michigan, George Romney--who'd converted to a critic of the war after saying he'd been "brainwashed" into supporting it a year earlier--dropped out of the race.

Lyndon Johnson's incumbency, and the power and prestige that flowed from it, had stood paramount among the strategic reasons for Bobby's hesitation to declare. (During an early strategy meeting, I'd wondered aloud what would happen if Johnson should pull out of the race. No one took the question seriously--myself included.) But on March 12, America woke up to more stunning news about McCarthy: he had come within seven percentage points of upsetting the president in New Hampshire.

Overnight, Johnson had become beatable. He'd won the balloting, and won it entirely on write-in votes; he'd not even entered the primary. Still, McCarthy's showing, propelled by his antiwar stance and the idealistic college students who canvassed for him, made it clear that the president's worst fears might be realized.

That afternoon, Bobby taped an interview with Cronkite for airing on the
CBS Evening News
a few hours later. A group of us were waiting for Bobby at Jean and Steve Smith's house to explore the implications of McCarthy's near-upset on Bobby's prospects. At 7 p.m. we tuned in the news and watched the interview. At the end of it--though my brother still had stopped short of declaring his candidacy--I knew, along with everyone else in the room, and everyone who'd watched the broadcast, where his intentions lay. When Bobby himself arrived at the Smith house and walked into the room, sleeves rolled up and grinning his best sheepish grin, we all stood and gave him a great rousing cheer. None of my misgivings mattered anymore. My brother was running for the presidency, and I intended to do everything in my power for him.

Historians like to analyze Bobby's decision to run for president almost exclusively in the context of the Vietnam War and his opposition to it. But Bobby's concerns about America extended far beyond the war. He was bothered by the deterioration in our cities: the poverty and decay, and the growth of gun violence. He did not see Eugene McCarthy paying any particular attention to these problems. I am convinced that had McCarthy begun to talk about the cities and put forth plans to restore them, Bobby would not have run. But McCarthy had demonstrated no interest whatever in these issues. And when one examines the record, one finds that his interest in the war came pretty late as well.

Nor can one fully understand Bobby's candidacy without recalling his engagement with rural hunger and poverty: his emotional interlude with the near-comatose, starving child that he held in his lap inside a shack in the Mississippi Delta, and his vow as he arose that "I'm going back to Washington to do something about this." (The occasion was a visit to the state by a Senate subcommittee on poverty in March 1967; my brother asked Charles Evers to take him on a tour of the Delta.) There was his visit to California for a meeting with Cesar Chavez, the great farmworker activist, who was then on a hunger strike. There was his chairmanship of the Indian Education Committee, in which he held hearings about boarding school abuses being visited on children on western reservations.

Even his war concerns went beyond the fighting, and engaged the issues of what the war was doing to American society. The inequities of the draft, for example. My work on the random-selection revisions in the draft was spurred by his criticisms of the status quo. I remember walking into his house in 1966 and him launching into an attack on the way Selective Service worked: how it was disproportionately the poor and the black who were fighting and dying, while the sons of the white middle class took advantage of the education deferment, the marriage deferment, the skill deferments.

It was not just the war that made Bobby decide to run. It was the war, and how the war was propelling the direction of America, especially the young people, the underprivileged, the underserved, those struggling for their civil rights. It was the inflaming of the cities and the failure to deal with the root causes of the flames. It was the cutting back on appropriations, the underfunding of the Office of Economic Opportunity, for example, because funding for the war took priority. Bobby felt that we were witnessing the deterioration of President Kennedy's legacy. And when people came to Bobby as they did, saying, "You can change this. You can do it. It's possible. It's feasible. We're prepared to help you do it," he felt an obligation to do something.

Our organizational meetings shifted in tone from "further discussion" to "campaign mode." We assigned key people to campaign tasks--organizing volunteers, arranging an itinerary.

