CHAPTER 8
I have left Act I for involution
and Act II. There mired in complexity
I cannot write Act III
—EUGENE MCCARTHY, “Lament of an Aging Politician,” 1968
1968 WAS ONE OF THOSE rare times in America when poetry seemed to matter. Telephone service in New York City in 1968 offered a “dial-a-poem.” A government pilot program that year sent poets around the country to public high schools to give readings and discussions. The response was wildly enthusiastic. In Detroit, poet Donald Hall was trapped in a hallway at Amelia Earhart Junior High School by excited students shouting, “Say us a poem!” Obligingly he shouted one, but then the crowd had doubled with new arrivals and he had to read it again.
Robert Lowell, born to a patrician Boston family in 1917, the year of John Kennedy’s birth, seemed a poet for the sixties. Like the Mobe’s David Dellinger, who was from a similar background, Lowell was a pacifist who had served a prison term rather than fight in World War II. In the sixties, he was a frequent fixture at antiwar rallies. By 1968 he was the most visible American poet, because he campaigned with Eugene McCarthy.
Allen Ginsberg, born in 1926, was closer in age to Lowell than he was to the students of 1968. But Ginsberg, even in his forties, balding and a bit paunchy, with his thick beard and wreath of wild dark hair, had both the personal spirit and literary style that characterized the sixties. He was really a fifties figure, a central figure of the beat generation. But by 1968 many of the beats had faded. Jack Kerouac was dissipated from alcohol and did not approve of the antiwar movement. He accused his old friend Ginsberg of being unpatriotic. Neal Cassady died in Mexico in early 1968 while undertaking a fifteen-mile hike following a railroad line. He said he would pass the time counting railroad ties. But along the way he managed to get himself invited to a wedding party, where he spent hours drinking and taking Seconal. He was found the next day along the railroad tracks where he had spent the rainy night. Suffering from overexposure, he soon died, exiting in that free and offbeat style that had made his group famous. According to legend, his last words were, “Sixty-four thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight.”
Despite losing many friends to alcohol and drugs, Ginsberg was a passionate believer in certain drugs, especially marijuana, psilocybin, and LSD. In fact, although he was a determined adversary of the Vietnam War and the American military and industrial war machine, there were three other topics that he seemed to bring up on most occasions. One was fair treatment for homosexuals. Always extremely candid in his poetry, some said graphic, about his own sexual preference, he was a gay rights activist before the term was invented. And he always championed his theories on the beneficial uses of narcotics as well as the unfair persecution of users. He was also a persistent believer in the value of Buddhist chants. By 1968, when Eastern religion had become a trend, it was easy to forget that Ginsberg had been very serious about his Buddhism for a number of years. Hinduism was also in vogue, especially having a guru, a new enough word in 1968 for the press to usually offer the pronunciation (goo-roo).
Mahesh Yogi, who gave himself the title Maharishi—“great sage”—had found a formula for instant meditation, which he promised would deliver samadhi, a holy state of expanded consciousness, without going to all the trouble of fasting and endless prayer. He converted Europeans by the thousands to “Transcendental Meditation” before arriving in the United States in 1968, bringing with him a fad for Indian clothes and Indian music. Many celebrities, including the Beatles and the Beach Boys, followed the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. But when the Beatles went to India to spend three months studying under the Maharishi, Ringo Starr, always said to be the least reflective of the quartet, returned with his wife, Maureen, to his suburban London mansion after ten days, unhappy with the great sage’s accommodations. “Maureen and I are a bit funny about our food, and we don’t like spicy things,” Ringo explained.
The Maharishi was of limited appeal to poet and seasoned chanter Ginsberg because he opposed LSD and urged young people to accept the draft. Ginsberg continued to chant, oppose the war, and champion the rights of homosexuals and the use of hallucinogenic drugs.
By the 1960s Ginsberg had become one of the most venerated living poets and was invited to speak around the world, though in many of these countries, including the United States, the Soviet Union, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, and Italy, he found himself in legal difficulties for the things he said.
