Prologue
Robert Kennedy liked to plunge into cold water. He swam in the surf off Cape Cod in February and in white water in upstate New York in May. Sailing off the coast of Maine on rainy, foggy days, he would egg on family and friends to follow him into the fifty-degree ocean. George Plimpton, the writer and amateur sportsman, once watched as Kennedy jumped into cold rapids on a rafting trip in the Grand Canyon. Taking an icy dip before lunch was a WASP ritual that Plimpton understood and appreciated: you would let out a gleeful whoop and then down a martini. But Kennedy, Plimpton observed, was grimly silent.
On this particular day, in late June 1967, the river guides tried to stop Kennedy. The white water was too rough, they warned; a swimmer might hit a rock and drown. But Kennedy, strapping on a life jacket, went anyway. Plimpton recalled anxiously watching Kennedy, "just his head in a great wash of water." Plimpton, who -- as a stunt -- had once climbed into the ring against a champion professional boxer, was afraid to join him. So was Jim Whittaker, the first American to conquer Mount Everest. Kennedy had brought along Plimpton and Whittaker as fellow adventurers, but they had less to prove.
Kennedy camping trips were rollicking and fun, with famous athletes and celebrities along for entertainment -- humorist Art Buchwald cracked jokes, and crooner Andy Williams led the campfire sing-along -- but the fainthearted rarely came back a second time. Kennedy's custom was to arise from his tent in the morning, scan the surrounding mountain peaks, and announce his intention to climb the highest one. On the morning of July 1, Kennedy set forth on a seven-mile climb out of the Grand Canyon. The temperature at noon was 110 degrees. Some of the entourage begged off and flew out with the younger children by helicopter instead. The march was so demanding that one of the professional guides dropped out. At one point, Whittaker, who by then was half carrying a couple of young Kennedys, asked if the group should turn back. Kennedy answered by reciting a few lines of the St. Crispin's Day speech from Shakespeare's Henry V. "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers," Kennedy orated. "For he today that sheds blood with me shall be my brother...." "Say the whole thing," urged his wife, Ethel. Kennedy did once, and then a second time when the group was again flagging. Plimpton was reeling like a drunk by the time they neared the end. Andy Williams, unable to go on, had to be carried on a donkey. Considerate in his way, Kennedy stopped the donkey near the summit to let Williams walk the last few hundred yards, and thus not lose face.
Kennedy believed that one should mock fear, not show it. He adopted the studied casualness, the effortless grace of a New England prep school boy of the 1930s and 1940s, but beneath the offhand manner was ferocious determination. The speech from Henry V was delivered half -- but only half -- in jest. As attorney general and right-hand man to the president, Kennedy made light of dire predicaments, often using a gallows twist, and he expected his subordinates to join in the joking. In September 1962, several of his top aides, sent by the Department of Justice to gain the admission of a black student to the University of Mississippi, were besieged by angry men, armed with shotguns and squirrel rifles, who had poured into the college town of Oxford from the outlying hills and dirt-poor farms. The mob began by throwing rocks and bottles; soon, shots rang out. From a pay phone in the university administration building, where the feds were surrounded, Ed Guthman, a trusted aide, called the attorney general, who was back at his office in Washington. "It's getting like the Alamo," said Guthman. Kennedy dryly replied, "Well, you know what happened to those guys." Less than a month later, CIA spy planes discovered Soviet ICBMs tipped with nuclear warheads in Cuba. It was the moment of maximum danger for America and the world, the most perilous showdown of the Cold War. At a very tense briefing at the White House, CIA photo interpreters described the deadly missiles and their range. Robert Kennedy mordantly piped up, "Can they hit Oxford, Mississippi?"
The black Irish humor, like the prep school cool, was for show, to keep up a brave front. In truth, Kennedy revered courage in a romantic, sentimental way that his friends found touching and revealing. In his daybook, where he dutifully recorded inspirational sayings, Kennedy quoted Winston Churchill's epigram that courage is "the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others." In his well-thumbed copy of Emerson's Essays, he underlined "It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'Always do what you are afraid to do.'"
Kennedy made a cult of courage. He collected brave men. General Maxwell Taylor, who had commanded a division of paratroopers on D-Day, was a frequent tennis partner and visitor to the Kennedy house, Hickory Hill. Mountain climber Whittaker and astronaut John Glenn often came, along with various professional athletes and Olympians. Kennedy would quiz them about their experiences. The questions were precise and practical, but aimed at eliciting deeper truths about the nature of valor.
