The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy Page 6

  The New Hampshire campaign in early December was pieced together almost against McCarthy’s will. His advisers tried to tell him that running for president was different from running for the Senate, that it was not a small, closed operation, that he needed the national press, and most of all that he had to enter New Hampshire. McCarthy did not want to enter. On that particular trip he wanted to tell all those nice, sincere, decent doves that he liked them and shared their idealism, but that he did not like their state; it had too many mountains, too few Democrats and too many hawks for his taste. One sensed that he was thinking about it—the long campaign ahead, all the snow, all the sore throats he would get. Just twenty-one days was all it would take, his New Hampshire people pleaded, just twenty-one days. They were the best people he had, and their quality of backbiting was surprisingly low for such good liberals; but he shook his head. All right they said, just fourteen days. Give us fourteen days in New Hampshire. Advisers like Lowenstein were arguing that if he went after the presidency, he had to go after each primary, he could not afford to be frightened away. A victory in a so-called dovish state such as Wisconsin would not be a victory unless he had also done well in so-called hawkish states. So he ambled, almost bumbling, through New Hampshire, appearing at meetings which were sometimes painfully small, talking about the need for changes in American life in a typically McCarthy style: In the past, when a country won a war the successful leaders always stayed on one generation too long, but now, after World War II, with the invention of penicillin they have stayed on two generations too long, and that’s the trouble with most of the world.”

  But the army of students was there too. It had been organized for more than a year, primarily by Lowenstein and a few sub-Lowensteins who traveled all over the country, telling the students that their dissent was not unique and that there would be an outlet this year. Lowenstein had alternated between the Reform Democratic clubs and the students—mixing in both, always late, always disorganized, and yet touching thousands of people. I remember one evening late in the spring of 1967 at Lowenstein’s apartment. What, you’ve never met Norman Thomas? You’ve got to come by the house tomorrow night. And so I went, the next evening, to meet Norman Thomas. It was an extraordinary evening: Norman Thomas, almost blind now, Frank Graham, the former Senator from North Carolina who was successfully red-baited years ago, Mrs. Lowenstein, quite pregnant and quite confused—wondering who all these people were—and about twenty students, but no Lowenstein—he was circling above LaGuardia, in from another college visit. Some of the students were New Left, some of them very angry and bitter about the country and the war. Three very radical ones were arguing furiously with Thomas, saying that the war was racial and genocidal, white men deliberately killing yellow men. Thomas, turning with the sound, barely able to see, argued patiently that no, it wasn’t a racial war, this country made a mistake. There was just too much American vanity and it was getting us in deeper. This was the radical Norman Thomas, my father’s hero? Many of the people in charge, he was saying, feel about Negroes the same way you do. Those generals, a girl shrieked, those generals feel anything about Negroes? Yes, said Mr. Thomas. Vintage stuff. Eventually Lowenstein arrived and packed everyone off to a West Side reform club meeting where he spent half the night attacking Johnson and the war, saying Johnson will be beaten, the politicians are wrong, it is in the air. Volunteers were asked for, and a few appeared.

  These were bad days for Robert Kennedy. He was playing Hamlet—thinking about the race constantly, wanting to make it, being led there by his emotions again and again, only to be brought back from the brink by the cold words of his closest advisers. His position was terribly ambivalent. He had chartered an entire political course only to halt at its most crucial moment. He was still telling people that he would support Johnson for the presidency. He had failed to come out for McCarthy (if he were going to come out for McCarthy, he might as well come out for himself). Columnist Murray Kempton who had frequently penned love notes to Kennedy in the past, and who felt deeply for him, was writing bitterly in early January: “As of now I prefer Eugene McCarthy as a candidate for President of the United States. An obvious reason is that McCarthy has the guts to go. A less obvious but more significant reason is that I was not at all surprised that he would, and I’m not the least surprised that Kennedy wouldn’t.”

  But it was the cartoonist Jules Feiffer with his fine eye for our contemporary foibles who caught the failure of Kennedy the best In a cartoon strip entitled “The Bobby Twins,” Feiffer portrayed a television debate between the Good Bobby and the Bad Bobby:

  The Good Bobby: We’re going in there and we’re killing South Vietnamese. We’re killing children, we’re killing women. ...

  The Good Bobby: We’re killing innocent people because we don’t want to have the war fought on American soil.

  The Good Bobby: Do we have that right, here in the United States, to perform these acts because we want to protect ourselves?

  The Good Bobby: I very seriously question whether we have that right.

  The Good Bobby: All of us should examine our own consciences on what we are doing in South Vietnam.

  The Bad Bobby: I will back the Democratic candidate in 1968. I expect that will be President Johnson.

  The Good Bobby: I think we’re going to have a difficult time explaining this to ourselves.