Known for his kindness, he is still remembered in his East Village, New York, neighborhood as a soft-spoken gentleman. His free-form passionate verse was from its first publication both controversial and widely recognized as brilliant. He sometimes gave readings with his father, Louis, who was also a poet. Louis, a New Jersey schoolteacher, could not resist the more than occasional pun in his comments and wrote well-constructed, lyric poetry, often in rhymed couplets. The relationship was one of love and mutual respect, though Louis thought his son should be a little less free-form. He also thought his son should not use scatological words that embarrassed people and wished he would be a little less forthcoming about his homosexuality. But that was the way Allen was. He talked publicly about whom he loved, whom he lusted after, and how. Once he went too far and referred to an extramarital dalliance of his father’s, and Louis got him to remove the lines. Their readings together, in the age of “the generation gap,” were considered a great show—Louis in his tweeds and Allen in his beads.
In 1966 they had appeared together in the Ginsberg hometown of Paterson, New Jersey. Louis read to his many local fans, and the more famous son read political poems but also his poem about Paterson. They talked about how father and son had visited Passaic Falls the day before, Louis calling it an intimate moment shared. Then Allen, who always volunteered the unrequested detail, said that while at the falls he had smoked marijuana, which had added greatly to the experience. The next day Paterson mayor Frank X. Graves, contending that he had received numerous calls about the drug confession, got a bench warrant for the younger Ginsberg’s arrest, whereupon the police found and detained a man with a beard and glasses, mistaking him for the wanted poet, who was by then safely back in the East Village.
By 1968, when they appeared together at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a bearded, pot-smoking hippie was more commonplace, though it was still curious to see the two together. Louis began by punning and Allen began by chanting a mantra that The New York Times reviewer said was longer than any of his poems. They ended the evening with a family squabble about LeRoi Jones’s recent illegal firearms possession conviction. To the son it was clear the black playwright had been framed—to the father it wasn’t. The audience was also divided, and each Ginsberg had his cheerers.
LeRoi Jones was also one of the popular poets of the 1968 generation. His most famous line was fast becoming “Up against the wall motherfucker this is a stick-up.” A 1967 East Village “affinity group” named themselves “the Motherfuckers” after the Jones poem. An affinity group used intense intellectual debates as an underpinning for carrying out the kind of media-grabbing street theater that Abbie Hoffman could do so well. During the New York City garbage strike, the Motherfuckers hauled garbage by subway from the redolent mountains of it left on the sidewalks to the newly opened Lincoln Center.
The bestselling poet of 1968 was Rod McKuen, who penned rhythmic little bon mots that he read in a raspy voice suggestive either of emotion or bronchitis. A Hollywood songwriter, clean-shaven with V-neck sweaters, McKuen was a long way from the beats. But by early 1968 he had already sold 250,000 volumes of his unabashedly sentimental verse. His two books, Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows and Listen to the Warm, were selling more than any book on The New York Times fiction bestseller list, although they were not listed, because poetry was not included on bestseller lists. With characteristic self-effacing candor, he said in a 1968 interview, “I’m not a poet; I’m a stringer of words.” When he came down with hepatitis, fans by the hundreds sent him stuffed animals. To many, he and his fans seemed unbearable.
If a songwriter is a poet, stronger candidates were available in 1968 than McKuen. Bob Dylan had made his position clear by choosing the stage name Dylan. There was a distant relation between his richly worded lyricism and that of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. The Doors named their group from a line of William Blake’s poetry: “the doors of perception.” In Life magazine, Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors, was called “a very good actor and a very good poet,” in fact “an amplified poet in black leather pants.” It did not matter that the words at times would not have conveyed the point without the embellishment of Morrison’s shrill screams. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, whose ballads featured lyrics full of metaphor and imagery, were to many fans poets. But the songwriter of the pair, Paul Simon, dismissed the idea. “I’ve tried poetry, but it has nothing to do with my songs. . . . But the lyrics of pop songs are so banal that if you show a spark of intelligence, they call you a poet. And if you say you’re not a poet, then people think you’re putting yourself down. But the people who call you a poet are people who never read poetry. Like poetry was something defined by Bob Dylan. They never read, say, Wallace Stevens. That’s poetry.”
