Robert Kennedy’s promise cut short by an assassin 50 years ago
All too briefly, Robert F. Kennedy electrified the 1968 presidential race.
In the early morning of June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy stood at a lectern in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, flanked by aides and his pregnant wife, Ethel, and claimed victory in the California and South Dakota Democratic Party primaries for president.
“I think we can end the divisions in the United States,” Kennedy said. “We are a great country, an unselfish country and a compassionate country. And I intend to make that my basis for running over the period of the next few months. So my thanks to all of you, and it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there.”
Kennedy did a thumbs-up, made a peace sign and ran his fingers through his tousled chestnut hair. Amid wild cheers and applause, he exited through the kitchen to avoid the heaving crowd. He was shot. He fell to the ground and lay in a pool of blood leaking from his head. Busboy Juan Romero pressed rosary beads into his hand and cradled his head.
The spray of bullets from the assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, also wounded several others. There was pandemonium. The feeling of jubilation among volunteers, staff and supporters turned to shock, despair and then anger. Kennedy was rushed to Good Samaritan Hospital and died 25 hours later, at 1.44am on June 6. He was 42 years old.
Fifty years after his death, Kennedy still arouses powerful emotions among those who knew him personally or remember his years as a shrewd campaigner, a crusading attorney-general and courageous senator.
He continues to inspire new generations who know him only as a historical figure whose life was wretchedly cut short.
He was passionate yet pragmatic, idealistic but realistic, and gripped by a moral sense of right and wrong. He was tough, fearless, energetic, ambitious and unafraid to speak truth to power, whether it was to his brother John F. Kennedy or his despised successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. He was his brother’s protector and confidant who found his own voice and purpose, and pursued it with characteristic Kennedy vigour.
His character is complex and difficult to reconcile. He was an advocate for the white working poor, blacks living in poverty and Latino farm workers. He appealed to affluent liberals. He quoted Greek poetry. His speeches reached the highest form of political oratory. He wrote thoughtful books. His presidential campaign witnessed an energy never surpassed, as people clamoured to touch him, tearing his clothes and bruising his hands.
Yet he employed dirty tricks when managing his brother’s political campaigns. He worked for Joe McCarthy to expose alleged communists, authorised covert plans to disrupt Fidel Castro’s Cuba, covered up his brother’s philandering and approved FBI wire-tapping of Martin Luther King Jr. He was culturally conservative and a devout Catholic who fathered 11 children. He led a privileged life. Some Americans loved him, but many loathed him.
His story is one vested with promise, potential and destiny cut short by tragedy. He had taken up his brother’s fallen standard and carried the hopes of a restored Camelot. He had the magic Kennedy name but he would be a different type of president. He was profoundly changed by his brother’s assassination. He promised to heal the divisions over race, address entrenched poverty and end the war in Vietnam.
Kennedy’s legacy lives on as a great “what if” of American history — his memory is frozen in time, never to disappoint, never to let us down, leaving us only to imagine what might have been. He remains something of an enigma: a politician with authenticity, conviction and purpose but also a complex puzzle of contradictions.
Five decades after his death, there is an avalanche of books being published and republished about his life and legacy including by two of his children; a new Netflix documentary; and endless newspaper and magazine retrospectives. Several of Kennedy’s former staff, an adviser to LBJ and two leading historians spoke to Inquirer.
William vanden Heuvel, 88, worked closely with Kennedy at the Justice Department and on his Senate (1964) and presidential (1968) campaigns. “Kennedy was a passionate yet practical idealist,” he tells Inquirer. “He had a national constituency and that is reflected in young people today who are desperately looking for the leadership to restore us to the path that the Kennedys worked so hard to bring about.”
Peter Edelman, 80, worked as a legislative aide to Kennedy from 1964 to 1968. “He was the real thing,” he tells Inquirer.
“He was a decent and loving person, very smart, enormously funny. He picked up the mantle from his brother and when he came into his own, people could see in him a tremendous integrity and that he really wanted to make this a better world.”
