Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (62 page)

The eloquent speech elicited a long, sustained wave of applause. But afterward, as Kennedy made his way toward the shopping mall exit, the crowd “suddenly became a live and dangerous thing,” in the words of a reporter who was there. Navigating his way through the surging mass of people, Kennedy had to reach down to rescue children who had been toppled to the ground. When he finally made it back to his open convertible and climbed on the trunk, he was almost yanked off the car. Kennedy bodyguard Bill Barry, a former college football star and FBI agent, fell to his knees and locked his strong arms around Bobby’s waist to keep him from being swallowed by the crowd.

Barry was the only protection Kennedy had that day, as he was during most of Bobby’s tumultuous campaign. “I loved him intensely as a human being, and for his qualities,” Barry later said. “I wanted him to be president of the United States for the sake of my children and generations to come. It was not just a professional job with me. It was something my life qualified me for. This would be my juggler’s gift.” The candidate had made it clear to his staff that there were to be no cordons of guards around him, no barriers between him and the crowds. Poor Barry was Kennedy’s only full-time security person. It was a terrible responsibility to put on one man. And it would haunt Barry for the rest of his life.

Kennedy’s closest political confidants told him that Bill Barry was not enough—he needed more protection. Ed Guthman, as usual, was one of them. Taking a break from the
Los Angeles Times
, he went out to Indiana to observe the primary campaign there for a couple of days. “I was amazed at what I saw, no security at all,” Guthman told me. “I called Bob up and he said, ‘Let’s go for a walk.’ Well, I knew what that meant. The next morning, we got up at 6 a.m. and went for a walk in some field behind the motel where they all were staying. And I told him, ‘I was watching last night, Bob—you didn’t have a lot of protection.’ And he said, ‘Aw, I don’t want a lot of cops around.’ I told him, ‘Look, let’s put aside the fact that you have a wife and ten kids, with an eleventh on the way—you’re very important to this country.’ But he wouldn’t do anything.”

In early April 1968, the Kennedy campaign headed for a series of major rallies in Indianapolis to build momentum for the important Indiana primary election. As a Kennedy advance man made preparations for Bobby’s upcoming appearances in the city, federal documents later revealed, he was being spied on by the FBI. On April 3, the FBI official in charge of the local office noted ominously in a memo that “the Kennedy rallies scheduled for April 4 in Indianapolis might be subject to some violence simply to embarrass Senator Kennedy.” The heavily blacked out document—which was obtained by scholar Joseph A. Palermo under the Freedom of Information Act—suggests that the Kennedy campaign was being targeted by the same well-documented FBI dirty tactics that were being used against Martin Luther King’s organization and other activist groups.

But it was a far greater calamity that disrupted Kennedy’s campaign plans in Indianapolis. As his plane landed in the city that evening, the candidate was informed that the Reverend King had died, after being shot through the jaw by a sniper while the civil rights leader was standing on a motel balcony in Memphis. King had gone to Memphis to lead a march of striking black garbage workers, part of his growing campaign to link the race problem with the issue of economic exploitation.

When Kennedy got the news, he was headed for one of the poorest black neighborhoods in Indianapolis, where he was to formally open the state’s Kennedy for President headquarters at an outdoor rally. The chief of police warned him not to go into the ghetto. Fiery riots sparked by King’s murder were already spreading across the country, including in the nation’s capital, where flames lit up the sky just blocks from the Capitol building. But Kennedy insisted on going ahead with his appearance. When he arrived at his destination, it was dark and cold. He made his way through the crowd and climbed onto a flatbed truck illuminated by floodlights that cast a flickering, funereal glow in the blustery wind. It was Kennedy who brought the people the terrible news that night—the crowd expelled a loud moan as if punched in the gut. And it was he who consoled them. He was the only white leader in America they would have allowed to do it.