By the middle of March, Bobby was perhaps 90 percent resolved that he would run, but he held back, pending one final consultation with Eugene McCarthy, whose viability could not be dismissed. I flew to Green Bay, Wisconsin, to meet with the senator and deliver two messages from my brother. The first was that if McCarthy would pledge to speak out as forcefully about the crises in our cities and about urban policies in general as he was speaking out against the war, Bobby would stay out of the race. The second was that if McCarthy refused to make such a pledge, Bobby would listen to any ideas about a joint effort to defeat Johnson. If the Wisconsin senator spurned both options, Bobby would get in.

In the interest of discretion, I flew with a small group of aides to Green Bay at night and, instead of risking detection by taking an elevator, trudged up the back stairs of the Northland Hotel, where Gene and Abigail McCarthy were staying. I should have saved myself the climb. At the eighth floor, stationed in the stairwell with his cameraman, hovered the CBS correspondent David Schoumacher, who'd been assigned to travel with McCarthy. He asked me, "What are you doing here?"

Abigail answered my knock. I waited an hour and half for McCarthy to appear. It was a difficult meeting. As soon as he entered the room, it was clear to me that he was completely uninterested in what I had to say. I assume that he had watched my brother's interview with Walter Cronkite, and had a pretty good sense that Bobby was going to get into the race. He certainly got it from me that Bobby was going to get in unless the two of them talked. Gene was still riding the high of New Hampshire and felt he was pretty much in the catbird seat. The meeting was respectful, but I really hadn't expected much from it.

McCarthy had always had a little edge of anger, or perhaps contempt, for the Kennedys. I believe he'd felt himself more Catholic, more liberal, and more intellectual than John Kennedy. I'd maintained a decent relationship with him in the Senate, but there was never any warmth between us.

I said goodbye to McCarthy in the wee hours of Saturday, March 16. At which point McCarthy gave the whole story of our meeting to the waiting David Schoumacher, spinning the thrust of it in his own favor.

On Saturday morning, March 16, 1968, Bobby entered the Caucus Room of the Old Senate Office Building and announced his candidacy for president. He stood in the same spot where our brother Jack had made his own announcement in 1960. "I do not run... to oppose any man, but to propose new policies," Bobby avowed. The divisions in the party and in the country made clear by Senator McCarthy's showing in New Hampshire took the race beyond a mere clash of personalities and made it a test of policies and the nation's moral character. He expressed personal respect for President Johnson and gratitude for LBJ's kindness toward the Kennedy family. But, "I must enter the race," he declared. "The fight is just beginning, and I believe that I can win."

Fifteen days after my brother entered the race, a weary and warhaunted Lyndon Johnson sat down in the White House television studio and delivered a stunning announcement. He began by renewing his calls for peace talks with North Vietnam. He promised a significant unilateral reduction in the bombing. And then he concluded with the words, "I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president."

By that time, Bobby was campaigning with all the energy and clear purpose that the president lacked. Photographs of him amid the crowds are part of the national memory. I still smile when I recall his lightning appearance in Boston the day after his announcement. It was St. Patrick's Day, the occasion of Boston's grandest parade. I was walking, as I did every year, and this time Bobby decided to join me. He arrived while the parade was in progress and walked by himself for a couple of blocks. I spotted him and hurried ahead to join him, but by then he'd noticed that he was getting a great reception. I have a terrific photograph that shows him sort of pushing me away with his right hand. He was saying, "I'm doing fine, Teddy. You don't have to join me. I'll see you later."

At the far end of the parade, in a manner of speaking, lay Indiana. The state now dominated our thinking. Its primary was scheduled for May 7; the filing deadline for candidates was March 28. Should Bobby enter? The risks were high. Indiana was a conservative and pro-war state, despite having elected two antiwar Democratic senators. It was the home to the Ku Klux Klan, a stronghold of the Teamsters, whose membership still resented my brother's investigation of Jimmy Hoffa, and a large conservative agricultural community. Its tough Democratic governor, Roger Branigan, had entered the primary as a stand-in for Johnson. Its two leading newspapers, the Indianapolis
Star
and
News
, reflected the anti-Kennedy opinions of their owner, Eugene Pulliam, a wealthy and right-wing Republican from Arizona.

