The Passage of Power (119 page)

B
ACK IN
J
ANUARY
, when Lyndon Johnson had delivered his State of the Union address, the attorney general was sitting at the end of the row of Cabinet members. His presence at the speech, coupled with his return to his duties at the Justice Department, were celebrated the next morning on the front page of the
New York Times
under the headline
ROBERT KENNEDY
DEFEATS
DESPAIR.

For those who had been watching him during the speech, however, it was difficult to credit that assessment. He applauded occasionally, but for the most part sat with his arms folded across his chest, his face expressionless, inscrutable, somber, withdrawn, as if he was remote from the scene in which he was participating. And friends and aides knew that if in fact despair was a foe, his battle with it was far from over.

During the three days of memorial ceremonies, he had never been far from Jackie’s side, standing behind her, still as a statue, pale and grave but dry-eyed, resolute, seemingly calm; Chuck Spalding would have thought he was
“controlled
” had he not heard the question Robert Kennedy sobbed out when he thought no one could hear. In the weeks thereafter, however, his grief became so obvious that, his aide
Ed Guthman says,
“It
was painful to see him.” He lost so much weight that his collars gaped away from his neck, and his suits no longer fit. Some of the clothes that he insisted on wearing would have been too large for him anyway: an old tweed overcoat of his brother’s; the President’s bomber jacket with the presidential seal. As the weeks passed, he grew even thinner, the hollows in his cheeks and around his eyes deeper,
“as
if,” a friend says, “he was being devoured by grief.” For men who adored him, the fact that he so seldom spoke of what he was feeling was especially poignant.
“It
was, perhaps, that he held his grief inwardly so tightly that made it so hard for others to bear,” Guthman says.

Douglas Dillon offered him his house at Hobe Sound in Florida for Thanksgiving, and he went there with Ethel and a few aides.
“At
Hobe Sound, the attorney general was the most shattered man I had ever seen in my life,” Pierre
Salinger says. “Bobby had almost ceased to function. He walked alone for hours.”

Try though he did to resume work at Justice, he couldn’t concentrate on it.
“In
the middle of a meeting, his expression went blank and he would stare out a window, absorbed in his own thoughts … numbed by sorrow and depression.” Sometimes, jumping out of his chair, he would hurry out of the room, and people would see him walking, often coatless in the freezing December weather, up Constitution Avenue, hunched, slight, frail-looking, unseeing. Long after midnight, the Secret Service agents on guard at Hickory Hill would see a light in the master bedroom go on, and a few minutes later Bobby would drive off, not to return until dawn. Sometimes he would have telephoned
John Seigenthaler to tell him he would pick him up.
“He
was wearing that bomber jacket. ‘Let’s pay Johnny a visit.’ ”
Arlington Cemetery would be locked, but Bobby had found a way in. “We scale the wall.…” Robert Kennedy would kneel—“sometimes for hours”—beside John Kennedy’s grave. “He was just inconsolable,” Seigenthaler says. “He was in perpetual pain.… It was awful to watch.” Decades later, another aide,
William vanden Heuvel, would say,
“I
don’t think I ever saw human grief expressed as in the face of Robert Kennedy after the assassination.” As another account puts it,
“So
complete was his withdrawal, so scant his interest in his own future in public life, that for a time members of the family felt that the political succession of the Kennedys, by Robert Kennedy’s choice, might settle on his brother, Edward.” Over Christmas, he and Ethel took their children on a skiing vacation in Aspen, and when, at the beginning of January, 1964, he returned, tanned, to Washington, he seemed, to reporters who didn’t know him well, to have recovered himself. Returning to his office at Justice,
“smiling
,” “relaxed,” joking with the staff, he was, they wrote, “his old self,”
“as
energetic as ever.” Pledging loyalty to the new Administration, he said he would remain in office at least
“through
the election.… I’ll do whatever anybody—the President or the Democratic National Committee—feels will be helpful.” The pledge itself merited headlines:
ROBERT KENNEDY
STAYING
ON.