On the other hand, few doubted that Ginsberg was a poet and no one that Ezra Pound was one, the octogenarian artifact of the birth of twentieth-century poetry, now sitting out his days in Italy. Despite Pound’s fascism and anti-Semitism, he and his politically conservative protégé T. S. Eliot remained on the cultural list of the 1968 generation. Even without studying poetry, the lineage was clear. If there had been no Pound, there would have been no Eliot and there would have been no Dylan Thomas, no Lawrence Ferlinghetti, no Allen Ginsberg. Or they would have written very differently.
Ginsberg acknowledged his debt to Pound, so the Jewish poet or, as he liked to say, Jewish Buddhist poet wanted to visit Pound. When he did in 1967 in Venice, he did not recite his own poetry. Instead, after dinner he rolled marijuana in cigarette paper and, without comment, smoked it. Then he played records for the elderly poet—the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and “Eleanor Rigby,” Bob Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” and “Gates of Eden,” and Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman.” Pound smiled as he listened, seemed particularly to enjoy certain lines, tapped his ivory-handled cane to the music, but never said a word. Ginsberg was later assured by the elderly poet’s longtime partner, Olga Rudge, that if he had not appreciated the offering, he would have walked out of the room.
Just who was and wasn’t a poet was becoming an issue.
Politics had much to do with tastes in poetry. Russian poets, especially if they were politically outspoken, were garnering huge followings among college students in the West. Yevgeny Yevtushenko was having a big year in 1968, both in political controversy at home and in artistic recognition abroad. Born in 1933, he belonged to a new school of Russian lyric poetry. Critics frequently suggested that others from the new school, such as Boris Pasternak’s protégé Andrey Voznesensky, also born in 1933, were better poets. But in the 1960s Yevtushenko was the most famous working Russian poet in the world. In 1962 he published four poems highly critical of the Soviet Union, including “Babi Yar,” about a massacre of Jews unsuccessfully covered up by the Soviets.
In 1965, when Ginsberg was in Russia, in between being thrown out of Cuba and being thrown out of Czechoslovakia, he met with his famous Russian colleague. Yevtushenko told Ginsberg that he had heard many scandalous things about him but did not believe them. Ginsberg assured him that they were probably true. He explained that since he was a homosexual and that was the reality he lived in, the scandals came from his willingness to speak openly about his experiences.
The Russian grew visibly uncomfortable as he said, “I know nothing of such matters.” Ginsberg quickly changed the subject to another favorite, drug use. Yevtushenko said, “These two subjects—homosexuality and narcotics—are not known to me, and I feel they are juvenile preoccupations. They have no importance here in Russia to us.”
In 1962, when British composer Benjamin Britten wrote War Requiem, he was not thinking about Vietnam. He was commemorating the reopening of Coventry Cathedral, bombed during World War II. The text came from Wilfred Owen’s poems about World War I. But by 1968 War Requiemwas considered to be “antiwar,” and anything that was antiwar had a following. Wilfred Owen’s nearly forgotten poems were being read again, not only because they expressed a hatred of war, but because of his sad life story. Owen had been a company commander in World War I who discovered his poetic talent while venting about his war experiences. He almost went on to a brilliant literary career, but a week before the war ended he was killed in combat at the age of twenty-five and most of his work was published posthumously. In 1968 not only was the poetry of Owen becoming popular again, but also that of Rupert Brooke, another young poet who died in World War I. The poet-victim of war seemed to be an irresistible setting for literature in 1968. Even Guillaume Apollinaire, the French writer who died the day before World War I ended from a shrapnel wound to the head months earlier, was attaining cult status in 1968. Better known in the art world as the critic who promoted Picasso, Braque, Derain, his own mistress, Marie Laurencin, and many others—the inventor of the word surreal—he was also a poet. In 1968, when a new English translation of The Poet Assassinated was published, Richard Freedman, reviewing it for Life, said, “A half-century after his death Apollinaire is more than ever a big man on campus.”
