RFK Jr., page 7
And then, a few weeks after taking the oath of office, Bobby Kennedy found himself embarking on another challenge: climbing a mountain in Canada’s remote north to honor his late brother. The nearly 14,000-foot-high Mount Kennedy, the highest unclimbed peak in North America, was located in the Yukon, more than 140 miles northwest of the provincial capital Whitehorse, and had been named to honor John F. Kennedy a year after his assassination in 1964. The mountain, in the Saint Elias range, had previously been known as East Hubbard. “I believe it is appropriate35 that Canada’s memorial to him should be a mountain,” said Lester B. Pearson, Canada’s prime minister, in his speech christening the mountain after John F. Kennedy. “A mountain is solid and enduring. Mount Kennedy is a graceful, towering, unencumbered peak . . . a symbol of aspiration and upward reach.” Months later, in January 1965, another Canadian mountain was named for JFK because it was discovered that Mount Logan, also in the Yukon, was, in fact, some 4,000 feet higher than East Hubbard.
Robert Kennedy, then thirty-nine, was flown by Royal Canadian Air Force helicopter to the first base camp at 9,000 feet along with a crew sponsored by National Geographic. The expedition was led by Jim Whittaker, the first American to climb Mount Everest in 1963. From the camp, he was to climb to the top, a 5,000-foot ascent. He took an American flag, two Canadian flags (the Union Jack and the newly adopted Maple Leaf), the Kennedy family crest, and a copy of his brother’s inauguration address to leave at the top. Whittaker and another member of the climbing team unroped him near the mountain’s peak, allowing him to climb the last fifty yards to the top on his own. It was a huge public relations coup36 for Bobby, as well as a personal memorial to his beloved brother.
When Bobby returned to base camp, crew members fed him steak, instant mashed potatoes, ice cream, and “the heel of a bottle of Madeira37 wine which someone had stashed in a pack sack,” according to a Whitehorse newspaper, which ended its report with a description of the newly minted senator buying a round of drinks for locals at the Capital Hotel. Kennedy paid with a check, which Cal Miller, the owner of the hotel, refused to cash. “I told him I wanted to keep it as a souvenir of the next President of the United States,” he said. Miller’s comment proved prescient. Three years after climbing the mountain to honor his dead older brother, Bobby Kennedy would make his own ill-fated decision to run for president.
Chapter 3
“Everybody Takes Their Licks”
Robert Kennedy’s children were dressed in their Sunday best as they sat with their mother on either side of the podium in the ornate Senate Caucus Room on Capitol Hill to await the arrival of their father, who was scheduled to announce his bid for the White House on March 16, 1968. The Kennedy boys were dressed in dark suits, stiff white shirts, and ties, carefully styled to match their father’s outfit. The Kennedy girls wore dainty white gloves and their best dresses. Kathleen Kennedy, then sixteen, stood out in a brunette bob and Kelly green suit that was an almost exact match of the industrial broadloom carpet as a sea of dark-suited reporters and political supporters poured into the room. Many stood on tiptoe, straining with cameras held aloft to get a photo of Ethel and the Kennedy children. Ethel was resplendent in a bouffant hairdo and tailored suit, her tanned face and trim build a testament to her rugged Skakel forebears. She was pregnant with the couple’s eleventh child, although no one had yet made a public announcement that she was expecting a baby.
Correspondent Roger Mudd, who was providing live commentary from CBS’s New York City studios, noted that the Senate Caucus Room, where John F. Kennedy had made his own campaign announcement on January 12, 1960, resembled “a gilded German nightclub” with its soaring ceilings, gold-covered eagles, and indirect lighting.
Supporters broke into applause as Robert Kennedy finally entered the room flanked by his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, whose signature pipe seemed to lead him through the surging crowd. Despite the wild applause, Mudd’s commentary reminded the audience that the senator from New York had his work cut out for him: He faced “almost solid opposition1” from his own party, with only three Democratic state chairmen—in Oregon, New York, and Tennessee—supporting his bid for the country’s highest office.
As if to assuage his critics, he seemed to back into his historic speech when he announced, “I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man.” In the same room where he had once so combatively presided over the Senate’s hearings into organized crime, he warned that the country was on a “perilous course” and that he had “strong feelings about what must be done.”
During the question period after the speech, he brushed off suggestions that he was an opportunist in announcing his run for the presidency on the heels of Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy’s stellar showing in the polls against President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary four days earlier. While McCarthy had lost that race with 42 percent of the vote to Johnson’s 49 percent, the result had been critical because it had revealed Johnson’s vulnerability within his own party. More important, as Bobby pointed out, New Hampshire highlighted the deep divisions within the party and the country itself, especially over the war in Vietnam. Years earlier, Johnson had considered McCarthy as a running mate before settling on his own vice president, Hubert Humphrey.
“I run for the presidency because I want the Democratic Party and the United States of America to stand for hope instead of despair, for reconciliation of men instead of the growing risk of world war,” Bobby said.