Seeing the desolation in his wasted face when the smile faded, those closer to him remained uncertain about despair’s defeat. To look into his eyes was to know
“the
suffering he had endured,” a friend says. Though he was back in the office, his administrative assistant, Seigenthaler, says that
“I
didn’t have the feeling that he really was part of the world in which he was working. I mean he was doing the job, answering the correspondence.… When I say he was not functional, I don’t mean that he was not able to do what he had to do or that he didn’t know what he was doing.… It was more that he did what he did through that sort of haze of pain that he felt.” Calling on him in his office in February, the columnist
Murray Kempton, an old friend, noticed that he hadn’t regained any weight, that his collar was still
“a
little too large … and his cuffs a little too close to his knuckles, not as though he had wasted but as though he had withdrawn.” The telephone rang, the caller happened to be a friend of Kempton’s, Bobby handed him the phone, and Kempton began to banter and laugh with the friend.
Then he glanced over at Robert Kennedy. “The Attorney General was sitting and looking at his hands,” and his face was “a face horribly lonely for a time when it had been part of a community with a place in it for careless laughter.” New lines had been carved into his forehead and around his mouth. There was, suddenly, gray in the mop of ginger hair. “How his face had aged in the years I had known him!” a friend thought.
“How
do I look?” he asked Seigenthaler. “You look like hell,” Seigenthaler replied. “I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep,” Bobby said. He still, that February, drove at night to his brother’s grave, still wore the talismanic bomber jacket or the tweed overcoat. On St. Patrick’s Day, almost four months after November 22, he would be talking to
Mary McGrory, whom, in the old days, he had once picked up and slung, the two of them laughing, over his shoulder. Trying to comfort him, she said, “You’re young and you’re going to be productive and successful.” Suddenly burying his head in her shoulder, he gave a cry of anguish and, she would recall, “burst into tears.” Time may have been blunting—slightly—the pain and desolation; it wasn’t curing it. Time would never cure it. Almost half a century later, when she was the only one of the nine Kennedy siblings still living, the author would ask
Jean Kennedy Smith about her brother Bobby and his depression over Jack’s death.
“When
did he come out of that?” she repeated, and then said, “I don’t think he ever came out of that.”

S
OME EXPLANATIONS FOR GRIEF
of such vivid intensity were obvious. The brother who had died was not just a brother, but a brother with whom Robert Kennedy had been so close that they finished each other’s sentences, or communicated without any words at all, in a “perfect,” “almost telepathic” understanding. Strong-willed though Robert Kennedy was, he had at an early age subordinated his own aims and ambitions to his brother’s, had subordinated them, submerged them, completely, investing himself totally in John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s destiny.
“Now
he is alone,” Kempton wrote. Bobby explained to a reporter “that he had to find a goal for the first time in his life because, for as long as he could remember, he had no goal that was not his brother’s.” Says a friend:
“It
was almost as if a part of
him
had died.” Nor, on a less subjective level, was it merely a brother he had lost. In an instant, in the crack of a gunshot, he had lost power, too.
“What
is different now and what makes me sad is that I see a problem or someone tells me about a problem and I can’t do anything about it,” he told Kempton.
“There
was this time when if people had something and couldn’t see my brother, they could always see me and I could pick up the phone and call him.… It’s strange to think that you can’t just pick up the phone.”

Obvious as were these explanations, however, as weeks turned into months without the wound showing any signs of healing, friends began to wonder if there were less obvious ones as well. Seigenthaler was to say that he
“sensed
in the months after JFK’s assassination that Robert Kennedy seemed haunted, as if he was holding something back.”