It seemed the literary capital of writers who had opposed wars, any wars, was on the rise. Hermann Hesse, the German pacifist who moved to Switzerland to evade military service in World War I, was enjoying a popularity among youth greater than he had known during most of his life. Although he died in 1962, his novels, with an almost Marcusian sense of the alienating quality of modern society and a fascination with Asian mysticism, were perfectly suited to the youth of the late sixties. He might have been amazed to discover that in October 1967 a hard-driving electric rock band would name itself after his novel Steppenwolf. According to the twenty-four-year-old Canadian lead singer, guitar and harmonica player, John Kay, the group, best known in 1968 for “Born to Be Wild,” had a philosophy similar to that of the hero of the Hesse novel. “He rejects middle-class standards,” Kay explained, “and yet he wants to find happiness within or alongside them. So do we.”
In 1968, it seemed everyone aspired to be a poet. Eugene McCarthy, senator and presidential candidate, published his first two poems in the April 12 issue of Life magazine. He said that he had started writing poetry about a year before. Since no one in the working press believes that a politician does anything just by chance in an election year, Life magazine columnist Shana Alexander pointed out, “Lately McCarthy has discovered, with some surprise, that people who like his politics also tend to like poetry. Crowds surge forward eagerly when they learn Robert Lowell is traveling with the candidate.”
This turn toward verse showed in McCarthy an understanding of his supporters that was surprising in a candidate who was seldom caught doing anything to curry favor. Most of the time, conventional political professionals and the journalists who covered them did not understand him at all. McCarthy would skip speeches and events without warning. When television host David Frost asked him what he wanted his obituary to say, McCarthy answered without the least suggestion of irony, “He died, I suppose.” His tremendous popularity on college campuses and among the youth who did not like conventional politics initially arose because, until Kennedy entered the race, he was the only candidate committed to an immediate end to the Vietnam War. Early in his campaign, the antiwar leftists such as Allard Lowenstein, who had constructed his candidacy, were so frustrated by the senator’s ambiguous style and lack of passion that they started to fear they had picked the wrong man. Some thought they should appeal to Bobby Kennedy, Lowenstein’s first choice, one last time. But McCarthy’s style appealed to young people who disliked leaders and appreciated a candidate who didn’t act like one. They talked about him as though he were a poet who later became a senator, although the less romantic truth that he was able to reinvent himself as a poet in midcampaign may be a more impressive stunt.
It was Life’s Shana Alexander who had labeled him a “conundrum,” explaining, “One’s first response to him is surprise. Admiration, if it comes, comes later.” Perhaps part of his appeal to college students was that he looked and sounded more like a professor than a candidate. Asked about the riots in the black Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, he mystified everyone by comparing them to a peasant uprising in 1381.
“McCarthy for President” campaign poster, 1968
(Chicago Historical Society)
Norman Mailer, in describing the candidate’s faults at the campaign’s final hours in Chicago, may have hit on exactly the source of his appeal to young antiwar activists of 1968:
He spoke in his cool, offhand style, now famous for its lack of emphasis, lack of power, lack of dramatic concentration, as if the first desire of all men must not be the Presidency, but the necessity to avoid any forcing of one’s own person (as if the first desire of the Devil might be to make you the instrument of your own will). He had insisted after all these months of campaigning that he must remain himself, and never rise to meet the occasion, never put force into his presentation because external events seemed to demand that a show of force of oratorical power would here be most useful. No, McCarthy was proceeding on the logic of the saint, which is not to say that he necessarily saw himself as one (although there must have been moments!) but that his psychology was kin: God would judge the importance of the event, not man, and God would give the tongue to speak, if tongue was the organ to be manifested.
Given how unusual a year this was, it may have made sense for McCarthy to publish his poetry in midcampaign, but the contents of the poem seem ill chosen. Why would someone running for the office of president of the United States volunteer that he felt mired in Act II and could not write Act III? Asked to explain his poem, why he could not write the third act, he said, “I don’t really want to write it,” which for many supporters, reporters, and political professionals confirmed the suspicion that he did not really want to be president. But the senator mused on, “You know the old rules: Act I states the problem, Act II deals with the complications, and Act III resolves them. I am an Act II man. That’s where I live. Involution and complexity.”
