True Compass (30 page)

Bobby invited the grieving people before him to make a choice: "You can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, with a desire for revenge." Or, he said, "we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love."

He quoted Aeschylus: "'In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'"

And Bobby closed with another invitation, this one offering no options at all, other than hope: "Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people."

Upon the news of King's murder, more than a hundred cities across America erupted in rioting and burning. Indianapolis remained calm.

I've always thought in very personal terms of the power of my brother's words that evening. I believe the people of Indianapolis responded to the sincerity of a man whose own life had been touched by such profound loss and grief, by a man who understood.

Sixty-one days later, it was my brother himself who was cut down by an assassin's bullet. Even as I write these words, they still seem almost unreal.

Those sixty-one days were mostly days of sunlight for Bobby; days when tens of thousands of Americans lined the streets of his campaign trail or watched him on television, and came to know him at last in the fullness of his personality, the fullness I'd known and loved since boyhood. He seemed to thrive on his exposure to crowds, although the crammed schedule, the constant travel, and the sheer intensity of it all deepened his exhaustion. As with the reporters in the hotel bar, his contact with the crowds paid dividends. Through his hesitations, his quick banter and self-parodying jokes, his humanity shone through.

He won Indiana on May 7, beating McCarthy by 42 percent of the vote to 27. On the same day he defeated Hubert Humphrey, who'd finally entered the race, in the District of Columbia, 62.5 percent to 37.5. Then on May 14 he won Nebraska. He lost Oregon to McCarthy, who had grown increasingly bitter. He campaigned in South Dakota, which would vote on June 4, and in California, which had its primary on the same day.

California was crucial. I campaigned for Bobby among labor leaders there. McCarthy had stung us in Oregon, but it was Humphrey who led in national delegates. Humphrey was not running in California, where the winner would capture all 172 delegates. Thus, coupled with New York, whose primary was two weeks later, a victory here could give Bobby enormous momentum. We were scraping for every vote we could get.

The signs looked good. My brother's natural constituency--Hispanics, urban blacks, farmworkers--formed a great mass of California voters, and they turned out in throngs for Bobby, cheering his speeches as his train moved up the fertile farmlands of the Central Valley toward Sacramento. He encountered rough spots: a fractious meeting with black militants in Oakland, a spitting incident amid hostile students at San Francisco State College. But on June 1, my brother answered McCarthy's challenge for a televised debate. Nearly half the state's voters watched, and of these, nearly 60 percent thought Bobby had won.

California voters went to the polls on June 4. At a party for campaign workers in San Francisco that evening, I watched the TV networks track Bobby's rising numbers as he came from behind McCarthy en route to a 45 to 42 percent victory. I watched as my brother, with Ethel smiling at his side, received the cheers from his supporters near midnight in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles. I watched him proclaim America to be "a great country, an unselfish country, and a compassionate country."

And then I left the party and went to my room at the Fairmont Hotel. There, I turned on the television news again.

My mind went black.

Dave Burke was with me. He took care of the details.

A police escort to the airport, a hastily arranged military plane for the flight to Los Angeles, a helicopter ride to Good Samaritan Hospital. John Tunney and John Seigenthaler were there.

We arrived around 3 a.m., just before doctors began their surgery to remove what they could of the three bullets fired by Sirhan Sirhan. Bobby died at 1:44 a.m. the next day, June 6, 1968.

At the funeral mass for Bobby at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan on June 8, after a night of sleeplessness, I managed to deliver these thoughts:

"Love is not an easy feeling to put into words. Nor is loyalty, or trust or joy. But he was all of these. He loved life completely and lived it intensely.

"A few years back, Robert Kennedy wrote some words about his own father and they expressed the way we in his family feel about him. He said of what his father meant to him, 'What it really all adds up to is love--not love as it is described with such facility in popular magazines, but the kind of love that is affection and respect, order, encouragement, and support. Our awareness of this was an incalculable source of strength, and because real love is something unselfish and involves sacrifice and giving, we could not help but profit from it.'

"Beneath it all, he has tried to engender a social conscience. There were wrongs which needed attention. There were people who were poor and who needed help. And we have a responsibility to them and to this country. Through no virtues and accomplishments of our own, we have been fortunate enough to be born in the United States under the most comfortable conditions. We, therefore, have a responsibility to others who are less well off."