Courage was a moral test that his enemies always failed. Lyndon Johnson was a "coward," Nelson Rockefeller had "no guts," Chester Bowles was a "weeper." To RFK, there could be no greater reward than a Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery under fire. In 1963, President Kennedy hosted a reception at the White House for all of America's surviving Medal of Honor winners. Over 250 heroes from America's wars gathered in the Rose Garden, chatting and joking with President Kennedy. JFK, a war hero himself who handed out tie clips fashioned in the shape of his old PT boat, basked easily in the reflected glory. RFK, on the other hand, stood off at the edge of the crowd, watching silently. His eyes, observed White House aide Kenneth O'Donnell, were "full of fascination." The younger Kennedy, who kept a copy of General Douglas MacArthur's World War I Medal of Honor citation in his desk drawer, often spoke reverently of his own brothers' bravery.
Robert Kennedy missed combat in World War II. In 1946, he served as a seaman, second class, aboard a destroyer named after his brother, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., a naval aviator who had perished after volunteering for a virtual suicide mission. Perhaps in part because he had never seen the real thing, Kennedy glorified war. He felt diminished that he had never been tested in battle. At a Georgetown dinner party in about 1960, when the guests played a parlor game, if you could do it all over, what would you be? Kennedy answered, "A paratrooper." He was thrilled when the president's military adviser, General Taylor, told him that he would have made it in his old unit, the 101st Airborne.
Left behind, unable to catch up to his war-hero brothers, he reconciled himself to a supporting role. He extolled their exploits, advanced the family cause, and carefully polished the Kennedy myth. The Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House was Robert Kennedy's idea. It was in keeping with the role he had created for himself, as the stage manager who worked behind the scenes, who sublimated his own ambitions to the larger cause of his family's success.
Kennedy, for much of his young life, was an acolyte. As a youth, he had been proud to be trained as an altar boy. He liked to be part of the ceremony, to help reenact a great drama, to serve the priest. Attending Catholic Mass as a grown man, he sometimes stepped over the rail to help out if he saw that an altar boy was missing and the priest needed a hand. He served his father, Joe, and his brother John in the same faithful, unembarrassed way, attending to them, celebrating them, helping them produce the grand drama of their lives. He outgrew his altar boy role; to his foes he sometimes looked more like Cardinal Richelieu, lurking behind the throne. He was without question a forceful executor of his brother's will. Yet he did not often or easily imagine himself succeeding his brother as president.
Then, with brutal suddenness, Robert Kennedy stood alone. JFK was dead. Their father, crippled by a stroke, could only utter the word "no." Robert Kennedy had no one left to serve and protect. He had to remake himself, to find a new role. He escaped into brooding for a long time, then slowly rejoined the world. Events pulled at him, forced him to weigh his capacity to lead -- and his courage. Anguished, uncertain, he hesitated, pulled back -- then lunged forward. His entry into the 1968 presidential race -- criticized as belated and opportunistic at the time -- required an act of tremendous personal will. Kennedy was able to transform himself from follower and behind-the-scenes operator to popular leader in part by conveying, in an urgent, raw way, his identification with the underdog.
This is the story of an unpromising boy who died as he was becoming a great man. There was very little about young Robert F. Kennedy that foretold a grand or tragic destiny. Overshadowed by his more glamorous and accomplished siblings as a little boy, he was small, clumsy, and fearful. His father slighted him, while hovering about the older children, particularly Joe Jr. and John. Desperate to win his father's attention and respect, Kennedy became a hard man for a long while, covering over his sensitivity and capacity for empathy with a carapace of arrogance. But never entirely: his humility was always a saving grace. He might have made an unusual and gifted national leader, one who was able to both feel for and challenge his people.