  But by late January it was no longer just a trickle of volunteers. In Cambridge, where feeling runs particularly strongly against the war, it was the minority which was not opposed and which was not activist. And so now, gathering from every state, the army marched on New Hampshire. Not everyone, it seemed, had completely turned off the system. These kids were quite obviously the best of a generation. Kennedy would later note ruefully that he had the B and B-minus kids and McCarthy had the A kids. Most of them were upper-middle class. Many of them were the sons and daughters of those who voted for Richard Nixon in 1960, who felt more at ease with Nelson Rockefeller than anyone else. The kids were at ease convincing the Hampshiremen that the war was an immoral cause; they had all practiced on their parents before.

  Among the Jewish students there is something striking, the new security of American life. They are the sons of the affluent Jews in the suburbs, but they look more like their immigrant grandfathers, those radical Socialists from the old world with their beards. They were men who never felt shame about their political feelings, not at all like the next generation which wanted so desperately to be Americanized, which shaved its beards and out-WASP-ed the WASPs politically. No, these kids are much more secure in American life, and they seem almost to have their grandfathers’ political views in a contemporary setting. They are all part of an affluent new society with jobs secure and waiting after college. Material security is part of their birthright. Their worries are different than their parents’ were. They now worry about what kind of a country they live in, and they worry about the morality of American life and its affluence.

  These volunteers are not interested in the great battles of their parents’ day, the Depression and How It Was Solved by Franklin Roosevelt and Us. They are more interested in the moral thrust of America. They see not so much what has been done, as what has not been done. They do not doubt that capitalism, as a material system, works much better than communism, but they wonder openly about the use of its affluence. They are bored with the anti-communism of their parents and of most of the national journals, so bored, in fact, that any new youth-oriented publication, like Ramparts, gets the benefit of the doubt (just as the Communists get the benefit of the doubt), precisely because it is anti-Establishment, precisely because it is different; thus it is theirs. But in New Hampshire these kids were on their best behavior. They had found a tangible cause into which they could channel all that energy and frustration, and they did. They were intense, believing in their cause with a ferocity unmatched in contemporary politics. Many of the young men had been drawn from the brink of draft-card burning. Dan Dodd, a young stude
nt up from the Union Theological Seminary, told a reporter, “I was thinking of turning in my draft card but then the campaign began. We’re not going to build grass-roots politics in time to end the war by November, but if we can end the present President’s career, maybe we can do it by then.” They were even willing to use a little cosmetology in order to help McCarthy; the girls’ skirts became a little longer, beards were shaved off or, if not, were confined to manning the phones at headquarters. A note stuck on one of the bulletin boards there, just before the primary, read: “Over 40 percent we go on to Wisconsin; 30 percent back to school; 20 percent we burn our draft cards; 10 percent we leave the country.”

  They were carefully rehearsed in how not to offend the Hampshiremen; just how hard to push the issues; and how to test for the extent of hawkishness, to sense whether it is fragile and can be turned around, or whether it is deep and hard-core and not worth the effort. The volunteers became overnight a very effective force; young, intelligent, very attractive, and surprisingly well-organized. They made a formidable impression in New Hampshire. They had intense devotion to cause and intense belief in themselves, and watching them, I realized something about the McCarthy campaign which was to recur again and again in the months to come: when people cheered McCarthy, they were cheering themselves.

  Now too, in early January, there was money available. The big New York money, which traditionally has supported reform candidates—Kefauver, Stevenson, Humphrey, Javits—was beginning to go for McCarthy. But slowly, not in one great outpouring. These people were worried about the war, worried about the ghettos, and worried about the gold outflow, yet they were a little wary. They were tough-minded, and they weren’t sure that their tiger was a real tiger; he looked a little soft. But Galbraith and others would argue their doubts away, and gradually the money came in. If it was coming in to McCarthy, then it was also not coming in to Lyndon Johnson. This was one more sign that he was in serious trouble—sitting President or not, he would need money and he would need active volunteers, and his chances of getting them were diminishing every day. Politically too, he was paying a price for the increasing isolation of the White House. If the country had paid a price in the exodus of talented men from the White House because of Vietnam, so had the administration. Now, strikingly without talent, it faced a national election.

  Johnson has always had a problem with talented people, he has always had a reputation for mishandling and abusing staff, almost trying to humiliate and destroy the men around him. With Vietnam, the situation was worse than ever. Moyers, the brightest of Johnson’s own people, was gone, and to a degree, Johnson was unprepared for national elections. In 1964 he had been aided by a number of Kennedy people whose loyalty in that year was not in doubt. But now it was different He had Larry O’Brien, a highly knowledgeable technician whom he had carefully weaned away from the Kennedys. He had prevented him from resigning along with all the other Irish Mafia by an offer of the postmaster generalship. Robert Kennedy understood this; he told a friend he knew what it meant for a boy who had been as poor as Larry O’Brien to sit in the Cabinet of the United States. Kenny O’Donnell in particular was bitter about O’Brien because they had agreed, together with Dave Powers, to resign ensemble, and then O’Brien had stayed on. In 1968, when O’Brien came back to the fold, he and O’Donnell would, in a friend’s words, “communicate but not speak to each other.” But Kennedy had been too understanding of the dilemma. O’Brien had never broken ties with him, though the ties were strained at times, and now, in early 1968, Johnson was uneasy. He did not trust O’Brien and this proved costly, for O’Brien had an unusual knowledge of New Hampshire and the technology of its politics. He had run Jack Kennedy’s campaign there in 1960, and he knew its balance. He could have helped, if nothing else, to minimize mistakes. And there were incredible mistakes. The Johnson operatives, for reasons known only to themselves, allowed forty-five candidates to run in the President’s name for twenty-four convention slots, thereby splitting up the vote and allowing McCarthy to get twenty of the delegates. But Johnson was never sure of O’Brien; he did not entirely trust him, and so he used Marvin Watson.