I read a brief speech that Bobby had made to the young people of South Africa on their Day of Affirmation in 1966, in which he acknowledged the world's evils--slavery, slaughter, starvation, repression--but then affirmed "that those who live with us are our brothers; that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek--as we do--nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness.... Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something."

And I concluded my own remarks:

"This is the way he lived. 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.

"Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will someday come to pass for all the world.

"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.'"

Life, and politics, went on. But not in the same way. Not for me. I was shaken to my core. I was implored to rejoin the political whirlwind less than an hour after Bobby expired. The activist Allard Lowenstein found me on an elevator at the hospital and blurted that I was all the party had left. In subsequent days and weeks, Mayor Daley of Chicago led the voices of those who sought to enlist me as a standard-bearer against Richard Nixon. I told them all no.

I understood very well the stakes of the forthcoming election. I simply could not summon the will.

Hubert Humphrey now dominated Eugene McCarthy in the delegate count, and seemed certain to be the Democratic nominee. The convention was scheduled to begin in Chicago on August 26. Four days before that, Hubert paid an early-morning visit to my house in McLean, and I spent about forty-five minutes with him. We had a warm conversation about my accepting the vice presidential place on the ticket. He understood my personal difficulties, but he wanted me to run with him. If I did, he said, the ticket would win. If I did not, he faced a very difficult uphill fight.

Hubert and I had always had a good relationship, even though he had opposed both Jack and Bobby in presidential primaries. The two of us worked easily together in the Senate. And yet as much as I liked him, I was not prepared to sign on. It was too much, too soon. I was not about to put my family through all this. And anyway, Humphrey had not distanced himself from the war, and I reminded him that a large part of the reason Bobby had decided to run for president was the Vietnam issue. I still felt myself to be a part of this cause that Bobby had created and championed and that had inspired millions of people. It was not necessarily Hubert's cause. If I joined him on the ticket, I would be betraying the whole effort and movement that my brother had stood for--had died for, really. And so in the end it was not even a close decision. I would not stand for vice president.

Hubert told me that once he got the nomination, he could state more accurately his true position on the war. Given that Bobby had staked everything on an explicit antiwar candidacy, I did not find this inspiring. The conversation about the vice presidency ended cordially, and I invited him to breakfast.

The months following Bobby's death are a blur in my memory. One day I decided that going back to work would help relieve the emptiness. I got into my car and drove toward Capitol Hill. When the Senate Office Building came into view, I began breathing heavily. I turned the car around and went back home.

When I finally was able to enter the building, I found that I could not concentrate on my Senate work. I would go and visit my father on the Cape for a couple of days, and then I would go sailing. Sometimes I sailed alone. Sometimes I sailed with a friend. Sometimes I sailed for long distances. Sometimes I sailed to Maine.

I surrendered myself to the sea and the wind and the sun and the stars on these voyages. I let my mind drift, when it would, from my sorrows to a semblance of the momentous joy I have always felt at the way a sailboat moves through the water. I love sailing in the day, but there's something special about sailing at night. And on these nights in particular, my grieving was subsumed into a sense of oneness with the sky and the sea. The darkness helped me to feel the movement of the boat, and the movement of the sea, and it helped displace the emptiness inside me with the awareness of
direction
. An awareness that there is a beginning to the voyage and an end to the voyage, and that this beginning and ending is part of the natural order of things.

A sail from Cape Cod to Maine, with a southwest breeze, is a glorious adventure, and it's a trip that Bobby and I had enjoyed together in years past. About twenty miles from Hyannis, you see a sweep of sand dunes. And as the sun descends, only a few lights appear onshore, and so you head off into the darkness. Yet in the darkness you can see well into the distance, once you have learned where and how to look. The Cape gradually disappears, and the shore lights with it. After a while, new distant lights, small and bright, appear along the shoreline. And then the full darkness descends. Seldom is there another boat in sight.