He lives on in our imagination of what might have been. Robert Kennedy is one of history's great what-ifs. He was a Zelig of power -- at the vortex, it seemed, of every crisis of the 1960s, a decade that sometimes felt like one long crisis. He was centrally engaged in most of the great epics of the postwar era -- McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, the superpower confrontation, Vietnam. He was an essential player in the most severe test of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis. He had vast influence when JFK was in the White House. His brother gave him virtually unlimited discretion -- and he exceeded it. Sure of his standing with the president, he scorned yes-men and surrounded himself with confident achievers. He did overreach at times, and he could be a bully. Yet in tight spots, under pressure, he often demonstrated that rare and ineffable quality, good judgment. He was at once honorable and cunning. At certain critical moments in his brother's presidency -- and the nation's history -- he both connived and stood fast to advance the causes of peace and justice. Nonetheless, he never had the chance to develop and carry out his own vision.
He seemed so young when he died. He was young -- only forty-two, a year younger than JFK had been upon his election as the second-youngest president in the nation's history. But Robert Kennedy somehow seemed younger, more boyish. With his buck teeth and floppy hair and shy gawkiness, he sometimes came across like an awkward teenager. At other times, he was almost childlike in his wonder and curiosity. RFK was regarded by many as "ruthless," and though the adjective stung, it often fit. Yet with children, his own as well as anyone else's, he was tender. When he spoke to them, he didn't feign affection. Children could feel his identification; they would follow after him, wrapping their arms around his leg and climbing into his lap.
"He had a child heart," said his friend, filmmaker George Stevens. "A gentleness and playfulness and a trace of innocence." Robert Coles, the child psychiatrist who became a friend of RFK's through their shared interest in poor children, observed that even as boys, the older Kennedy siblings were expected to behave like men. RFK, on the other hand, was allowed to be a child, and in some ways never grew up. As an adult, Kennedy retained childlike mannerisms. Put off by someone or something, he would stick out his tongue or make a face. Sitting on a podium listening to a speaker he did not like, he would squirm and look petulant or bored. He was "a little boy in his enthusiasms," said Coles, capable of showing childish delight over something so simple as licking an ice cream cone. Kennedy once engaged Coles in an animated conversation debating the relative virtues of different flavors of ice cream -- vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate (RFK's personal favorite). On the campaign trail, Kennedy liked to end the day by eating a big bowl of ice cream (while at the same time sipping a Heineken beer). Kennedy was not unself-aware. Once, as a crowd pressed in on Kennedy, someone cried, "There's a little boy there! Watch out!" The person was referring to a small child who had become caught in the crush, but Kennedy felt the identification instantly. Without missing a beat, he remarked, "Yes, he's a U.S. senator."
And yet, at other times -- for days at a time -- he seemed prematurely aged, possessed by morbidity. "Doom was woven in your nerves," Robert Lowell wrote in a poem about him. He seemed especially haunted after JFK was assassinated in 1963. Kennedy had never been very forthcoming about his feelings, but now, with his brother killed, he seemed to be holding back, almost as if he were hiding something. He would withdraw, staring out into space, or lose himself in reading. He seemed to be searching, groping for an answer. Mary Bailey Gimbel, a friend since school days, recalled him lugging around a heavy tome of Western literature "like a football." The only writing he liked in it, he told her, was a story about a French poet named Gérard de Nerval who walked with a lobster on a leash. In the story, a friend asked the poet why. The poet replied, "He doesn't bark, and he knows the secrets of the deep."
Kennedy had his own secrets. He was known for his candor -- indeed, for his bluntness. But at the same time he carefully compartmentalized information. His closest aides understood that he rarely, if ever, told everything to any one person. He had learned, partly from his father, to use private back channels to accomplish difficult or sensitive tasks. He routinely circumvented the bureaucracy in his relentless pursuit of the Mafia and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, not trusting even the CIA to keep his secrets. For public consumption, Kennedy accepted the finding that JFK was not the victim of a conspiracy, but rather had been killed by a deranged lone gunman. Privately, RFK could never quiet his fear that his own enemies had struck back by killing his brother.