McCarthy mused further about everyone from Napoleon to FDR and finally came to his rival Robert Kennedy. “Bobby is an Act I man. He says here’s a problem. Here’s another problem. Here’s another one. He never really deals with Act II, but I think maybe he’s beginning to write Act III. Bobby’s tragedy is that to beat me, he’s going to have to destroy his brother. Today I occupy most of Jack’s positions on the board. That’s kind of Greek, isn’t it?”
Whatever similarities existed between Gene McCarthy and the late John Kennedy, they were seen by few other than the Minnesota senator himself. On the other hand, Bobby Kennedy, many hoped, might be like his brother. But others appreciated that he was not in any way like his older brother Jack except for the Cape Cod Yankee accent and a trace of family resemblance around the eyes. Robert was born in 1925, eight years after Jack. He was not entirely a part of the World War II generation because he had been too young to serve, though his adolescence was steeped in the thinking and experiences of that time, including having his brother, ten years older, killed in combat. By 1950 he was already twenty-five, too old to experience childhood or adolescence in the 1950s. So he was born on a cusp, not quite one generation or the other, tied to the older generation by his family. In the 1950s he participated in the cold war, even serving as a lawyer for the infamous anticommunist senator Joseph McCarthy. The relationship did not last long, and Kennedy would later describe it as a mistake. He said that though misguided, he had been genuinely concerned about communist infiltration. But perhaps a better explanation lay in the fact that his father had gotten him the job.
Robert Kennedy struggled to live up to his father and his big brothers. Having missed World War II, he always admired warriors, men at war. In 1960 at a Georgetown party he was asked what he would like to be if he could do it all over again, and he said, “A paratrooper.” He lacked his big brothers’ ease and charm. But he was the one who understood how to use television for the charming president, arranging for John Kennedy to be the first television president by hiring the first media adviser ever employed by a White House. John, understanding little of television, was a natural because he was easy, relaxed, and witty, and he smiled handsomely. Little brother Bobby, who understood television perfectly well, was terrible at it, looking awkward and intense because he was awkward and intense. John used to laugh at Bobby’s serious nature, calling him “Black Robert.” Seeing how it turned out, it is now easy to think that, with his sober intensity, he always looked like a man slated for a cruel destiny. “Doom was woven in your nerves,” Robert Lowell wrote of him.
He was slight, lacking the robust appearance of his brothers, and unlike his brothers, he was genuinely religious, a devout Roman Catholic, and a faithful and devoted husband. He loved children. Where other politicians would smile with babies or strike an instructive pose with children, Bobby always looked as though he wanted to run off and play with them. Children could sense this and were happy and uninhibited around him.
How did this man who worshiped warfare, wished he had been a paratrooper, was a cold warrior, even authorizing wiretaps on Martin Luther King because he feared he had communist ties—how did he become a hero of the sixties generation and the New Left? There was a moment when Tom Hayden had considered calling off the plans for Chicago demonstrations if Bobby was to be nominated.
In 1968 Robert Kennedy was forty-two years old and seemed much younger. Eight years earlier, when Tom Hayden had walked up to him at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles and brashly introduced himself, the chief impression Hayden walked away with was that he seemed so young. Perhaps that was why the boyhood nickname Bobby always stuck. There was Bobby, at the end of a tough day of campaigning, looking as if he were twelve years old as he settled into his evening ritual of a big bowl of ice cream.
Kennedy was obsessed with self-improvement and probably at the same time with finding himself. He carried books with him to study. For a time it was Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way, which led him to read the Greeks, especially Aeschylus. For a while he carried around Emerson. And Camus had his turn. His press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, complained that he had little time for local politicians but hours to chat with literary figures such as Robert Lowell, whom he knew well.
Although busy with his campaign, he was eager to meet poet Allen Ginsberg. He listened respectfully as the shaggy poet explained his beliefs about drug enforcement being persecution. The poet asked the senator if he had ever smoked marijuana, and he said that he had not. They talked politics about possible alliances between flower power and Black Power—between hippies and black militants. As the lean senator was walking the stocky, bearded poet to the door of his Senate office, Ginsberg took out a harmonium and chanted a mantra for several minutes. Kennedy waited until Ginsberg fell silent. Then he said, “Now what’s supposed to happen?”