And that is the truly magical time of sailing, because the North Star appears: the North Star, which has been the guiding star for all seamen through time. The North Star guides you through the evening. Its light is the most definite thing you can see on the surface of the dark water. And so you have the North Star, and the sound and swell of the shifting water. And sometimes the fog will come in and you must go by the compass for a period. But you are always waiting to see the North Star again, because it is the guide to home port; it is the guide to home. And so the voyage becomes all-inclusive; you are enveloped in the totality of it: you are a part of the beginning, you are a part of the end. You are a part of the ship and a part of the sea.

I gazed at the night sky often on those voyages, and thought of Bobby.

PART THREE

On My Own

Ken Regan/Camera 5

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Shock of Silence

1969

I returned to shore--to the Senate, to what was left of my world--consumed with the need to spur myself forward into activity. Devastation about Bobby's death--and with it, all my pent-up grief about Jack--threatened to overtake me. My only defense against giving in to it was to keep active, keep moving, keep churning forward. I feared that despair and darkness might overtake and smother me if I slackened my drive.

On New Year's Eve 1968, three weeks before the inauguration of Richard Nixon as the thirty-seventh president, I announced to Mike Mansfield that I would challenge Russell Long for his position as Senate assistant majority leader. It was a bold move, in terms of Senate tradition, and it surprised a lot of my fellow senators. Not many of them thought I had a chance to unseat the Louisiana icon, and some thought I had no right. I certainly could show no claim to seniority: I was just thirty-six and had been a senator only six years. I held no committee chairmanships.

The Louisiana incumbent whip cut a picturesque figure in the Senate, though hardly as picturesque as that of his towering father, Huey Long, back in the 1930s. As governor of Louisiana and later its junior senator, "the Kingfish" had blazed his way into folklore as a gifted rustic populist with oratorical tactics and presidential ambitions. I liked Russell: as a specialist in tax law with a conservative's antitax positions, he differed in his politics from me; but his racial views were far more moderate than those of his southern colleagues. More often than not, Russell and I would sit next to each other during Democratic Caucus meetings and he'd tell stories. He was witty, a great teller of jokes--one of the most entertaining senators I've known. There was never any hostility between us.

He also knew how to get things done. He had perfected a trick of persuasion that reminded me of Lyndon Johnson: he would lean into you during a discussion, bringing his face in close to yours and draping a heavy arm around your shoulders, pulling you to him against your will. He'd get inside your space, your comfort zone. Senators would find themselves agreeing to whatever he wanted, just to get away. And when he was at the top of his game, he was a master. He'd take four weeks to push one bill through, not letting it be finished until he was finished lining up his votes. He was unique in that way.

But Long, who'd first been elected to the Senate in 1948, was running out of gas. He was beginning to be more interested in pursuing his oil interests than in attending to the duties of the whip. I sensed that he was vulnerable. I made up my mind before Christmas that I would make the challenge, and on January 3, I ousted Long as whip by a vote of thirty-one to twenty-six.

I continued to drive myself as hard as I could. But sometimes things happened that made me realize that my deepest fears were closer to the surface than I wanted to believe.

As I walked in a St. Patrick's Day parade in Lawrence in March 1969, a burst of popping firecrackers caused me to freeze in my tracks and prepare to dive to the pavement. I stayed upright by an act of will. Years later, on another occasion, I was enjoying a walk in the sunshine near the Capitol with Tom Rollins--then my chief of staff--when a car backfired down the street. Tom recalls that I was suddenly nowhere to be seen. Turning around, he saw me flattened on the pavement. "You never know," Tom recalls me saying. His memory is probably true.

Even now, I'm startled by sudden noises. I flinch at twenty-one-gun salutes at Arlington to honor the fallen in Iraq. My reaction is subconscious--I know I'm not in danger--but it still cuts through me.

In the months and years after Bobby's death, I tried to stay ahead of the darkness. I drove my car at high speeds; I drove myself in the Senate; I drove my staff; I sometimes drove my capacity for liquor to the limit. I might well have driven Joan deeper into her anguish, but the sad truth is that she needed no help from me. Bobby's assassination had devastated her.

We suffered together. And we suffered apart.

I generally managed to keep my public duties and my private anguish separated. Whatever excesses I invented to anesthetize myself, I could almost always put them aside in my role as senator. Almost, but not always.