On the night JFK died, a friend heard RFK, alone in a White House bedroom, cry out, "Why, God?" His Catholic faith in a good God was shaken. In visible pain -- "like a man on the rack," said one friend -- he cast about for a way to make sense of the despair he felt. At the suggestion of his brother's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, he began reading the plays and writings of the ancient Greeks. In the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, Kennedy discovered fate and hubris. He began to wonder if the Kennedy family had somehow overreached, dared too greatly. In his copy of Edith Hamilton's The Greek Way, he had underlined Herodotus: "All arrogance will reap a harvest rich in tears. God calls men to a heavy reckoning for overweening pride." Comparing oneself to an actor in a Greek tragedy may seem pretentious, and inconsistent with RFK's customary self-deprecation, but Robert Kennedy had an epic sense of his own family. The Kennedys were the House of Atreus, noble and doomed, and RFK began to see himself as Agamemnon. RFK also saw himself as Shakespeare's Henry V. When Robert Lowell derided the comparison as trite, Kennedy argued with the poet, pulling down a volume of Shakespeare's Histories and reading from Henry IV's deathbed scene. ("For what in me was purchased,/Falls upon thee in a more fairer sort....") "Henry the Fourth," said Kennedy, without apparent irony, "that's my father."
Fate was to be accepted -- but not passively, resignedly. The former C-student regarded as a black-and-white dogmatist by his foes began carrying Albert Camus in his pocket. He became an existentialist, without at the same time abandoning his faith in God. He refused to accept the bleakness of a godless world, though he was troubled that God could allow a Hitler or the suffering of small children. He had been a romantic Catholic who believed that it was possible to create the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. He lost the certainty of his faith but never the hope. He believed that one had to keep trying. His philosophy, which he urged on others and truly tried to live by himself, was: we may all be doomed, but each man must define himself anew each day by his own actions. Action relieved Kennedy from dwelling on his fate, while leading him to it.
The year 1968 was one that cried out for action. It was a time that, in retrospect, seems overripe and overwrought, but to ordinary Americans watching the disturbing images on TV -- young people burning the flag, soldiers burning villages, blacks burning their own neighborhoods -- the feeling was ominous, pre-revolutionary. In Vietnam, the generals had stopped giving speeches about the light at the end of the tunnel. Now, as the Viet Cong's surprise Tet offensive exploded in February, Walter Cronkite was joining the longhairs looking for a way out. In Detroit and Newark in "the long hot summer" of 1967, snipers had opened up on firemen, and President Johnson had sent in paratroopers and tanks. In the summer of 1968, many whites feared angry blacks would try to burn the cities down. The national crisis called for a leader who was unafraid, who could bring together angry blacks and students and the blue collar workers who feared and loathed them. At once a radical and a moderate pragmatist, Robert Kennedy cast himself as the only one who could reach across the divide.
Yet he balked. He thought and talked incessantly about running for president, but he could not bring himself to declare. He liked to say that his brother's favorite quote was from Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of moral crisis preserve their neutrality. But through the winter of 1967-68 he equivocated. He did not want to destroy the Democratic Party, said his protectors. He did not want to start a civil war with President Johnson that would ruin his own political future and in the end elect Richard Nixon and prolong the war. Beware of hubris. Do not invite a second tragedy. He was, for all his activism, a prudent man, and he had no time for lost causes.
Or possibly, he was afraid. Kennedy would have made a courageous small-unit commander in combat, the kind who slept with the troops and led the charge. But as a politician, he could appear shy and small and slouched; his hands trembled; he recoiled from the backslapping and insincerity of electioneering. Curiously, for someone whose family helped invent mass media politics, he was terrible on TV. He was too intense, not facile, and the camera caught the haunted look. More profoundly, he had not been raised to be a leader in the grand or visionary sense. If he overreached for power, would he tempt his brother's fate? Kennedy was fatalistic in the extreme. If the police passed on a threat, and his aides tried to hustle him out the back, he would insist on leaving by the front door. Yet he could not entirely hide his fear. His administrative aide in the Senate, Joe Dolan, would not tell Kennedy about most threats, but if there was a really serious one, Dolan would try to be nearby to warn and protect. "I was always the angel of death," Dolan recalled. "I wouldn't show up at his events unless there was a real threat." Kennedy understood this and was not at all glad to run into his loyal aide unexpectedly. Once, as he was leaving a polling place in Manhattan, he stumbled across Dolan standing in line outside. Kennedy visibly flinched at his angel's shadow.
