CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1968
My second visit to Vietnam grew out of my conviction that an even greater gap existed between rhetoric and reality there than during my first trip, in 1965.
I had dispatched a team of advance men to explore the terrain held by U.S. forces--villages, refugee camps, hospitals--and to scout for sources who could take me beyond "official" versions of what was happening. My traveling companion on the flight over was Dr. John M. Levinson, a physician who had spent time in Vietnam studying medical care and health issues.
We arrived in Saigon on January 1--two days before Senator Eugene McCarthy stunned the Democratic Party by announcing he would enter the New Hampshire primary against Lyndon Johnson as a test of the Vietnam issue. Over the twelve dangerous and heartbreaking days we spent on the ground, I refused to settle for canned pronouncements and packaged tours. When a colonel greeted us with a schedule for a given day, I would demand double or triple the agenda. I made sure we kept on the move, and in one instance, at least, it was that constant motion that kept us alive. We'd been scheduled to have dinner one night in Can Tho at the residence of the heroic young pacifist David Gitelson of the International Volunteer Service, a sort of private version of the Peace Corps. Gitelson, who'd been an honor student at the University of California at Davis, was living like a peasant in Vietnam, teaching modern farming methods to people as he roamed the Delta region. He was just then involved in building a library at Ba The. As the hour approached, I suddenly decided we needed to be somewhere else, and canceled the dinner in favor of breakfast the next morning. A bomb, planted in a car outside the house, exploded at the dinner hour, blowing out the front of the building.
Gitelson survived. But a month later, he was shot to death by the Vietcong.
Memories from the trip: We raced at midnight across wild jungle roads in a car driven by John Paul Vann, the civilian adviser, in clandestine search of a notorious mental hospital where the inmates were forced to feed on garbage. We didn't find it.
A young air controller sobbed as he described his job to me, flying around in a small plane looking for figures in black pajamas so that he could report their positions to fighter pilots. He had no way of knowing whether the figures were Vietcong or peasants.
I found photographs of Jack on walls of tarpaper shacks in Saigon, and heard shouts of "Ken-uh-dee, Ken-uh-dee" in a refugee cemetery behind a church in the city.
I met with President Nguyen Van Thieu, as well as U.S. military commander General William C. Westmoreland and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker on the day before departure back home. Their stonewalling of questions and their boilerplate optimism made me wonder whether they were speaking about the same torn nightmare of a country as the one I'd just seen. In response to my queries about refugees, whose festering camps I'd seen myself, they declared that the refugees were being well cared for. To my report that I'd heard of American artillery fire being directed into an area that might have held civilians, Westmoreland assured me that no civilians could possibly be injured or die from indiscriminate U.S. fire. Why not? Because there was no indiscriminate fire. The handbooks forbade it.
I left Vietnam with one further thought in my mind: I could no longer support this atrocity of a war. I drank a great deal of liquor on the flight home.
My mood was not improved by a briefing with President Johnson at the White House on January 24, not long after I returned. As the president's white-haired dog Yuki romped on the lap of my aide Dave Burke, covering him with dog hair, I began to outline my observations: that corruption was rampant in the government of the Republic of Vietnam to the extent that it was inhibiting our goals, and that President Thieu of South Vietnam showed no inclination to combat this corruption. The result was that morale among civilian-program workers was suffering. The president broke in to remark that he was aware of the corruption, and yes, it certainly had to be corrected. He asked me for an evaluation of U.S. civilian personnel in Vietnam, and I told him that although some in the mission were long-serving, dedicated, and able, too many others saw their work as a form of adventure and escapism, a chance to break away from their wives and earn some easy money.
The president mulled this over and suggested that before I continued, Dave and I might like some tea, coffee, or a Fresca. We politely declined. The president persisted and asked Dave, "Aren't you going to have a Fresca with your president?" David said, of course, he would have a Fresca.
