The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy Read online

  What we need in the United States is not division, what we need in the United States is not hatred, what we need in the United States 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 whether they be black. So I shall ask you tonight to return home to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that’s true, but more important to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love—a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke. We can do well in this country, we will have difficult times, we’ve had difficult times in the past. We will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence. It is not the end of lawlessness. It is not the end of disorder. But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land. Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

  It was a sign of the changing new and angry times that Kennedy’s very appearance in the ghetto was considered more important by the press than his speech. He was one of the rare American political figures who could, on a night of such anger and vengeance, go safely into the black quarters of the cities; others would go that night, and in the nights to follow, in unmarked cars or fly quickly over in helicopters as city after city burned.

  They had been tied together, King and Kennedy, in what was essentially the same cause: working within the system to bring white and black together. They had both worked, for the last eight years, to make America more tolerable for the black. It was Robert Kennedy’s phone call to a Georgia judge which had sprung King from jail in 1960, and which had probably won Jack Kennedy not only the election, but the affection of King’s father, Martin King Sr.—a hard Baptist preacher with no love for white men and particularly for Catholics. (He later told reporters that he had planned to vote for Nixon because he did not trust Catholics, but would now vote enthusiastically for Kennedy. ‘Imagine Martin Luther King having a father who’s a bigot,” Jack Kennedy said later. “Well, we all have our fathers. ...”) The relationship after John Kennedy’s election had been guarded, King and the Kennedys were not of the same style, and they were mutually suspicious at first. King felt that the Kennedys were dragging their feet on civil rights, which was correct—they simply did not understand how far there was to go and how slowly they were moving; and the Kennedys found King’s brand of moralism somewhat heavy in the fast pragmatic world in which they operated, where idealism was carefully masked with cynicism. Nonetheless the justice department under Robert Kennedy was drawn increasingly into civil rights, not particularly because it wanted to be, but because the action was there and because the Kennedy administration, drawn in by events, had to come down on one side or the other, and finally there was only one side. By the end of the administration, the justice department virtually served as a coordinator for The Movement. It quietly lent its organizational skills to King and his people; organization had never been their strong point. They would choose an idea, more likely a target, jump in, and await the Lord to hand down the organizational plan, said one admiring follower. At the time of Jack Kennedy’s assassination, Martin Luther King was holding higher hopes for Lyndon Johnson than he did for the late President (though Robert Kennedy was another matter, King had high hopes for him). He had seen in Johnson a son of the South trying to cleanse his past, had thought him deeply committed on civil rights, and anxious to prove his liberation. (This might have been a double miscalculation on King’s part; he was from the South and Johnson was from the South, and perhaps both of them had thought the battle front would remain in the South. It was an area and a set of problems which Johnson understood far better than the problems of the ghettos.) Then the war came along, dominating the Johnson years and destroying the Great Society. Those years particularly undermined moderate leaders like King, who preached non-violence, love and reconciliation, hoping that the moral conscience of America would turn. It was a plea which did not particularly offend white America, but in the late sixties it fell on deaf ears among the alienated young blacks of the North. These young men were in the North because they had forsaken their past; the Protestant religion of their parents had failed, their god was dead; King was hot and they were cool. In the past year King had been pushed by events into increasing radicalism. His doubts about American society mounting, his criticism of the society sharpening, his white following diminishing, he was no longer so beloved by the white establishment. At the time of his death he had been organizing the Poor People’s March on Washington. Had that failed, it was feared that it would have been one failure too many, and that the more radical leaders would take over his following, particularly among younger blacks. But now he was dead, the victim of one more assassin, and the campaign was breaking off. The Kennedys sent a plane to Memphis to bring King’s body back to Atlanta, and all the great figures of America went to Atlanta.

  In Atlanta there were additional dilemmas. The rioting had started throughout the country, and Chicago and Washington and Pittsburgh were burning. Lindsay’s walk had helped ease tension in New York but the nation seemed to be just short of revolt. Kennedy wanted to go on national television and discuss what was happening, and why the Negroes were rioting, and there was discussion among a very few friends as to whether he should. His point was strong: most of white America would see only the rioting and the anger; Kennedy knew why this rioting was taking place and he thought people would listen to him, and besides, he felt the country needed some leadership at that moment. But he was warned that anything he might do would be misinterpreted, would be attributed to political motive. The rednecks would say, look at that damn nigger-lover, and the liberals would say, he’ll exploit anything. Reluctantly he decided against it. Later that night an informal meeting between Kennedy and a number of black leaders took place. Though some of the men, such as the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and John Lewis, the former head of Snick, were sympathetic, almost all the black anger in America seemed to be unleashed on Kennedy in that room, one constant outpouring of bitterness. Why should we support a white man? Why should we bother with America’s election? You people kill our leaders. Kennedy painfully tried to talk with them, not to answer them, saying “If you think I’m going to give you a campaign speech, you’re mistaken. I’m not here to campaign. I’m sorry. I’m here to pay my respects to a friend and a leader. I can’t campaign. I know how you feel and I know your anger, but I can’t make a speech to you, I’m sorry.” The King funeral: a dark, somber affair, a broiling hot sun. Every important black man in the country was there. White leaders were everywhere. The little church was so crowded that the group of Senators which had flown down had to stay outside. There was only room for presidential candidates inside. King’s people were wearing their poor people’s uniforms as badges of honor. One of King’s people was trying to move the enormous crowd in front of the church so that the mule-drawn wagon would be able to start. The crowd refused to move. He was begging them now, “Make it easier for the family, this is a way to honor Martin,” but they refused to move. They have moved too often at the requests of officials all their lives, and they will not be moved. Then the march from the church to Morehouse College. More than five miles under the grueling sun. It was a strange assemblage of the mighty and the poor. It went through Atlanta; stores all closed, in honor of Dr. King, and in honor of keeping them from being destroyed (Rich’s, the famous store, closed its downtown store, but left its suburban store open. Perhaps there is no honor in the suburbs). Along the way some of the older Negroes began to lead in singing; the walk had become a shuffle, slow, hot, burdened. Someone tried “We Shall Overcome,” but it seemed tainted. Rather, they moved back to some of the older ones.

  I’
m on my way to Freedom

  We shall Not be Moved

  I’m on my way to Freedom

  We shall not be moved

  Just like a tree that’s planted near the water

  We shall not be moved.

  Martin’s gone ahead

  But we shall not be moved

  Martin’s gone ahead

  But we shall not be moved

  Just like a tree that’s planted near the water

  We shall not be moved.

  “I’m coming Martin,” someone wailed, “I’m coming now,” and the rest said, yes, yes, we’re coming.

  Along the route Kennedy became the star. As we got closer to Morehouse there were crowds of Negroes standing in front of their houses, handing out cool water to marchers. When Kennedy came along, slight, almost hard to find in the crowd, they began to clap, Yes, Bobby, Bobby, and more clapping. “It’s as if they’re anointing him,” a friend of mine said. Someone else complained later that even here he was campaigning. Perhaps, but it seems American, in 1968, that a funeral should be part of the campaign.

  Several days later we were talking during a break in the campaign; Kennedy started discussing the fabric of America. I said that it seemed very thin, stretched far too thin; there has been so much violence that any quality of doubt or buffer has been used up, now everyone believes the worst. There were 50,000 people or more at the funeral, many of them the best people in the country, all having come to make a witness, all this passion, and yet, all it would have taken was one nut, pulling one trigger or throwing one bomb, to have set off the entire country. Yes, said Kennedy with a touch of bitterness, the richest country in the world. White people living better than they ever did before; no matter who they are, having it better: if they had rented, now they own. If they had ridden buses or walked, now they own one or two cars. If they had sweated, now they have a summer place. Now they go out to dinner once or twice a week. But all they think about is how much they have to pay in taxes, and how much more they pay in taxes than five or ten years ago. It is extraordinary how ungenerous they have become, he said. They don’t see the poor and they don’t want to.

  All this distrust, he said, everyone in America distrusting everyone else. Then he became very critical of President Johnson: he never went into a ghetto. He knew he had the Negroes and decided they had nowhere else to go, and he didn’t care about the ghettos. He was going to run on crime in the streets, and they knew this, knew that he felt he didn’t have to go after their votes. Look at Dr. King, he couldn’t get through to the White House, the administration wouldn’t see him. They thought he was an enemy because of Vietnam. So the Negroes felt more and more isolated politically.

  I nodded, yes, but how much of it could really be blamed on the President? Wasn’t it a little too easy to blame it all on Johnson? How much of it was the diverse pull of the country; perhaps we had become too rich, and as such, less dependent on each other, allowing the selfish rather than the dependent tendencies to become dominant. So that now the things which divided us were stronger than the things which united us. We were not bound together tightly, but were permitted the luxury of divergent pulls. People behaved best in adversity, worst in luxury. His face darkened for a minute; after all, what I was saying was that if he became president he would end up as beaten by the system as Johnson had been. Then, rather coldly, the informality of the last ten minutes gone, he said, “I don’t think so at all. I think the country wants to be led and needs to be led. I think it wants to do the right thing.” And then he was off campaigning and moving again.

  From the funeral he flew back to Indiana, ending up in Terre Haute in Southern Indiana. It has the look of a depressed city. (One develops a fine eye for poverty in America after campaigning. One can sense where the money has departed and where the money and the jobs have arrived.) In the downtown area, store fronts were closed. Terre Haute was cool to the candidate. It was the day after the King funeral, and white America, by and large, was not mourning Dr. King, rather it was frightened by the violence which took place in the wake of the assassination, and it felt that the politicians were too permissive. As he rode into town several people shouted coon-catcher, coon-catcher, at him. His speech was weak and edgy and somewhat defensive on civil rights; with a new emphasis on the fact that the violence is unacceptable. The audience was almost entirely white, only a couple of Negroes there. I asked one what he thought was happening. “Oh he’s my man. He’s my man all right.” What about the rest of Terre Haute? “These people? These people?” and he laughed. That night several of the reporters claimed that in the last day Kennedy had been trimming on civil rights. His staff denied it, but the reporters insisted. The talk was pleasantly abrasive, and everyone was in a reasonably good mood because the schedule had eased off a bit, for a day, and there was time to eat for a change. One of the reporters kept telling one of the young speech writers, “What I can’t stand about your guy, what I find hard to stomach, is that back right after the war, when I came home, and I led an open housing drive on the campus, and it was a lonely fight, your guy was on the McCarthy committee. That’s what I can’t stand. And now he’s a big liberal.” One of the speech writers, who was approximately eight years old when this transpired, was enjoying it all, saying, “You should have had a richer father that’s all That was your first mistake.” It was all reasonably good natured, but it could have gone sour at any minute. The staff was restless; there was too much time and they were not used to it. We had checked into the hotel in the early afternoon and there was nothing scheduled until the next morning. “Four colleges in the area and all of them on vacation when we got here. Best scheduling of the trip.”

  The next morning Kennedy breakfasted with a group of 150 women in Terre Haute and gave a pedestrian speech. He was not a particularly good speaker, and here he was ill at ease. But then in the question-and-answer period, and this is equally typical, he was very good. He fielded their questions and he had decided that while they were all good Democrats, they were complacent, and so he got carried away on the subject of the poor in America. “They are hidden in our society. No one sees them any more. They’re invisible. A small minority in a rich country. Yet I am stunned by the lack of awareness of the rest of us toward them and their problems. We don’t see them. We pay all these taxes and pass all these programs to help them, and yet the programs don’t reach them and the taxes go for other things, and every year their lives are more helpless than ever and yet we wonder what’s wrong with them, after all we did for them.” It went on like that, very good stuff, not exactly what the good ladies of Terre Haute had set out to hear, but it was very effective. There were almost no reporters present.

  We got off to Gary which is a very tough town, perhaps the most polarized city in America. On the plane Kennedy talked about his problem in the state. Since the King funeral he had had two days of cold receptions. “So far in Indiana they seem to want to see me as a member of the black race—I don’t think I can win if that happens. If it keeps up I’m lost. That breakfast was very good and you could feel them coming around, but how many people in Indiana will get that much exposure, how many chances will you have to talk at that length?” He stopped for a moment. “These people never ask me, ‘What are you going to do about the Negro problem, or what can we do for the Negro?’ They always ask: “What are you going to do about the violence.’” Then he continued with a private and highly informed analysis of varying Negro groups in the country. He saw the Southern Christian Leadership Conference splitting apart inevitably with Dr. King dead. There are too many conflicting ambitions and conflicting pulls which have been kept submerged only because of the sheer power and prestige of King himself. Now with him gone, they will begin to surface. Besides, there is no one person who has all the qualities of Dr. King: one is his intellectual equal, another has his ability to speak, another has his instinct for the moral position and how to dramatize it, but no one had all the pieces like Dr. King. What about Stokely and Rap? someone as
ked. Beyond bringing in, he said, it’s all gone too far. They’re too bitter, been hit on the head, harassed and arrested too many times. As far as America goes, you can forget about them; your only hope is the other young Negroes. Keep them in, and give them alternatives, and make it possible for them to stay inside the system. It can be done, but you have to move quickly and you have to be willing to take some heat in the process. I mean, they’re not going to tell you how grateful they are.

  Kennedy had been making a major part of his pitch on the ghettos an attempt to get private industry involved. He had decided that there had been too much reliance in the past upon government action, and that nothing could be done in the ghettos until there were jobs available. This put him in a different group from most of the older Democrats who, from the New Deal days, had an instinctive reliance on the government’s ability to handle any problem; but it did put him in the rough category of younger men, like Chuck Percy of Illinois, who felt that government’s encouraging business to operate in the ghetto would have more long-term results than overdependence on government programs. It also put him at odds with some of his allies.

  Michael Harrington, the young socialist who had articulated the plight of the poor in America, had switched from McCarthy to Kennedy despite the reliance on the private sector, and in Indiana Dick Goodwin brought Harrington in to meet the candidate. “I guess you don’t like all the things I say about free enterprise,” Kennedy said.

  “I guess you don’t like all the things I say about socialism,” Harrington answered.

  Goodwin interjected: “Mike told the television people he couldn’t support Rockefeller because Rockefeller wouldn’t really spend 150 billion dollars for the cities.”