As he dithered in the winter of '67-'68, the crowds and the pundits taunted him. He saw a protester waving a sign, "Kennedy: Hawk, Dove -- or Chicken." He hated it. He kept a letter in his wallet from a journalist friend reminding him of the photos of John F. Kennedy that hung on the walls of poor people around the world. "This is your obligation," the letter implored. His wife, Ethel, urged him to run, despite the obvious dangers. As fierce in her own way as her husband, she understood that he had to run. Ethel preferred to look at the world in black and white, the good guys (her husband, always) versus the bad guys (her husband's foes). A determined optimist, she would not permit herself to contemplate gloomy outcomes. RFK, by contrast, was a brooder who could easily imagine the worst. But he knew that his wife was right -- that if he did not run, he would never be able to live with himself. And so, on March 16, 1968, he declared his candidacy.
Viewed three decades later, the films and photographs of Robert Kennedy's eighty-one-day campaign seem feverish, almost hysterical. Not just the jumpers and screamers waving signs that said "Bobby Is Sexy," "Bobby Is Groovy," "I Love You Bobby," but the farmers and workers and housewives who closed in on him, clutching at him, pulling him from his car, and (twice) stealing the shoes off his feet. They came out, at first, to cheer the myth of Camelot restored. They saw instead a raw, sometimes reticent young man struggling to be honest with them and with himself. His speeches were effective not so much for their words, which, when scripted, were usually bland, or their delivery, which was often flat or awkward, but for something more ineffable: the body language, the aura, the emanations of compassion and understanding that Kennedy conveyed. Inarticulate but urgent and sincere, Kennedy could reach poor and dispossessed people who themselves had difficulty articulating their needs and anxieties. People loved him even though he challenged, even baited them, to overcome their fears and narrow self-interest. He would embarrass middle-class college students -- whose support he desperately wanted -- by belittling their draft deferments, pointing out that the casualties in Vietnam were disproportionately suffered by minorities and the poor. When a medical student asked him who would pay for better care for the poor, he answered bluntly: "You will." Measured by the poll-driven caution of the stereotypical politician, Kennedy's willingness to speak hard truths seems almost quaint. But it worked to inspire many voters, particularly those most alienated from conventional politics.
The intensity was so great, the yearning and devotion so palpable, that the inevitability of Kennedy's victory in 1968 has become an enduring political myth. In fact, as his campaign entered the final day before the California primary that June, his advisers were very worried. "We were losing altitude, though the Kennedys today don't like to admit it," recalled Fred Dutton, Kennedy's top aide on the campaign plane. Defeated by Eugene McCarthy in Oregon, way behind Vice President Hubert Humphrey in the delegate count, Kennedy himself understood that if he failed to win California, he was out of the race.
Kennedy's solution, as always, was to try harder. On the Monday before the Tuesday vote, he intended to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco, back to Watts and Long Beach, on to San Diego, and back to L.A. -- 1,200 miles in thirteen hours. His aides wanted to hit the three major TV markets in a single news cycle. Kennedy, whose father took home movies as footage for the family myth and whose brother spent hours choosing which photographs to release to the press, understood the practical necessities. But at times he drifted along in a dreamy reverie. From time to time he would think of the Ulysses of his favorite poem by Tennyson, which he often quoted in his slightly self-dramatizing way -- wishing "to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars, until I die."
Generations of office seekers have tried to model themselves on Robert F. Kennedy, as politicians able to exude sensitivity, moral force, and a touch of glamour -- while doing whatever it took to win. Beyond warmed-over rhetoric, haircuts, and hand gestures, none have succeeded. Kennedy was one of a kind. He was consumed by an inner flame. On this last day, he seemed on the verge of burning out.
As the motorcade crept through San Francisco's Chinatown that Monday morning, there was a series of loud pops. In any Kennedy motorcade post-November 1963, a sound that seemed to echo gunfire was an instant source of panic. Ethel Kennedy "dove for the bottom of the car," recalled Bill Eppridge, a Life magazine photographer in the car just ahead of the Kennedys. Robert Kennedy, standing on the rear hood of a convertible, remained upright and continued to wave to the surging crowd. But Karl Fleming, a Newsweek correspondent who was running alongside the motorcade, saw Kennedy's knees buckle. The campaign entourage and traveling press were all "scared to death," remembered Eppridge. "Everyone remembered Dallas." The explosions were only firecrackers. Seeing that Ethel was badly shaken, Kennedy asked a newspaper reporter, Richard Harwood of the Washington Post, to comfort her. Harwood climbed into the car and held her hand.