There was no speech making that night—when an aide rushed up to him beforehand with a sheet of talking points, Kennedy crumpled the notes and stuffed them in his pocket. He talked to them from his heart, softly and slowly, like he was comforting them in their living room after giving them news of a loved one’s death. And they listened quietly in the evening gloom because, as he reminded them, he too had suffered the death of a loved one.

“For those of you who are black and tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.” It was the first time Kennedy had ever invoked the death of his brother in a public speech in the United States. And then he shared with the crowd how he had learned to bear what was unbearable. Quoting the Aeschylus passage he knew by heart, he reminded them what they already knew, that only time would turn their misery into something higher: “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.” Finally, he urged them not to lash back in anger, but to honor King’s message of peace. “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”

Unlike many other U.S. cities, Indianapolis was not set on fire that night. The crowd listened to him because they knew it was not just more words, that Bobby would continue King’s crusade.

But Kennedy himself knew how impossible his task was, how torn and bleeding the country was. One night after King’s death, Bobby dropped by the Los Angeles home of Pierre Salinger, high atop Coldwater Canyon. At one point during the evening, Salinger’s sixteen-year-old son Stephen found himself alone with Kennedy, and the teenager put one of his favorite songs on the living room stereo to play for Bobby. The song was Simon and Garfunkel’s “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night,” a bitter juxtaposition of jarring news headlines backed by the soothing strains of the Christmas carol. While a radio announcer briskly reports a grim barrage of news—Vietnam, civil rights battles, mass murders, celebrity drug overdoses—the duo sweetly sing that “all is calm, all is bright.” As the song played in the Salinger living room, Kennedy stared silently out the picture window at the twinkling lights in the San Fernando Valley below. “After it was over, Bobby turned around,” said the younger Salinger, recalling the moment many years later. “And his eyes were filled with tears. He didn’t say anything.”

“WE WANT TO KNOW
who killed President Kennedy!” a young woman in the crowd screamed. Other students picked up her cry, yelling, “Open the archives!” Bobby tried to ignore them at first, but finally he relented. “Your manners overwhelm me,” he quipped irritably. “Go ahead, ask your question.”

It was March 25, 1968, a blazing hot afternoon on the campus of San Fernando Valley State College in Northridge, California. Kennedy had just delivered a campaign speech to a tumultuous crowd of twelve thousand people, who jammed the campus and stood on rooftops to hear him. But afterwards, during the question period, he was finally confronted with the tormenting query that he knew would inevitably arise after he got into the race. If elected president, would he reopen the investigation into his brother’s murder?

For years he had routinely endorsed the Warren Report in public, while pursuing his own investigative path in private. But Kennedy hated the rampant lying in political life—seeing LBJ as one of the worst perpetrators—and the growing “credibility gap” between those in power and the public. By the 1968 race, he was clearly finding it more difficult to keep misleading the public about his true opinion of the Warren investigation. And yet he fully realized how explosive the reaction would be if the headlines suddenly blared, “Kennedy Rejects Warren Report.” Not only would it turn the assassination into the leading campaign issue—instead of Vietnam or the country’s growing social divisions—but it might put Kennedy in more danger on the campaign trail. The assassination question was a growing dilemma for Kennedy that promised to ensnarl his campaign more and more as the race progressed.

When he was suddenly confronted with this conundrum by the student hecklers on the San Fernando Valley State campus, Kennedy seemed ready for it, and his reply was subtly—and intriguingly—different from his standard response in the past. In effect, he split the difference, once again endorsing the Warren Report (although more haltingly this time), while at the same time leaving the door open for reopening the case. Rick Tuttle, a young campaign coordinator seated right behind the candidate that day, later recalled Kennedy’s manner as he responded to the emotionally and politically charged question: “I remember there was a slight trembling of the hands, which happened every so often when Kennedy spoke, there was a slight tensing. But I also remember saying to myself, ‘He was prepared for that question.’ I remember he handled it well. Don’t forget—at this point, we’re past the mourning period and he is running for president and he had entered that world. He was prepared to handle it. It was not one of those times when he stammered badly or fell apart or got mournful.”