  Marvin Watson symbolized in many ways the White House at its lowest ebb in 1968; he was the loyalty officer of the administration at a time when loyalty was becoming the transcending quality. Marvin Watson was known best to America as the man who wanted to monitor all the calls going in and out of the White House, and now he was the White House’s political man. The campaign was disastrously run. McCarthy was smeared repeatedly as the agent of Hanoi. Governor John King said that any vote for McCarthy would be greeted “with cheers in Hanoi.” Senator Thomas McIntyre said McCarthy would honor “draft dodgers and deserters.” Radio spots attacked the “peace-at-any-price fuzzy thinkers who say ‘Give up the goal, burn your draft card and surrender!’” But McCarthy, running quietly with his own special dignity, did not look like the candidate of Hanoi. The Johnson people were too dependent on the state machine. They had nearly all the local politicians, which made them look, particularly in their own eyes, unbeatable. They would be able to gather all the politicians at the top—men who were seemingly reflectors of what was going on underneath—and believed this meant they would carry the workers and small fanners. The White House felt, looking at these politicians, that there was no coercion in their support, though of course it was not overt, it was covert; McCarthy had looked like a long shot and the President, a sure shot Besides, the role of a state organization is almost always overemphasized by politicians themselves, and political reporters. Because the machine dominates politics in the off season, it becomes the initial point of reference; politicians make their living at it, therefore they are presumed to know what is going on. The truth is that in a statewide gubernatorial election, a moderately well-run machine can function, can effect a certain limited percentage of votes, because it is dealing with jobs and the families of job holders; but the very same machine trying for a Senate race often blunders badly because patronage is not at stake and because there are other more important issues. And in New Hampshire, in 1968, there was a very basic issue: the war.

  In January 1968, General Vo Nguyen Giap changed his strategy. Up until then the Vietnamese Communists, fighting their particular guerrilla war, had never made their challenge in the cities. It had always been in the rural areas, where the guerrillas could slip away using the natural resources of the land. As such, the toughness and resiliency of the enemy had never come across clearly to the American public. By the time television cameramen arrived the enemy would be gone; besides, the places were almost always nameless spots. But in January, General Giap launched the Tet offensive. Suddenly, it became painfully clear to the American public that the war was not going well; that the enemy was resilient and very tough; that most of the pacification work had been shattered; that we could barely protect Saigon; and that the predictions of the American leadership had been totally false. Up until then Lyndon Johnson had believed that the war was going well; perhaps not as well as some of the generals said, but well nonetheless. He believed that dissent was largely the work of a few east-coast intellectuals and professors, and that it would be rejected by the rest of the country, which was soundly patriotic. Now, day by day, as the nation watched the endless battles on its television sets, and read the discouraging accounts from Saigon, Johnson was becoming more and more a hollow man. He had staked his entire political future on the war. He had slowly used up his credibility; now it was gone. Now it was too late to bring General Westmoreland home again to address joint session. And for Lyndon Johnson it was worse than for most leaders, for he was not a lovable man. He did not generate charisma, had no popularity; he was the kind of man who needed tangible success to hold his troops in line, and now even that success eluded him.

  When Robert Kennedy decided in December to stay out, the debate within his circle had not ended. If anything it had accelerated. Walinsky, the house radical (when on the road, during the campaign, friends would put si
gns on his office door: “Gone To Peking, back in two weeks.” or “In Hanoi”), wanted to quit. It took great effort on the part of his friends to keep him on the staff, to keep him from resigning. Now he and others were warning the Senator of something Kennedy knew himself, that Robert Kennedy was becoming an old politician overnight, long hair or no. If it were true that in the new politics with the old broker out, a candidate could be created overnight, then it was also true that it was a fragile thing and could fade just as quickly.

  He became restless again and he wanted to run. Two weeks before the New Hampshire primary he began to call friends regularly, asking their advice, hoping, said one friend, to hear them change their minds and tell him to go for it. He went regularly to colleges, knowing that he would be harassed and booed, that the disparity between what he had pledged to America and what he was doing would be challenged. It was almost a form of masochism; he sought their anger. Indeed when it was not there, when they did not challenge him, he was angry at their complacency and he would challenge them: how can you be so complacent when there is a war on and your contemporaries are dying?