After Chinatown and another rally at Fisherman's Wharf, Kennedy flew to Los Angeles. Burgeoning, fast-forward California was in many ways the perfect test for Kennedy. It was a vast mixing bowl in danger of becoming a cauldron. The first of the urban race riots of the 1960s had erupted in Watts in 1965. The white middle classes in their bungalows and tract houses, the voters who had elected Ronald Reagan governor, feared that the fire next time would be in their backyards. To some, Kennedy was a peacemaker, but to others he was merely an instigator. He needed to challenge and soothe all at once, a tricky task for someone who still had to steel himself to appear in large public forums. In Long Beach, Kennedy was engulfed by six thousand people. As usual, the crowd was enormous and edgy. An agitated man kept calling out, "How 'bout your brother? Who killed your brother?" Kennedy stumbled; his delivery was flat, his attempts at humor forced. "He seemed spaced-out, like he had gone off someplace," observed Newsweek's Karl Fleming, who was watching from the crowd. Back in the car, Fred Dutton, who understood Kennedy's low tolerance for insincere flattery, told the candidate that his speech had not gone well. "I don't feel good," said Kennedy. Dutton was taken aback. Kennedy subsisted on four hours a night of sleep, almost never got sick, and never complained if he did.
The motorcade headed down an avenue in the black inner-city neighborhood of Watts, where the stores were still burnt out from the rioting three years before. The Los Angeles Police Department was nowhere to be seen. The mayor of Los Angeles, Sam Yorty, regarded RFK as a subversive. In downtown L.A. a few days earlier, a policeman had improbably given the Kennedy motorcade a ticket for running a red light. Security, such as it was, was provided by a militant group called Sons of Watts. Ethel, sitting in Kennedy's car, did not seem reassured. Her customary sunniness had, for the moment, clouded over. "I looked into her face," said Marie Ridder, a friend and journalist who was working as a reporter for campaign chronicler Theodore H. White. "It was a mask of such concern and fear -- fear is not the right word -- it was tenderer than that. It was: what's going to happen?"
Dutton was eager to get out of the ghetto. "We knew that coming to Watts would look bad on TV that night. California is full of Okies and Iowans. TV is a cool medium and we were too hot, too emotional." Dutton and other top advisers had been trying to tone down the campaign. "Bob understood this, rationally, when he was sitting in a hotel room," said Dutton. "But out there...." Dutton paused as he recollected; he seemed suddenly weary, as if he had gone back thirty years in time and was trying, futilely, to reason with a force of nature. Shy and uncertain, Kennedy fed off the crowds.
Fortunately, the candidate was, as usual, running behind schedule; Dutton was able to steer the motorcade into a quiet residential neighborhood to make up time -- and escape the mob. As the press bus raced down a deserted street, assistant press secretary Richard Drayne asked aloud, "What is this? Are we going house hunting?"
In San Diego, night was falling. In the semi-darkness, black children squealed "Bobby! Bobby!" as the motorcade pushed through Logan Heights, a poor district on the edge of downtown. Kennedy's driver was Stuart Bloch, a young onetime volunteer. Bloch had simply been given a credit card in the name of Joseph P. Kennedy ("that's how we charge everything," an aide had explained) and been told to rent a white convertible. Greeting Kennedy at the airport, Bloch was surprised by his weak handshake. "It was like a noodle. He seemed shy, mousy. He kept looking at the ground." In the car, Ethel scolded Bloch to watch out for the children. Kennedy seemed to revive, rejuvenated by the squealing kids, whose natural energy seemed so out of place in the dusty, exhausted streets. Kennedy's bodyguard, Roosevelt Grier, an all-pro tackle for the Los Angeles Rams, held Kennedy by the waist as the candidate leaned out, his arms stretched wide so he looked like a human cross, swinging from side to side. The children squealed and waved and smiled, their teeth flashing white in the gloaming. After a while Kennedy, spent, fell into the front seat with Ethel, who anxiously stroked her husband's forehead, feeling for fever.
The motorcade arrived at Kennedy's last rally of the campaign three hours late. About three thousand people had crammed into a ballroom at the El Cortez Hotel. A few minutes into his speech, Kennedy nearly collapsed. He abruptly sat down on the stage and put his head in his hands. Grier hustled him into a bathroom, where he threw up. He lay on the floor while Grier knelt and mopped his head. He rose and walked back into the ballroom and finished his speech, ending, as he always did, by paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw. Kennedy's talents as an orator may have been limited, but his Boston twang became more resonant as he delivered his familiar peroration: "Some men see things as they are, and ask why," said Kennedy. "I dream of things that never were, and ask why not."