Jeff Greenfield, 74, was a speechwriter on Kennedy’s staff in 1967-68. “He spoke with such passion about the most urgent of matters — war, race, poverty, joblessness, the loss of community — that even half a century later we’re struck by the intensity and the personal drive,” he says. “These were not words shaped by focus groups and polls. They came from the heart.”
Joseph Califano, 87, worked as LBJ’s top domestic policy adviser. He tells Inquirer that his boss had doubts about whether Hubert Humphrey, who eventually won the Democratic Party nomination, could beat Richard Nixon in the fall. But LBJ had few doubts about Kennedy. “Johnson thought Kennedy could have won and that he would support the Great Society programs,” he says.
Evan Thomas, 67, is the author of Robert Kennedy: His Life (2000). “RFK was that rarest of politicians: he was unafraid to tell people what they did not wish to hear,” Thomas says. “He told college kids that he was against draft deferments if it meant poor high school kids had to die in Vietnam in their place. When a medical student asked who would pay for expanded healthcare, he said, ‘You will.’ ”
Robert Dallek, 84, has written biographies of JFK and LBJ, as well as Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (2013). “RFK evokes strong emotions because the country is starved for idealism,” he tells Inquirer.
“RFK, like JFK, remains a heroic political leader. His brother’s assassination changed him and made him into the politician he had become by 1968.”
Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on November 20, 1925. He was one of nine children born to Joseph and Rose Kennedy. His father called him the “runt” of the family and didn’t think he would amount to much. He was closer to his mother and five sisters. He was seen as “the black sheep” of the family.
“Although RFK was a spoiled rich kid, he knew what it was like to be put down and marginalised at a very young age,” Thomas says. “He had empathy others lacked. It also made him a mean little bastard who would do anything to get his father’s attention.”
Kennedy enlisted in the navy in 1943, studied at Harvard and the University of Virginia, and managed his brother’s successful Senate campaign in 1952. He worked for the Senate subcommittee on investigations, initially with McCarthy, and later for the Senate rackets committee probing union corruption and the mafia.
After managing JFK’s winning presidential campaign in 1960, he was appointed attorney-general in the Kennedy administration. He was JFK’s most trusted adviser, helped defuse the Cuban missile crisis by negotiating a secret deal with Russia, and continued his pursuit of corrupt union officials and mafia figures.
Although initially cautious on civil rights, he ordered marshals to protect freedom riders in Alabama and dispatched federal troops to ensure James Meredith, a black student, could enrol at the all-white University of Mississippi. He also advocated new civil rights legislation.
“Civil rights was alien to his own experience,” vanden Heuvel says. “When he met with black leaders, he was constantly surprised at the depth of their feelings and the injustice they felt. When he and his brother saw what was developing in the streets of Birmingham, they knew it was a moral issue.”
White House adviser and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr identified the differences between the two brothers. “John Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic; Robert Kennedy was a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist,” he writes in Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978).
And, while JFK is seen as a historical figure, RFK has a contemporary resonance.
Vanden Heuvel saw Robert Kennedy after his brother’s assassination in 1963. “I have never seen a person more mortally wounded and still living,” he says. “The pain never left him.” Kennedy turned to Aeschylus, Camus and Dante to try to make sense of it all. He did not want to be paralysed by grief. He wrote a letter to his son, Joe: “Be kind to others that are less fortunate than we — and love our country.”
Kennedy and Johnson shared a mutual contempt. Yet Kennedy unsuccessfully sought to be Johnson’s vice-presidential running mate in 1964. “Johnson was determined to keep Bobby from running with him out of fear that his victory would be seen as belonging to the Kennedys rather than to him,” Dallek says.
So Kennedy ran for the Senate from New York and won. “His Senate office was a hotbed of energy,” Greenfield recalls. “He was so skilled at finding the weak point in a speech or policy that we were compelled to dig deeper to try and ‘get it right’, whatever we were working on.”
Kennedy made economic, social and racial justice his cause. He was not driven by ideology. He believed in personal responsibility, and jobs rather than welfare, was sceptical of bureaucracy and strong on law and order, and supported stricter gun control. Americans watching his televised visits to Brooklyn, the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia witnessed his compassion. He gently rubbed the back of his hand against the face of a black child with a bloated belly and skin pockmarked by sores.
