Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (61 page)

No amateur when it came to playing Washington hardball, Kennedy immediately moved to shut down the story. He requested a copy of the FBI memo on the 1962 Justice Department meeting when he was first informed by the CIA about the Mafia plots, to prove his reaction had been withering. And then he phoned Helms to ask him to lunch. There is no record of what the two men discussed at this March 4 meeting. But it can be safely assumed that it was not simply a pleasant discussion of old times. The two men had a barely restrained loathing for one another, and a tense understanding of some sort was certainly hammered out. What is known is that on May 10, when Helms presented the CIA’s internal report on the Castro murder plots to Johnson in the White House, it did not pin the blame on Robert Kennedy.

LBJ knew that Bobby Kennedy was a formidable political adversary. Over the years, Kennedy had amassed a vast amount of information about Johnson’s corrupt dealings. RFK was no doubt prepared to use this poison arsenal should their political battle ever escalate. This is what made Robert Kennedy such a rare and potent force in American politics—he was a man who could call on the higher instincts of our nature and he also knew how to fight with his bare knuckles.

This time, Kennedy and Johnson fought each other to a standstill. Two weeks after the Anderson column ran, Bobby delivered a curiously effusive speech about LBJ at a Democratic Party fund-raiser in New York, calling him “an outstanding president.” And Johnson never again used the Cuba bombshell against Kennedy.

But as the months went by, it became clear that Kennedy and Johnson were headed for a final political showdown. As Bobby edged closer to challenging Johnson for the presidency, he understood that he must be prepared for one of the most brutal campaigns in American history.

It was an excruciating decision. Most of the old guard from the Kennedy administration—including Sorensen, Schlesinger, and Dutton—warned him not to enter the 1968 campaign, fearing he would tear apart the Democratic Party and ruin his long-term chances for the White House. The Washington press corps was hostile, interpreting his growing opposition to the war as a personal vendetta against Johnson. By running, Kennedy would not only be breaking sharply from tradition by challenging a sitting president in his own political party. He would finally and irrevocably be turning his back on his brother’s administration, since the key policymakers behind the war were holdovers from the Kennedy years—McNamara, Bundy, Rusk, Rostow. But entering the race was also the only way to redeem his brother’s legacy, by showing the country—and the world—that Johnson’s disastrous Cold War policies were a violation of his brother’s ideals.

Bobby was trapped in the swirling political passions around the war, torn at from both sides. His young aides and antiwar leaders beseeched him to take on Johnson, telling him the fate of the nation was in his hands. But still he hesitated. He knew that if he ran, he risked everything.

Through all his agonizing over Johnson and the war, there was one high administration official to whom Kennedy remained close—Bob McNamara. It was a relationship that utterly baffled the young firebrands on his staff like Walinsky, who was filled with contempt for the leading intellectual architect of the war, a man the young Kennedy aide felt had sacrificed his conscience in the name of bureaucratic loyalty. As the war steadily escalated and Johnson kept promising there was a light at the end of the tunnel, McNamara grew quietly disenchanted. But he kept sending more troops and expanding the bombing campaign.

Even in McNamara’s final hours in office—as LBJ prepared to shuffle the increasingly tormented defense chief out of the Pentagon to the World Bank—Kennedy held out the hope that he would reject Johnson’s consolation prize and finally break with the president in public over the war. Kennedy knew it would make a major impact on the political establishment if Robert McNamara joined him in opposing the war. Kennedy met with McNamara after his departure from the administration was announced, and Edelman thought his boss even urged the once mighty defense czar to run with him on an antiwar presidential ticket.

But instead, McNamara—ever the company man—went along with what Johnson asked of him, exchanging one powerful Washington post for another. At his farewell press conference, choking back tears, he came to Johnson’s defense. “Many in this room believe Lyndon Johnson is crude, mean, vindictive, scheming, untruthful. Perhaps at times he has shown each of these characteristics. But he is much, much more.”