LBJ seemed preoccupied with our soft drink needs as that meeting went on, Burke's especially. Every time Dave found an opening to voice his opinions on Vietnam, Johnson would interrupt to ask whether he would like another Fresca. It finally became clear that the president was trying to keep Dave off balance--and off the topic of Vietnam.
The president gave me a little more leeway than Burke in speaking my opinions--but not much. After much fencing, I finally was able to turn the topic to how I would suggest reducing the war to more moderate levels, as was my stated wish. I urged him to change our strategy from "search and destroy" (essentially, going out gunning for the enemy) to one of "clear and hold" (securing territory). LBJ told an assistant to write out a memo along those lines. We all want to do the right thing, he observed.
Finally, Johnson asked me whether I'd seen any progress in the war since my trip in 1965. I formulated as tactful a reply as I was able: perhaps I had seen some, I told him, but I was not sure the measures of progress we were using were in fact related to the real war, the war we should be fighting for the Vietnamese people. Lyndon Johnson thought that over for a moment, and then became philosophical. It is difficult to evaluate the war, he said. You have some progress when you have half a million men and all that equipment, but where and how do you start evaluating true progress? Two times zero is zero, he noted, but two times one-half is one. And that is some progress.
Then the president leaned toward me. "I believe we are all trying to do the right thing," he said again, and added, "If we flop on this one, then Nixon will be in there, and we don't want that, do we, Ted?"
On that note, the meeting ended.
Two days later, in an address before the World Affairs Council in Boston, I abandoned all restraint. The Lowell Sunday Sun, among other papers, printed the text of my remarks, and added the comment, "This speech could mark the beginning of the end of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war."
I acknowledged the limited optimism I had felt after my 1965 visit, but told my audience, "I am forced to report to you, and to the people of the Commonwealth, that continued optimism cannot be justified... that the objectives we set forth to justify our initial involvement in that conflict, while still defensible, are now less clear and less attainable than they seemed in the past." I praised the bravery and professionalism of the young Americans who were fighting for us. Yet, "I found that the kind of war we are fighting in Vietnam will not gain our long-range objectives; that the pattern of destruction we are creating can only make a workable political future more difficult; and that the government we are supporting has given us no indication, and promises little, that it can win the lasting confidence of its own people."
This war was unlike the traditional wars the United States had fought, I said. "Our country was not attacked. Our cities were not threatened. We do not seek to overthrow an enemy government, capture ground, or achieve unconditional surrender. We seek only to allow the people a free choice. For these reasons the war is more nebulous, more vague in its ends, than the conflicts of our past... we must be careful in applying the traditional canons of patriotism, or the cliches of the past, in judging this war."
I pointed out, in reference to America's concern with the spread of communism, that political ideology meant little to the suffering peasants of Vietnam. Their concerns and hopes were not identical to ours. I brought up the question of refugees: "twenty-five percent of that nation's population, all of whom are disaffected, all of whom hold a strong resentment for whatever side tore them away from... their lives.... I found a great deal of resentment to the United States among these people."
I spoke of the corruption among Vietnamese officials, and gave examples: the siphoning off of money to aid the refugees, for one.
"I believe," I told my audience toward the end, "that if we cannot achieve negotiations in the very near future, we should begin immediately to moderate... our activities in South Vietnam to levels... more commensurate with our limited aims." Those aims, I suggested, should be defensive--protecting and holding heavily populated areas--and conditional on demanding and receiving more of a commitment from South Vietnam to defend and govern itself.
With this speech, I was now on record, along with Bobby, that time and events had outpaced our original mission in Vietnam, and that the war was a perversion of our original ideals.
On the issue of Vietnam, I was shoulder-to-shoulder with my brother. And yet as I watched his trajectory veer toward a bid for the 1968 presidential nomination, I continued to find myself unable to embrace it wholeheartedly.