Among my subcommittee chairmanships was Indian Education. The previous chairman had been Bobby; I'd taken it over after his death. On April 8, 1969, I led a delegation to Anchorage for visits to schools in Eskimo and Indian villages. The other members included Senator Walter Mondale, four other Republican senators, and one GOP representative. The trip was marred at the outset by political tension: after a long day of touring remote villages with newsmen and photographers in tow, three of the Republicans decided that I was exploiting the event for publicity and with great fanfare pulled out of the visit and returned to Washington. Mondale, Senator Ted Stevens, and Congressman Howard Pollock--the latter two of Alaska--and I continued our investigation, and in fact we were later able to pass legislation that improved conditions for the schoolchildren.

The aurora borealis, the northern lights, burned brightly while we were in Alaska. The lights burned especially bright one night during a side visit by Ted Stevens and myself, via a small airplane, to a locale so ancient and so remote as to almost seem suspended in time: Arctic Village, a tribal settlement of fewer than two hundred people and more than forty-five hundred years old. It lay, and still lies, in the lonely far north tundra of the Yukon.

The only landing strip lay several hundred yards from the hamlet, and so Senator Stevens and I, accompanied by some reporters and guides, traveled to it by dogsleds from the plane. We inspected the pitiful facilities, talked to people, made notes on what had to be done, and began our trek back to the airplane. Not far outside the village, I spotted something illuminated dimly by those green and red flashes of light from the heavens. What I saw made me halt my dogsled, disembark, and walk down a path that cut through a nearby woods. I had spotted a child, shivering in the cold, with no shoes and no bottom to his clothing. I unzipped my parka, lifted this little fellow, and tucked him inside against my chest. I could feel his icy skin begin to grow warm as I set out, with Ted Stevens, in search of his mother. We found her, in an igloo in that hamlet. She hadn't realized that her toddler had wandered off.

On the homeward flight to Seattle, I drank too much in an effort to numb myself. The accounts that eventually surfaced, of my resulting rowdiness and leading everyone in childish chants of "Eskimo power!" were on target. Someone later quoted me as saying, in the course of one of those legs, that if I were to run for president, "They're going to shoot my ass off the way they shot off Bobby's."

My family, especially my children, provided hope and balance in those hard months. I focused on the responsibility that now had fallen to me, at age thirty-seven. My father would remain our paterfamilias for as long as he drew breath, but the family now looked to me for guidance and leadership in a new way.

I accepted my new role, insisted on it, and discharged its duties as though Dad's blue eyes were still watching me from the window of the Cape house. I became closer to the children of my brothers and sisters: those of Jack and Jackie, Bobby and Ethel, Peter and Pat Lawford, Sarge and Eunice Shriver, Steve and Jean Smith, Joan and myself; and, later, Caroline and Curran, Vicki's daughter and son. Thirty-two total, just from that group alone. I wanted to do for them what my family had done for me when I was young; what all the Kennedys always did for one another: cherish them, look out for them, show them hope and joy and the delights and miracles of this world.

Memories of how I'd received these gifts came flooding back to me. I recalled the way my parents made the household and the dinner table places of inclusion and learning; the dolls and soldiers that Dad brought home from his travels; the endless larking competitions on the lawn and by the shore and out in the open waters of Nantucket Sound; the way we'd joke as children that none of us would marry because we were having such a good time with one another. I recalled those walking tours with Mother around Boston to see Milk Street and the Common and Paul Revere's home, and the trips with her to Plymouth, to Walden Pond--excursions that Honey Fitz had led for his eldest daughter Rose at the twentieth century's turn; excursions he later led for me.

I recalled how Jack and Bobby, who were altar boys, trained me to be an altar boy--and how that training tightened the fraternal bonds among us.

I recalled watching Jack as he used to take the hand of his small son John and lead the boy to the shore in front of the Cape house; watching the two of them bend over an elegant miniature sailboat, a gift of the Italian government, I think. How Jack would actually trim the little boat's sails and rig its steering.

Then memories came rolling in: all of Bobby's children filling the sunlit waters offshore with swimming and sailing, their cries of excitement floating along in the wind, their father splashing among them.

And I knew that my role now was to ensure a continuum in this beautiful process, this precious tradition of the Kennedy family, regathering itself, replenishing its young with knowledge and love.