Walinksy was disgusted. “I mean, the country’s falling apart over a war that he’s pretty much started and has been running all this time—and then all of a sudden, he just walks away from it, without saying another word. Excuse me?” In response, Walinsky wrote a scathing analysis of the Johnson-McNamara relationship, which he suggested had perverse master-slave tones. Titled “Caesar’s Meat,” the essay was avidly circulated within the Kennedy circle, where Ethel was among those who praised its insights. McNamara had a choice, wrote Walinsky. “In a dozen ways, he could have preserved his dignity and his freedom; not just the freedom to speak out on the war, now or later, not just the freedom to join Robert Kennedy if that would be his choice: but his freedom as a man, freedom from manipulation, freedom from the domination of a meaner and pettier man. Instead he chose submission.”

By crushing McNamara’s spirit, Walinsky continued, LBJ was sending a message to Kennedy: “You think to challenge me. Then watch carefully what I am about to do. I will take this man—with all he means, all he is, all his power and ability and character—I will take this man and break him into nothing. I will reach in and tear out his spine, and he will say ‘thank you, sir.’”

Kennedy himself would not hear any criticism of McNamara. When a young speechwriter named Phil Mandelkorn who had just joined the senator’s staff dashed off a memo to Kennedy counseling him to distance himself from McNamara “because history was going to show he is to blame for killing an awful lot of people,” he was promptly told that Kennedy and McNamara were friends and that the senator did not need his unsolicited advice. The staffer who conveyed this message to Mandelkorn—Walinsky—had certainly been told the same thing.

To Bobby, McNamara still carried the aura of those years with Jack. For him, the defense secretary would always be the imposing intellect who stood up to the generals, the man who took the Kennedy brothers’ side during the Cuban Missile Crisis and helped keep a world that was spinning towards oblivion in the safe grasp of their humane logic. After Jack was gone, Bobby wrote McNamara a letter: “Dear Bob, I just want you to know that I don’t want to be in Washington when you are no longer Secretary of Defense or something even higher than that. You are the one that makes the difference for all of us.” Though he knew how poisoned the Johnson-Kennedy relationship was, McNamara continued to socialize with Bobby and his family and shared with him his growing doubts about Vietnam.

But now Bobby was on his own. The former defense chief would not risk his prestige by joining Kennedy’s insurgent campaign. Nonetheless, McNamara would make a lesser gesture on Kennedy’s behalf. Late in Bobby’s campaign, shortly before it came to its violent end, McNamara agreed to appear in a TV endorsement for Kennedy. In the spot, the former defense secretary offered praise for RFK’s cool-headed performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis. “I wasn’t stupid,” McNamara told me, recalling his decision to help Kennedy. “I knew that it would be taken as a political violation of my position at the World Bank. And in fact I later got all kinds of hell at the bank for doing it—there were calls for my resignation and so on. But I went ahead and did it. And thank God I did. It was filmed in early May 1968. And of course he was killed shortly after that. I would have felt awful if I hadn’t done it.”

HE STOOD IN THE
ornate, chandeliered caucus room of the Old Senate Office Building on Saturday morning, March 16, 1968—the same room where his brother had announced his quest for the American presidency eight years before. “I do not lightly dismiss the dangers and difficulties of challenging an incumbent president,” declared Robert Kennedy, flanked by the familiar faces of past campaigns. “But these are not ordinary times and this is not an ordinary election. At stake is not simply the leadership of our party and even our country. It is our right to moral leadership of this planet.”

And so began one of the most terrible and most beautiful journeys in American political history—the passion of Robert Kennedy. He saw his race for the presidency in missionary terms; he thought America’s salvation hung in the balance. But there was almost a weary resignation in his decision to finally join the epic battle.

It was the Tet offensive at the end of January 1968 and Senator Eugene McCarthy’s near upset of President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary on March 12 that finally forced Kennedy into the race. The sweeping Viet Cong assault on American strongholds, timed for the country’s lunar new year, dramatically exposed the Johnson administration’s empty promises of imminent victory. And McCarthy’s surprisingly strong showing in the first Democratic primary exposed the president’s political weakness. With the Johnson White House unalterably wedded to its disastrous course in Vietnam, and another Democratic dissident threatening to steal his antiwar base, Kennedy could no longer sit on the sidelines.