His appeal was global. In 1966, Kennedy travelled to apartheid South Africa. He wanted to give voice to the universal struggle for freedom and dignity.
He was shunned by the government and faced a hostile media. At the University of Cape Town, almost 20,000 students wanted to hear his speech but there was room only for 1600.
It was a tour de force. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance,” he said.
Vanden Heuvel remembers organising meetings at his New York apartment in late 1967 where Kennedy mulled a presidential run with long-time advisers such as Schlesinger, Ted Sorensen, Kenneth O’Donnell, Robert McNamara and Richard Goodwin. “Practically all of us did not recommend that he run,” he says.
Kennedy was concerned about splitting the party by challenging Johnson, and worried about whether he could win. But he also felt he had a duty to run. Edelman says Kennedy decided to run two days before the New Hampshire primary on March 12, in which Johnson defeat Eugene McCarthy by only 49 per cent to 42 per cent. Kennedy announced his candidacy four days later.
“The presidential campaign was thrown together so quickly that it seems almost a blur — a montage of planes, buses, motorcades, speeches, enormous passionate crowds,” Greenfield recalls. There was shock when Johnson withdrew from the race on March 31. Kennedy still faced a difficult contest against McCarthy and eventually Humphrey, who had establishment party support.
Kennedy filled stadiums with people eager to hear him speak. They lined the roads to catch a glimpse of his motorcade. And when he spoke from the bonnet of a car, the crowds surged so much that security struggled to keep hold of him. He lost cufflinks and shoes, and his clothes frequently were torn.
He believed politics was “an honourable profession” and often ended speeches by paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw: “Some people see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’ ”
His speeches were compelling. On April 4, Kennedy announced to a predominantly black audience in a poor neighbourhood of Indianapolis that MLK had been killed. With only a few notes, he spoke eloquently about the need for “love and wisdom” rather than “violence or lawlessness”.
In May, Kennedy chalked up victories in the Indiana and Nebraska primaries. But he suffered a jolting defeat in Oregon, making him the first Kennedy to lose an election. Victories in California and South Dakota, an urban and rural state, saw him regain momentum. But Kennedy was behind Humphrey in the convention delegate count when he was killed. And he was still far from universally popular.
It is impossible to know whether he would have won the nomination. “The party was controlled by unions and party bosses, and Hubert Humphrey was their guy,” Thomas says. “But RFK had popular momentum.” Dallek is more certain: “I think he would have won the nomination and would have been elected president.”
Greenfield thinks it would have been “tough” for Kennedy to win the nomination but vanden Heuvel believes he had “a very good chance”. Edelman says party bosses such as Chicago mayor Richard Daley would have realised that Kennedy had the best chance of winning the election and ensured his nomination. After the assassination, vanden Heuvel recalls meeting McCarthy, who offered to switch his support behind Ted Kennedy, if he could be persuaded to run. Humphrey offered Ted the vice-presidential spot on his ticket. But it was too much to contemplate. “Ted was still in a state of shock,” vanden Heuvel says.
Robert Kennedy was aware of the risk of assassination. While walking on the street, he ducked whenever a car backfired, and he shuddered when a firecracker went off during a campaign event. He was a fatalistic. “He did not talk about it,” Edelman recalls. “But he lived every day on the basis that he wouldn’t be here the next day.”
After Kennedy’s funeral at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, a 21-car train transported his body to Washington, DC for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Millions of people — young and old, rich and poor, black and white, Latino and Native American — stood along the tracks to pay a final tribute. In the searing heat, as the special service train rolled along, Americans from all walks of life stood together. Bands played. Priests and nuns prayed. Soldiers saluted. Kids ran alongside. Others stood silent or waved. And they held signs that read “So long, Bobby” and “God bless you, RFK”.
Kennedy left a lasting imprint on his nation and its politics. “He was smart, tough and compassionate,” vanden Heuvel says. “He would have tried to bring the country together. His spirit and his love for those who needed help will cause his memory to go on for a very long time.”
A searing indictment of FBI
Americans deserve a full accounting of the missteps of James Comey and the FBI.
Trump’s good news day
Those repeated claims of no collusion now have credence.