Don't mistake me: I thought that Bobby should be president. And I thought that Bobby could be president. But I believed that 1972 would be a better year to run. If LBJ prevailed in the primaries but lost the election, Bobby would be blamed. But whether LBJ won or lost, I thought that Bobby would be the likely nominee in 1972. He would be the one to bring the party together.
Bobby was torn by his personal desire to stay out of the race and his growing opposition to the war. Ethel and my sister Jean urged him to commit. Bobby edged toward running, but remained wary. "What bothers me is that I'll be at the mercy of events," he remarked.
On January 31, less than two weeks after I returned from Vietnam, the Tet Offensive erupted. As Bobby breakfasted with members of the National Press Club in New York and told them he would not oppose Johnson "under any conceivable circumstances," more than eighty thousand North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops broke an announced religiousholiday cease-fire and rose up along a front throughout the South, attacking villages, towns, and cities. The communists eventually paid a terrible price in casualties for this surprise offensive, which had been conceived as an effort to stalemate the war. U.S. forces won the battle, but its initial severity outraged the American public. Coupled with an unrelated attack by North Korea on the U.S. intelligence ship Pueblo a week earlier, Tet spurred the Joint Chiefs of Staff to request more than two hundred thousand new troops.
Not "under any conceivable circumstances," Bobby had declared at the Press Club. I was glad that the alert Frank Mankiewicz, his press secretary, prevailed on him to change "conceivable" to "foreseeable" for release to the press. In 1968, scarcely anything was foreseeable.
Nor was Bobby as hardened against running as his declaration made him sound. On my return flight from Vietnam in mid-January, I had stopped over in Hawaii, intending to try and clear my mind in the sun there for two or three days. I was in my hotel room, getting undressed and ready to drop into bed and sleep off my fatigue, when the telephone rang. It was Bobby. "Come on back now," he told me. "We're going to meet out at McLean, either tomorrow or the next day." I climbed into my clothes again, checked out of the hotel, found a plane, and flew back. I felt that I knew exactly what I was going to find out upon my arrival: Robert F. Kennedy would join the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. I'd heard it in his voice on the phone.
But Bobby was still not ready to commit himself. Not publicly. The meeting at Hickory Hill in McLean turned out to be a discussion of options, strategies, weighing political pluses and minuses. I continued to oppose his entry, but save for Ted Sorensen, I had no allies.
On February 1, we knew who Bobby's Republican opponent would most likely be. Richard Nixon announced for the nomination. His only criticism of the Vietnam War was that it was not being waged efficiently enough.
On February 8, Bobby abandoned what was left of his own restraints and ambiguities regarding Vietnam. At a book and author luncheon at the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago, where he'd been invited to speak about his forthcoming book, To Seek a Newer World, Bobby unleashed a denunciation of the war, and ensured wide coverage of his remarks by instructing his aides to distribute copies of his talk to the national press corps in Washington. He excoriated all the war's facets, from muddled U.S. policies and prosecution to the corruption of the South Vietnamese regime--a regime that was an American ally "in name only." Declaring to the writers and editors that "it is time for the truth," my brother rebuked any official assurances of progress as "illusory." To the contrary, an American military victory was not in sight and probably would never come. I believe the Tet Offensive caused the last of his reservations to fall away.
The fissioning dynamics of 1968 now accelerated. On the same day as Bobby's speech, George Wallace of Alabama announced he would run for president as an independent, and a peaceful demonstration by black students at South Carolina State University--they wanted a bowling hall in the town of Orangeburg to be integrated--triggered gunfire by state troopers. Three students were killed and twenty-seven were wounded.
Bobby remained interested in my opinion on his candidacy. My brother and I had several direct soul-searching talks on the topic, starting with his phone call to Hawaii, summoning me to Hickory Hill. On or about February 13, Bobby asked me what I thought Jack would counsel him to do. I told him I wasn't sure about that, but I knew what our father would have said: Don't do it. As for Jack, he might have cautioned against it as well; but he probably would have made the run himself in similar circumstances.
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."
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.