It was nearly midnight when he took off for Los Angeles. "He just shriveled up," said Bloch. On the plane, Ethel told the staff and the reporters to leave them alone. The usually boisterous press corps quieted. Kennedy rested. He was not really ill, just done in. He had given all he had. In a few hours, he would learn if it was enough.
Historians have argued ever since that night about what Kennedy might have become, just as journalists and commentators in his lifetime debated who he really was. The Good Bobby/Bad Bobby dichotomy, limned by cartoonist Jules Feiffer, became a cliché even before he died. Was he the hard, bullying, McCarthyite, wiretapping, Hoffa-Castro-obsessed hater forever scowling and vowing to "get" his enemies? Or was he the gentle, child-loving, poetry-reading, soulful herald of a new age? Liberals and conservatives have laid equal claim to his legacy. If Bobby had lived, he would have united the races and -- at the cost of billions, but worth every penny -- saved the cities, cured rural poverty, and uplifted the American Indian. No, if Bobby had lived, he would have ended welfare, abolished racial preference, and made personal responsibility the crucible of rich and poor alike. Hawks and doves have tugged and pulled: he drew the world back from the abyss in the Cuban Missile Crisis and would have yanked every American soldier out of Vietnam; no, he was the original war lover who turned for foreign policy advice to generals who were intellectually self-confident, and hence the most dangerous kind. Then, of course, there is the endless debate -- it sputters and flares decades later -- over whether Bobby really changed. He was always changing, goes the argument; he had an experiencing nature that led him to constantly reexamine and transform himself. Nonsense, counter many of his oldest friends (and most of his family). He was born gentle -- and also born tough.
None of these images is wholly right; none wholly wrong. Only two Bobbies? asks Robert Coles. Why not four or five? Without thinking hard, Coles began ticking them off: Bobby the idealist. Bobby the plotter. Bobby the adventurer. Bobby the family man. How about Bobby the chief law enforcement officer who saw himself as a juvenile delinquent? Categorizing him is a futile exercise; the contradictions too confusing. There is no model that suffices to encompass the varieties of his nature, plain and half hidden.
A better way to understand him is to examine his fear. Kennedy spent most of his life struggling to face down demons from within and without. He was brave because he was afraid. His monsters were too large and close at hand to simply flee. He had to turn and fight them. Kennedy, who romanticized guerrilla fighters, became one himself. The self-destructive frontal assaults of his youth gave way to more clever and sometimes devious raids and insurgencies. He became a one-man underground, honeycombed with hidden passages, speaking in code, trusting no one completely, ready to face the firing squad -- but also knowing when to slip away to fight again another day. Although he affected simplicity and directness, he became an extraordinarily complicated and subtle man. His shaking hands and reedy voice, his groping for words as well as meaning, his occasional resort to subterfuge, do not diminish his daring. Precisely because he was fearful and self-doubting, his story is an epic of courage. He did not give in.
Kennedy's "house had many mansions," said Coles. "Bobby had to live with complexity and contradiction to survive in the world -- and in his own family. It gave him great flexibility, and the ability to live with secrets." We know some of those secrets, and, over time, we will learn more. But we will never know them all. We will not know about the cryptic conversations with Joe Sr. and Jack, the almost nonverbal signals between family members who communicated by grunts and through indirection. Unlike his cautious kinsmen, however, Robert Kennedy was a plunger and risk taker, a seeker open to the new. Because he could be raw and unguarded -- his emotions so close to the surface that he seemed to visibly itch -- we can see honest struggles suppressed by others of his clan. He is the light in the family cave.
Unlike his older brothers, Robert Kennedy was not born and raised for power, so he was not required to hide behind a mask of command. His sensitivity was not, like theirs, sealed over by premature adulthood. In his vulnerability, he found strength. He was rarely happy, certainly not content. But he never lost his childlike wonder and capacity for awe, for tenderness, and for rage. In his family, he was the most fierce and the most vulnerable, the Kennedy who most intensely experienced the range of human emotions. He was, in a way, the lucky one.
Copyright © 2000 by Evan Thomas