Ginsberg explained that he had just finished a chant to Vishnu, the god of preservation in the Hindu religion, and had thus been offering a chant for the preservation of the planet.
“You ought to sing it to the guy up the street,” said Kennedy, pointing toward the White House.
While he had little chemistry with Martin Luther King and the two always seemed to struggle to speak to each other, he struck up an immediate and natural friendship with the California farmworker leader César Chávez. With the slogan “Viva la Huelga!”—“Long Live the Strike!”—Chávez had launched successful national campaigns for what he called la Causa, boycotting California grapes and other products to force better conditions for farmworkers. Most self-respecting college students in 1968 would not touch a grape for fear it was a brand being boycotted by Chávez. He had organized seventeen thousand farmworkers and forced their pay to be raised $1.10 an hour to a minimum $1.75. Chávez was a hero of the younger generation, and Kennedy and Chávez, the wealthy patrician and the immigrant spokesman, seemed oddly natural together even if Bobby was famous for ending a rally with “Viva la Huelga! Viva la Causa!” and then, his Spanish seemingly failing to match his enthusiasm, “Viva all of you.”
Bobby even developed a rapport and sense of humor with the press. His standard campaign speech ended with a quote from George Bernard Shaw, and after a time he noticed the press took this as their cue to go to the press bus. One day he ended a speech, “As George Bernard Shaw once said—Run for the bus.”
He had clearly evolved in profound ways since the death of his brother. He seemed to have discovered his own worth, found the things he cared about rather than the family’s issues, and was willing to champion them even if it meant going against his old allies from those heady and revered days of his still-mourned brother’s administration. To turn against the war had been a deep personal struggle. He had named one of his sons, born in 1965, after General Maxwell Taylor and another in 1967 after Averell Harriman and Douglas Dillon—three of the key figures in pursuing the war.
Even if he was not a great speaker, he said extraordinary things. Unlike politicians today, he told people not what they wanted to hear, but what he thought they should hear. He always emphasized personal responsibility in much the same terms, with a similar religious fervor, as did Martin Luther King, Jr. Championing the right causes was an obligation. While adopting a strong antiwar position, he criticized student draft dodgers, going onto campuses where he was met by cheering crowds and lecturing them on passing on their responsibilities to less privileged people by refusing the draft. But he also said that those who did not agree with what their government was doing in Vietnam were obligated to speak out because in a democracy the war was being carried on “in your name.”
McCarthy did some of this as well, telling his young supporters that they had to work hard and look better for the campaign. Supporters cut their hair, lowered hemlines, and shaved their faces to get “clean for Gene.”
But Kennedy went to extraordinary lengths to define what was wrong and what needed to be done. He attacked the national obsession with economic growth, a statement Hayden cited for its similarity to the Port Huron Statement:
We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones Average, nor national achievement by the Gross National Product. For the Gross National Product includes air pollution, and ambulances to clear our highways from carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. The Gross National Product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads. . . . It includes . . . the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children.
And if the Gross National Product includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials . . . the Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America—except whether we are proud to be Americans.
“Robert Kennedy for President” campaign poster, 1968
(John F. Kennedy Library and Museum)
Could a man who said such revolutionary things actually get to the White House? Yes, it was possible, because this, after all, was a Kennedy. Most McCarthy supporters, at their most optimistic, thought the campaign might stop the war but quietly believed their man was unelectable. But Robert Kennedy had a real chance of becoming president, and though historians since have debated on what kind of president he might have been, he was a man the younger generation could relate to and even believe in, a hero even in a year poisoned by King’s murder.
Kennedy had endless energy for campaigning, and he might catch up to and pass McCarthy, he might even beat Hubert Humphrey, the vice president who would certainly pick up Johnson’s mantle and step into the race. Even with that Nixon nightmare—another contest with a Kennedy—pollsters said Bobby could win. If he could catch up to McCarthy in the spring, he might be unstoppable. But then what weighed on Kennedy and most of his supporters and detractors was the thought that he might be unstoppable—unless someone stopped him with a bullet.