This is precisely what Kennedy said that day, as recorded by a radio reporter for Los Angeles station KLAC: “You wanted to ask me something about the archives. I’m sure, as I’ve said before, the archives will be open.” The crowd responded to this by cheering and applauding. “Can I just say,” continued Kennedy, “and I have answered this question before, but there is no one who would be more interested in all of these matters as to who was responsible for uh…the uh, uh, the death of President Kennedy than I would. I have seen all of the matters in the archives. If I became president of the United States, I would not, I would not, reopen the, uh, Warren Commission Report. I think I, uh, stand by the Warren Commission Report. I’ve seen everything in the archives, the archives will be available at the appropriate time.” At this, the crowd again broke into loud cheers.

Kennedy’s statement was a careful tightrope walk. So cagily constructed was his reply that some assassination researchers later concluded it was simply another example of Kennedy’s perplexing refusal to push for a new investigation. But that’s not how Kennedy’s reply was heard that afternoon by the students. They were moved to cheer because Kennedy agreed that the government’s assassination archives should be opened—and opening the archives meant reopening the investigation. When they heard Kennedy pledge that the government’s investigative evidence “will be made available at the appropriate time,” to them this clearly meant when Bobby became president.

The students who cheered Kennedy were not the only ones who interpreted his answer this way. So did his press secretary Frank Mankiewicz, a man who closely monitored everything the candidate said in public and who had been asked by Kennedy to accumulate assassination information for a future investigation. In short, Mankiewicz was the ideal person to accurately read the nuances in Kennedy’s reply—and to realize the significance of what Kennedy was saying. There was no doubt in Mankiewicz’s mind: Kennedy was calling for his brother’s assassination to be reopened one day. “I remember that I was stunned by the answer,” recalled Mankiewicz. “It was either like he was suddenly blurting out the truth, or it was a way to shut down any further questioning. You know, ‘Yes, I will reopen the case. Now let’s move on.’”

The following month, Kennedy again spoke revealingly about his future investigation plans, this time with a small group of campaign aides in his room at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel. It was late in the evening on April 19, and Kennedy had just returned from a raucous appearance at the University of San Francisco, where a small group of antiwar radicals had charged at him, trying to hit him as he got out of his limousine. When he tried to deliver his speech, they shouted him down, screaming “Victory for the Viet Cong” and calling him a “fascist pig.” Decompressing in his hotel room later, Kennedy was in a particularly voluble mood, wanting to talk about the chaotic state of the nation and his plans to restore the country’s sanity if he reached the White House. Emboldened by Kennedy’s expansive mood, one of his aides mustered the courage to ask him about his brother’s assassination. Richard Lubic, a campaign media consultant who was in the room, later made notes on what Kennedy replied: “Subject to me getting elected, I would like to reopen the Warren Commission.”

BY THE TIME HIS
campaign reached the pivotal California primary, Bobby Kennedy was beginning to wrestle with a variety of formidable problems that he knew would confront him as president. One of them was the CIA. What was he going to do with it, he wondered out loud one day on the campaign plane with Pete Hamill, one of the journalists who grew so close to Kennedy that he briefly wrote speeches for him. “I have to decide whether to eliminate the operations arm of the agency or what the hell to do with it,” Kennedy told Hamill. “We can’t have these cowboys wandering around and shooting people and doing all these unauthorized things.”

Fred Dutton, the political veteran who served as Kennedy’s informal campaign manager, later confirmed that the candidate was starting to confront the CIA problem. Kennedy thought the agency “was out of control,” said Dutton. “The CIA would come up in discussions” during the race, said the Kennedy advisor—“just his disgruntlement over it.” But the agency’s abuses never became a campaign issue. “My reaction at the time was let’s win the campaign and we’ll worry about that problem later,” Dutton said.