To those searching for other explanations, there may—or may not—have
been clues. Though Robert Kennedy’s grief was “understandable,” his biographer
Evan Thomas would write, “yet it seemed too overwhelming, so all-consuming.” McCone of the
CIA, a close friend, remembered that, when he arrived at Hickory Hill not long after the terrible news, Bobby had asked him whether his agency was connected with the assassination; Bobby was later to say that he had asked McCone, a fellow Catholic,
“in
a way that he couldn’t lie to me,” and that McCone’s answer had satisfied him that the CIA had not been involved. In 1975, when, during a congressional investigation, the CIA’s assassination plots against
Fidel Castro were revealed, McCone, suddenly recalling that question, had
“a
flash of recognition.”
“He
had felt at the time that there was something troubling Kennedy that he was not disclosing,” Thomas says.
Operation Mongoose was still active on November 22; there had been eight separate CIA-sponsored assassination attempts on Castro’s life since the beginning of 1961. Whether or not Robert Kennedy had been personally involved, did Castro feel he had been—that the Kennedys had been? Did the assassination in Dallas have anything to do with the attempts in Havana? During that 1975 investigation, as he learned more about anti-Castro intrigues, McCone, as Thomas writes,
“began
to suspect that Kennedy felt personally guilty” for what had happened in Dallas. Friends remembered remarks Kennedy had made not about
Cuba but about the target of his other unrelenting campaign. On December 5, Arthur Schlesinger asked Robert “perhaps tactlessly, about Oswald. He said that there could be no serious doubt that he was guilty.” But, he added, there was doubt—“argument” was the word he used—about something else: “whether he did it by himself or as part of a larger plot, whether organized by Castro or by gangsters.”
Ben Bradlee remembered President Kennedy, “obviously serious,” telling him once that the Justice Department had discovered that an underworld enforcer had been given a gun fitted with a silencer and sent to Washington to assassinate the attorney general. When, later, the publicity-hunting New Orleans District Attorney
Jim Garrison claimed to have discovered that the Dallas shootings—the two shootings—were part of an elaborate conspiracy, Kennedy asked his press secretary,
Frank Mankiewicz, if he thought Garrison “had anything.” “No, but I think there is something,” Mankiewicz replied.
“So
do I,” Bobby said.

Although he may, as Thomas says, have been
“worried
that his own aggressive pursuit of evil men had brought evil upon his own house,” Robert Kennedy never went beyond such cryptic remarks, never told the Warren Commission of his suspicions about mobsters or Cuban exiles, never, in public, cast doubt on the single-gunman theory, never tried to have a more thorough investigation undertaken.
“He
never quieted his own doubts,” Thomas writes. Though his
“restless
mind continued to torment him, he [was unwilling] to go where the facts might lead.” He never pursued the question of who, or why. He
“never
really wanted any investigation,” Katzenbach says. He just wanted to close the book. He
“wondered
,” Schlesinger recorded in his journal after a talk with Robert Kennedy in 1966, “how long he could continue to avoid comment on the [Warren Commission]
report. It is evident that he believes that it was a poor job and will not endorse it, but that he is unwilling to criticize it and thereby reopen the whole tragic business.”

Such “clues” may, however, be clues to nothing at all.
“I
cannot say what his essential feeling was,” Schlesinger finally had to confess—and neither, perhaps, can anyone else. No one knows whether there are explanations for Robert Kennedy’s grief beyond the obvious ones. Half a century after John F. Kennedy’s death there is still speculation among his brother’s intimates about whether he was aware of any hard fact that might indicate that his crusades against the Cuban dictator or the underworld (or the Teamsters’ boss) had backfired against his brother, about whether his grief was intensified by a sense of responsibility, even of guilt, about his brother’s death. The fact that this speculation has never stopped is testimony not to any hard fact about his grief but rather to its unusual depth and duration, and to its effect on the man so many of them worshiped. For those who knew Robert Francis Kennedy well, the men and women who spent a lot of time with him, do not feel that he ever again became “his old self.” Interview these men and women over and over, and one hears, over and over, the same phrase:
“He
changed.”