Despite the odds, we decided that we had no alternative but to enter that primary. No one on the campaign seemed to have focused on the fact that Indiana would be the first test after Bobby announced, and that he stood a very good chance of getting licked there. The early polls did not look good. And if Bobby lost right away, before he got into the other states, it would amount to a devastating setback--especially given the small number of presidential primaries back then relative to today.

In April, as my brother opened his Indiana campaign, I helped set up the state, along with several of our friends and Bobby's aides. We were starting with almost nothing. And so we scrambled. We barnstormed the cities and towns as in the old days for Jack in Wisconsin and West Virginia, collecting signatures for Bobby's entry, building an organization from the ground up. We tried to find out the people's impressions of our candidate. We found that Indianans didn't necessarily like Bobby's "super-hot" style. And they didn't like the similar style of some of his advance people who rolled into the state. Bobby softened his approach and smoothed over some of the local feathers that had been ruffled by over eager staffers, but he didn't slow down his pace.

Every evening in Indiana, after his day's round of speaking and appearances, Bobby would sit down at the hotel bar and have a drink with members of the press. They would talk until two in the morning, and only then would he go to bed. After a three-day run with this schedule, he'd be exhausted. Yet he kept it going. Bobby went beyond political "straight talk." He would talk about Albert Camus, and poetry, and literature that inspired him.

These sessions exacted an incredible physical toll on Bobby. Yet the rewards were great. By the end of the campaign, those press people--suspicious at the outset toward this "ruthless," "arrogant" figure--had formed a completely different view of Bobby. Richard Harwood of the
Washington Post
. Jules Witcover of the
Washington Star
. Jack Newfield of the
Village Voice
. Sandy Vanocur of NBC, who interviewed my brother in the early evening of June 4 in Los Angeles, and then reported live throughout that horrible night from the Ambassador Hotel. All of these fine reporters came to see Bobby as he really was.

After my brother's loss, these members of Bobby's press entourage organized themselves into a group that, each year, gives a press award for a high school essay or editorial on the subject of poverty or civil rights (they present awards to professional journalists as well). They hold an annual presentation in Washington, raising the money themselves.

I have another very personal memory of Bobby in Indiana. I was following him up a stairway to his hotel room, after a long day of campaigning. Bobby told me that he was worried about his then twelve-year-old son David, who had been caught throwing rocks at cars. My brother stopped and looked straight at me.

"Teddy," he said, "I want you to know that if I don't make it this time, I am not interested in running again. This all takes too much. I have to be there for David and the other children."

In the early spring of 1968, America found itself in shock from a loss that in and of itself would have marked the year as catastrophic. On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis.

On that same day, Bobby had arrived in Indiana to begin his campaign. He'd kicked it off with an address in Muncie. Then he boarded a flight to Indianapolis for a speech in one of the most troubled African-American neighborhoods in the city, at a children's playground at Seventeenth Street and Broadway. Before his plane left the ground, Pierre Salinger reached my brother by telephone with the news that Dr. King had been shot. Upon his arrival in the city, Bobby learned that King was dead.

Most white political figures would have made any excuse to avoid standing before a black crowd in a ghetto under any circumstances in the summer of 1968. My brother did not hesitate, even when cautioned against it by the Indianapolis mayor. Carrying with him the news of King's assassination, Bobby moved ahead toward a moment that I believe encapsulates his life entire: a moment of conviction, compassion, courage, and eloquence.

Standing hatless on the floor of a flatbed truck under harsh lights on a rainy, windy night, in an enclave of desolation and anger, above a crowd whose reaction could not be predicted, Robert Kennedy broke the news with the directness of a family member: "I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee."