Bobby Kennedy Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Larry Tye

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Tye, Larry.

  Title: Bobby Kennedy : the making of a liberal icon / Larry Tye.

  Description: New York : Random House, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016004991 | ISBN 9780812993349 | ISBN 9780679645207 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Kennedy, Robert F., 1925–1968. | Legislators—United States—Biography. | United States. Congress. Senate—Biography. | United States—Politics and government—1945–1989.

  Classification: LCC E840.8.K4 T94 2016 | DDC 973.922092—dc23 LC record available at http:​//lccn.​loc.​gov/​2016004991

  random​housebooks.​com

  Ebook ISBN 9780679645207

  Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Victoria Allen

  Cover photograph: Jim Romano/New York Daily News Archive via Getty Images

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  PREFACE

  HISTORY REMEMBERS ROBERT F. KENNEDY as he was in his crusade for president in 1968—a racial healer, a tribune for the poor, and the last progressive knight. His romantic vision for America and the planet made Bobby the uncommon optimist in an age of political distrust and later would inspire both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in their spirited runs for the White House. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal,” RFK reminded us, “he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” No wonder his audiences swooned.

  But there was an earlier Bobby Kennedy whom few recall. Our favorite liberal was nurtured on the rightist orthodoxies of his dynasty-building father and started his public life as counsel to the left-baiting, table-thumping senator Joseph McCarthy. That younger RFK was a bare-knuckled political operative who orchestrated his brother’s whatever-it-takes bids for senator and president. As attorney general, Kennedy okayed FBI wiretaps of Martin Luther King, Jr., whom he never trusted or liked. Even guerrilla warfare was in his toolkit: Bobby masterminded cloak-and-dagger operations against Communist Cuba that included blowing up railroad bridges, sabotaging crops, and plotting the elimination of President Fidel Castro. His steely conservatism made him an idol to a young Rudolph Giuliani and younger Bill O’Reilly and Karl Rove. It would ensure him acolytes whose views were so antithetical to his leftist fan base that the two groups could neither talk to nor tolerate each other.

  In charting this charismatic man’s little-understood transformation from cold warrior to hot-blooded liberal, this book tells the story not just of Bobby Kennedy but of America at midcentury. The nation was riven back then. It had lost both its postwar sense of unbounded possibilities and John F. Kennedy, the youthful president who embodied that enthusiasm and promised new frontiers ahead. In their place were cities in turmoil, whites fleeing to the suburbs as blacks vented their frustrations in the streets, and a political system unable to respond. Now JFK’s messianic younger brother was offering fresh dreams. He imagined a country split less between right and left, or black and white, than between good and bad. The Bobby Kennedy of 1968 was a builder of bridges—between islands of blacks, browns, and blue-collar whites; between terrified parents and estranged youths; and between the establishment he’d grown up in and the New Politics he heralded. At age forty-two he was on the way to becoming the tough liberal—or perhaps tender conservative—who might have stitched back together a divided land and whose vision seems at least as resonant in today’s polarized America.

  That healing magic was on graphic display one chilly day in May 1968 when his campaign motorcade rode through the then racially and ethnically diverse Gary, Indiana. Richard Hatcher, the black mayor, stood on one side of Bobby in the backseat of the convertible, waving to the biggest crowds his city had ever seen. Clinging to Bobby from the other side was Tony Zale, a Polish American steelworker who had boxed his way out of Gary’s ghettos to the middleweight championship of the world. “The open cars rode through the white part of Gary, and then the black part, and Kennedy said precisely the same thing to both races: jobs were better than welfare…riots were no solution,” remembered a journalist who was there. “The reaction was equally enthusiastic in each half of the city.” It wasn’t just that he was the only politician in that season of strife who was embraced on both sides of the railroad tracks. Only Bobby was willing to tell each side not merely what it wanted to hear but what it needed to know.

  If the Gary appearance captured his public persona, a less documented car trip that year revealed the man-child who charmed audiences across the country. He’d been visiting a suburban New York hospital for mentally retarded children and, on his way out, he impulsively promised the nine kids he was talking to that he’d take them out later for his favorite food, ice cream. Knowing his jam-packed schedule, neither his aides nor the doctors believed him. But ten minutes later he was back, helping the shouting youngsters dress, piling them into his chauffeured car, and letting each of them pick out “one thing” at a nearby store that sold ice cream and candy. Driving away from the hospital afterward he joked, “When those kids tell their parents that Bobby Kennedy took them for a ride and bought them ice cream, they’ll never get out of that place.”

  How hard Americans fell for Bobby is apparent not just in his presidential bid that was catching fire or his accomplishments as attorney general and senator. Equally winning was his boyishness, with the country’s collective memory of him framed by that Kennedy smile and an unruly cowlick that flopped onto his forehead. In the history of America, there have been but two non-presidents with whom our relationship was so intimate that we recognize them by their initials—RFK and MLK—and we must reach back to Teddy Roosevelt to find even a president known by an appellation as dear as Bobby. He was, in a way, our little brother, too, which made the loss that much more harrowing when, hours after his most momentous political triumph, an assassin halted his campaign of conciliation.

  The dueling aspects of Bobby’s political soul were part of his breeding. His father, the speculator and kingmaker Joseph P. Kennedy, saw his third son as the runt of his litter of nine—the lamest athlete, the most tongue-tied speaker, the least likely to matter to the world. Those same traits made Bobby the pet of his mother, Rose, yet even she worried that he was “girlish.” Rather than keeping him down, his parents’ low expectations drove him to achieve at any cost. To please Rose, Bobby would pray five times a day, while at the same time he embraced too many of his father’s less saintly causes and tactics. But this striving shaped Bobby in ways that weren’t obvious to his parents and political rivals. While his more assured siblings were confidently charting their own courses, he was listening, learning, and developing a sensitivity that derived from his never being sure he could measure up. The obedient Catholic half of his nature was at war with the rebellious Irish side. All of which left him as vulnerable as he was fierce.

  Jack’s death plunged Bobby into grief and despair, but it ultimately freed him to find his own path, just as their oldest brother Joe Jr.’s death during World War II had first tormented Jack, then liberated him. Bobby went through nearly a year of undiagnosed and unacknowledged depression, convinced that his meaningful life, along with his career, had died in Dallas. It wasn’t only his closest brother that he had lost, but a father whose guiding light had been dimmed two years earli
er by a shattering stroke. Decisions that were preordained by his birth order now were his alone and excruciating. Should he run for the Senate or quit public life? Was it okay to challenge his sitting president or must he wait his turn?

  Slowly, he saw that people believed in him for himself, not just because of his family and his losses. Bobby Kennedy grew not by reading books, as Jack had, nor by chumming around with the brainy and powerful the way his father did. Experience transformed him. He came to understand poverty the way a novelist might, or a priest, sitting on the dirt floor of a shotgun shack in the Mississippi Delta trying to connect with a starving toddler. It was the same with farmworkers and coal miners. To Bobby, policy was personal and power was its handmaiden. More opportunities were handed to him, and snatched back, than to anyone else in public life, and both sets of experiences stretched him. He turned his back not just on parts of who he had been, but on fundamental aspects of the presidency of the brother he worshipped. He led the charge against the very war in Vietnam for which he and Jack had planted the seeds. He fiercely advocated for a civil rights agenda to which JFK had mainly paid lip service. Within five years of John F. Kennedy’s death, Bobby was asserting himself as a politician on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum from where he began—striving, as he put it, “to seek a newer world.” The country was in transition politically and culturally, and so was Bobby.

  For just that reason, this biography offers a lens into two of the most chaotic and confounding decades of twentieth-century America. Robert Kennedy came of age in the 1950s, with its Cold War and a Greatest Generation that was preoccupied with prosperity. Then he turned up, Zelig-like, at the center of every event that mattered in the 1960s, from the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis to race riots and Vietnam. The first half of his career underlines what America was like in the era of Eisenhower, while his last years reflect the Seismic Sixties. His slaying, at almost the same young age as JFK and MLK and so quickly after theirs, signaled to many Americans the end of idealism. “When Robert Kennedy was assassinated, something died within America,” says the civil rights leader John Lewis, who dropped to his knees sobbing when he got word of the killing. “Something died within all of us who knew him.”

  I was among them. I have been captivated by Bobby Kennedy since I was in high school. I taped a poster to my dormitory wall with his inspired (and borrowed) quotation: “Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?” Kennedy’s son David was two years behind me at Middlesex School, his nephew Christopher Lawford a year behind me. Later, when I was a reporter at The Boston Globe, I covered the Kennedys repeatedly—especially Ted, whom I interviewed nearly once a month while I was on the environment and health beats. I saw another side of the family, and I came to realize how effectively they could close ranks when, as the Globe’s roving national writer, I spent two months in Palm Beach covering the rape indictment, trial, and acquittal of William Kennedy Smith, Bobby’s nephew. Like anyone growing up in Massachusetts and passionate about politics, I felt the Kennedys were key figures in my world.

  Bobby has had more books written partly or wholly about him than all but a handful of figures in recent American history. (There are so many that one is called An American Drama, another An American Melodrama.) Too many are valentines or diatribes. None pays enough attention to the earliest, hardest-edged part of his career, perhaps because Bobby himself insisted that it mattered less than the facts suggest. So did much of the Kennedy public relations apparatus, which continues to downplay his conservative roots as well as his metamorphosis. I’ve judged those years by the standard to which the Bobby of 1968 would have held himself. While my focus is on the two decades of Bobby’s work life, to give it context I cycle back repeatedly to his beginnings. And while the explosive events of his existence unfolded simultaneously, to ease the reader’s burden I tease out a series of defining narratives, from his years as an anticommunist agitator, to his battles with Teamsters and mobsters, to his times as attorney general, senator, and presidential candidate. It is only by examining the nuances of his pilgrimage—it was neither a straight line from conservative to liberal, nor so simple as a frog turning into a prince—that we can peel away the myths and make this unorthodox political figure human and plausible.

  I sifted through the mystery of his contradictions with help from people who were closest to him, starting with his wife, Ethel, who has nearly always kept her memories private. When she finally agreed to see me, she talked about Bobby’s relationships with such key figures in his life as the two Senators McCarthy, Joe and Gene, along with Jack and Joe Sr. She also helped me understand where he changed and where he did not. Jean Smith, his only surviving sibling, helped, too, as did seven hours of interviews with his aide and closest friend John Seigenthaler. Nicholas Katzenbach and Ramsey Clark explained what it was like working with Bobby and succeeding him as attorney general. Peter Edelman, Adam Walinsky, Frank Mankiewicz, and other staffers told stories of the issues and people Bobby tackled as senator and why their time with him still seems, fifty years on, like the best of their lives. Many cried as we talked. Margaret Marshall, Bobby’s guide during the whirlwind Ripple of Hope tour across her native South Africa in 1966, recalled the hope he gave her and sixteen million apartheid-era blacks. I spoke with critics, too, including the 60 Minutes commentator Nicholas von Hoffman, who saw Bobby as “a trimmer…when the wind changed direction, he swung his sails in that direction.” I interviewed more than four hundred people over the last four years, too many of whom—including Seigenthaler, Katzenbach, and Mankiewicz—have died since I talked to them. Together they helped me unravel the riddle of why so many of my journalism brethren fell in love with this supposedly ruthless politician. “I’m a sentimental person,” explained The New York Times’s Anthony Lewis, “and I can be reached by genuine emotion. [Bobby] was a very emotional person, and I felt it was genuine.”

  The ongoing fascination with Bobby Kennedy’s story turns around the grand what-ifs. Could he have won the Democratic nomination and been elected president if he had lived? Would he have carried his raw and untested idealism into the White House and sustained it in ways that defied his brother and could have renewed America? Unlike Jack, Bobby died before he had a chance to deliver or to disappoint. That the path led instead to President Richard Nixon, whose cynicism made him Bobby’s polar opposite, adds to the heartache. Bobby Kennedy’s history hints at more promise than even his boosters realized at the time of his death, because he drew such a wide range of Americans to his cause. This man, who grew up mingling with queens, popes, and Hollywood idols, forged bonds not just with Negroes, Chicanos, and American Indians, but with the firemen and bricklayers a later generation would call “Reagan Democrats.” Who else could claim concurrent friendships with the student radical Tom Hayden and the establishment mainstay Richard Daley?

  His era’s most nostalgia-wrapped figure, Bobby was also its most avant-garde. He embodied the classic Kennedy blend of godawful disagreeable and transcendent good. But he was more passionate than his brother the president, more provocative, and more accessible. Half Che Guevara, half Niccolò Machiavelli, Bobby was a shaker-upper dedicated to the art of the possible. That he could change so substantially and convincingly over the course of his brief public life helped restore a changing America’s faith in redemption. In the end he could become this nation’s high priest of reconciliation precisely because he had once been the keeper of our darkest secrets.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  An RFK Chronology

  Author’s Note

  CHAPTER 1 Cold Warrior

  CHAPTER 2 Crusading

  CHAPTER 3 Brother’s Keeper

  CHAPTER 4 Getting Justice

  CHAPTER 5 Breaking Barriers

  CHAPTER 6 Cuba and Beyond

  CHAPTER 7 The Interregnum

  CHAPTER 8 Off
and Running

  CHAPTER 9 Senator Kennedy

  CHAPTER 10 Last Campaign

  Epilogue: Goodbyes

  Photo Insert

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  By Larry Tye

  About the Author

  AN RFK CHRONOLOGY

  SEPTEMBER 6, 1888 Joseph Patrick Kennedy is born in Boston, eldest child of the businessman and politician Patrick Joseph Kennedy and Mary Augusta Hickey Kennedy, the daughter of a prosperous Irish-born contractor.

  OCTOBER 7, 1914 Rose Fitzgerald marries Joe Kennedy in the home chapel of Boston’s Cardinal William O’Connell.

  NOVEMBER 20, 1925 Robert Francis Kennedy is born in Brookline, Massachusetts, the seventh of Rose and Joe’s nine children.

  APRIL 11, 1928 Ethel Skakel is born in Chicago, the next-to-youngest of George and Ann Skakel’s seven children.

  APRIL 30, 1933 Bobby receives his first communion at St. Joseph’s Church in Bronxville, New York.

  JANUARY 7, 1938 President Franklin Roosevelt names Joe Kennedy the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain.

  OCTOBER 5, 1943 Bobby enlists in the U.S. Naval Reserve as a seaman apprentice.

  MAY 27, 1944 After attending St. Paul’s School and then Portsmouth Priory School, Bobby graduates from Milton Academy (the program lists him as residing in Palm Beach, Florida).

  AUGUST 12, 1944 Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., is killed when his plane explodes during a top secret mission in Europe.

  MAY 30, 1946 Bobby is honorably discharged from the Naval Reserve as a seaman second class.

  NOVEMBER 5, 1946 John Kennedy is elected to Congress, with some help from his kid brother Bobby.

  JUNE 10, 1948 Bobby graduates from Harvard University, earning mediocre grades but winning on the football field the Harvard H that eluded his older brothers.