And so I became the family uncle. I was counselor, skipper, and mentor to the sailors among them. I organized an annual hiking and camping trip in western Massachusetts, and we kept it going, with a revolving cast, for probably fifteen years. I got a Winnebago and we toured the Massachusetts countryside, the Berkshires, always with a stop in Stockbridge, where we visited Norman Rockwell's studio and the summer studio of Daniel Chester French, the sculptor of Lincoln's figure at the memorial in Washington. Then on to Pittsfield, where we visited Melville's Arrowhead house. Then on again to the Riverside amusement park and its spine-tingling Cyclone roller coaster. As the nephews and nieces grew older, I rented a bus and expanded my itinerary to include the great Civil War battlefields, the ones where Jack had taken me. Over the past fifteen years, the circuit has variously included Manassas, Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Baltimore, Richmond, and Harpers Ferry, among many others.

I traveled constantly, almost compulsively, in the early months of 1969. In mid-May I flew to Los Angeles for a ceremony honoring the great organizer of migrant farmworkers, Cesar Chavez. Cesar had formed a powerful friendship with Bobby. This was my first return to the city since June 1968, and every boulevard, every palm tree took me back to that awful night.

My first impulse had been to decline the invitation. Both Chavez and I would be out in the open, among large crowds, and would be easy targets. But at the last minute I decided the hell with it, boarded a flight, and went.

In my hotel room at Los Angeles, I wrote a letter in longhand to the Los Angeles district attorney, requesting that the life of Bobby's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, be spared. Sirhan was then awaiting sentencing for his act, and the gas chamber appeared to be his fate. I told the presiding judge that Bobby would not approve the taking of a life in retribution for the taking of his own. The sentence, I argued, should be decided with respect for compassion, mercy, and God's gift of life. The next day I had copies of the letter made and sent them to Ethel Kennedy, to our mother, and to Eunice, Pat, and Jean. All of them agreed with me. I mailed the original letter to the judge, Herbert V. Walker, a week or so after returning from Los Angeles.

Walker disregarded the letter and sentenced Sirhan to the chamber. His life was spared by the California Supreme Court. As he sat on death row in 1972, the court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional. Sirhan's sentence was changed to life in prison.

Meanwhile, the Vietnam War had just reached its peak of escalation, with 543,400 troops in country at the end of April. The mad futility of that escalation was just then on display once again: a ten-day battle of breathtaking, needless carnage. I took the Senate floor on May 20, the concluding day of the slaughter that came to be known as Hamburger Hill, and gave my outrage full cry. It was "both senseless and irresponsible," I declared, that U.S. Army generals "continue to send our young men to their deaths to capture hills and positions that have no relation to this conflict."

The day of my speech marked the twelfth and final infantry assault upon the lethally fortified Ap Bia Mountain in the jungles near Laos. Our troops inflicted and absorbed heavy casualties. After the American survivors had taken the hill, the generals--as I'd predicted; as they so often had--abandoned the mountain as being "of no strategic value."

In subsequent days, and folding the abandonment of Ap Bia into my argument, I repeated my denunciation of the battle to the New Democratic Coalition in New York and to other groups.

On June 2, Everett Dirksen unleashed a strong and lengthy rebuke to me in the Senate. I was absent from the chamber on that day, delivering a commencement speech in Arizona. Senate protocol requires that a senator notify a colleague if he intends to refer to that colleague by name on the floor, but Dirksen was clearly not in the mood for niceties. He declared that my criticism of the generals "jolted" his estimation of my wisdom and judgment and that I had no doubt undercut troop morale and discipline. Radio Hanoi was already broadcasting my dissent to the North Vietnamese populace. Moreover, battlefield tactical decisions are never the province of "homefront critics"--they must always be left to the generals.

Given that Dirksen spoke only after a well-publicized meeting with congressional Republicans attended by Nixon himself, it was hard not to conclude that this was part of a consensus strategy to avoid responding to war criticism on its own terms.

The strategy failed. The sacrifices of American boys on Hamburger Hill and in similar battles that week, condemned by me and many others, outraged many citizens. The public outcry led General Creighton Abrams to fundamentally revise the U.S. prosecution of the war from one of massive force against North Vietnamese troops to one of "protective reaction" against attacking troops. The policy of "Vietnamization" soon took hold--in public, at least.