There was no euphoria around RFK’s announcement. He was entering the race late, and by the time he got in, McCarthy had already captured much of the rebellious energy in the party with his youth-driven “children’s crusade” against Johnson. The McCarthy camp bitterly resented the sudden intrusion of their more glamorous rival. The pro-Johnson Democratic Party establishment was also unnerved and enraged by Kennedy’s entry. And the political pundits were deeply skeptical of his motives. As he announced his daunting bid for the highest office, Robert Kennedy seemed more isolated than ever. Even some key Kennedy loyalists, like Dick Goodwin, were missing, after joining the McCarthy campaign in frustration while Bobby had dithered.

And then there was the awful air of danger that hung over his announcement. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential bid was not only politically risky, it was physically perilous. Kennedy knew how many lethal enemies he had, he knew that the men who had plotted his brother’s murder were still at large. He was surprised, after Dallas, by the fact they hadn’t killed him instead of Jack. Since then, he had been the target of numerous death threats.

A few days after RFK’s announcement, Jackie Kennedy took Arthur Schlesinger aside at a party in New York. “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby? The same thing that happened to Jack.” In fact, she pointed out, Bobby aroused more hatred among his enemies than Jack did. “I’ve told Bobby this,” she said, but he had brushed aside her fears.

After watching Kennedy’s announcement speech on a hotel room TV in Portland, Oregon, where he was campaigning for the Republican nomination, Richard Nixon turned off the set and then stared at the blank screen for a long time. Finally he spoke, shaking his head. “We’ve just seen some very terrible forces unleashed,” Nixon told the four or five aides in the room. “Something bad is going to come of this.” He gestured toward the screen. “God knows where this is going to lead.”

At a meeting of FBI officials that was held as Kennedy’s campaign got off the ground, Clyde Tolson—Hoover’s longtime intimate and assistant—shocked the group by spitting out his hatred for Bobby. “I hope that someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch.”

Kennedy sensed the danger, but he plunged forward with his campaign, unshielded from the crowds’ manic energy and whatever else was coiled and ready to greet him. “Living every day is like Russian roulette,” he told Newfield. He had taken to heart an Emerson maxim, copying it down in his notebook and underlining it: “Do what you are afraid to do.”

Though the political establishment was deeply wary of Kennedy, the crowds that poured into the streets and packed auditoriums to see him as he took his campaign through the Midwest, and out to the West Coast that spring, were frantic in their need to touch him. It was more like religious ecstasy than political celebration. They clawed at him, they tore at his hair and clothes, they even pulled his shoes from his feet. After years of death, of riots and war, they wanted to hope again.

JFK, with his body always tightened against pain, had flinched from the physical hurly burly of campaigning. He did not like to be grabbed and embraced. But Bobby exulted in it. His pain was of a different sort. And it found release in the crush of the crowd. He wore the scratch marks, the split lips, the shredded shirtsleeves like a holy scourge. As he waded into the screaming, shoving melees that inevitably greeted him—into this wounded heart of American democracy—Kennedy sometimes had a stricken look on his face. But he never held himself back from the crowds. He knew that this torrent of popular energy swirling around him was the only force that could overcome the political machinery stacked against him.

His aides were sick with fear about the physical risks he was taking. One day in suburban Sacramento, Kennedy climbed on a ladder inside a shopping mall to address a sprawling, boisterous crowd. His speeches were never stemwinders in the old Boston fashion; they were more halting and reflective. But he knew how to touch emotional chords with his audiences, and that day he touched the hearts of the rambunctious crowd by evoking the personal tragedies of the war. “Which of these brave young men dying in the rice paddies of Vietnam might have written a symphony,” he said in a quiet voice. “Which of them might have written a beautiful poem or might have cured cancer? Which of them might have played in the World Series or given us the gift of laughter from a stage, or helped build a bridge or a university? Which of them might have taught a small child to read? It is our responsibility to let those men live.”