Two weeks after Bobby entered the race, Johnson, whose approval rating had plummeted, largely as the result of the Vietnam War, announced his withdrawal. Less than a month later, Humphrey declared that he would run for president.
Like McCarthy, Bobby focused his campaign on the Vietnam War, but his emphasis was on uniting the country and helping the poor—his coalition of the “have-nots,” as he liked to describe the people who came out in force during his campaign and treated him like a rock star.
And he was determined to exploit the memory of his older brother to win. It was no accident that he chose the Senate Caucus Room to jump-start his presidential campaign. His buttons and placards were nearly exact replicas of John F. Kennedy’s campaign materials with a black-and-white portrait of the handsome candidate in a red, white, and blue setting urging supporters to “Vote for Our Next President, Robert F. Kennedy.” Unable to summon the party leaders and the country’s biggest unions to back his candidacy, his entourage leaned on Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers and civil rights leaders, including John Lewis, a cofounder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and speaker at the 1963 March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King Jr.
In fact, Bobby made his most impassioned speech extemporaneously in Indiana when he addressed a rally of mostly Black supporters on the day Martin Luther King had been shot. It fell to the former attorney general, who had once authorized wiretaps of the civil rights leader, to tell the crowd that he was dead, and in doing so he spoke publicly for the first time about his own grief after his brother’s assassination nearly five years earlier. “Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings,” he said in the address in which he quoted the Greek poet Aeschylus. “He died in the cause of that effort. For those of you who are Black, and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.” Bobby would go on to travel through several states, shaking so many hands during a frenetic eighty-two-day campaign for president that his hands would be chafed and bleeding at the end of each day. “He identified with people who hurt2,” recalled his campaign manager, Fred Dutton. “Maybe it was because he hurt.”
Bill Barry, his bodyguard, a former football player at Kent State, spent hours holding him around the waist3 to keep him from being lifted into the crowds that thronged the streets as adoring fans lurched perilously close to the open convertible where he stood to greet them. “The California crowds were much more exuberant and rough and bruising than any other crowds that we hit,” said Barry, who on one occasion “hit face down on the pavement” when he tried to prevent Bobby from being pulled into the crowd.
One summer morning in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Bobby’s entourage, including Ethel, ducked at what sounded like eight gunshots. Only Bobby was left standing, according to reporter Jules Witcover, who covered the campaign. “It was as though he had prepared himself4 for just such a moment, and to endure through it,” said Witcover.
That moment came a few days later when Robert Kennedy was shot along with several others in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles while making his way from the podium in the ballroom where he had just made his victory speech. “Kennedy, you son of a bitch!” yelled Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian Christian militant, who emptied all eight bullets from the chamber of his .22-caliber Iver Johnson Cadet revolver. In the melee of screaming aides, campaign reporters, and kitchen staff, Juan Romero, a seventeen-year-old busboy who had reached out to shake the candidate’s hand as he walked through the kitchen, cradled the wounded candidate, who fell to the ground in a pool of blood.
“I kneeled down to him5 and I could see his lips moving, so I put my ear next to his lips and I heard him say, ‘Is everybody OK?’ I said, ‘Yes, everybody’s OK,’” recalled Romero, a Mexican immigrant, years after the shooting. “I put my hand between the cold concrete and his head just to make him comfortable.” Romero remembered that he had had a rosary in his shirt pocket. “I took it out, thinking that he would need it a lot more than me,” he said. “I wrapped it around his right hand and then they wheeled him away.”
Bobby was rushed to Central Receiving Hospital about a mile away before being transferred to Good Samaritan Hospital, where doctors performed emergency neurosurgery to remove the bullets and bone fragments that had lodged in his brain. He had been hit at close range by three bullets. The fatal shot had entered behind his right ear. The other two shots had entered just below his right armpit.
Although some of Bobby’s children were in Los Angeles during the primary, Hubert Humphrey sent Air Force Two to pick up Kennedy, his sister Kathleen, and his brother Joe, who were at different boarding schools on the East Coast. Kennedy was roused from his sleep at Georgetown Prep, a Jesuit high school in Bethesda, Maryland. A car was waiting to take him home. At Hickory Hill, Ethel’s personal secretary, Jinx Hack, told him that his father had been shot. “But I was still thinking he’d be OK,” wrote Kennedy in his family memoir. “He was, after all, indestructible.” But when he heard that all the campaign offices were shutting down, “I knew my dad was going to die.”
Outside Good Samaritan Hospital, thousands of supporters, some holding “Pray for Bobby” signs, stood, waiting for news. The hospital floor where Bobby was in surgery had been cleared except for close friends and family, including Martin Luther King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, astronaut John Glenn, singer Andy Williams, and Olympic athlete and actor Rafer Johnson, as well as Kennedy’s aunts Jackie, Pat, and Jean, uncle Ted, and Jean’s husband, Steve Smith, he wrote. “My father lay on a gurney6 with his head bandaged and his face bruised, especially around the eyes. A priest had already administered last rites. My mother sat beside him, holding his hand. She stayed there all night. I sat down across the bed from her and took hold of his big wrestler’s hand. I prayed and said goodbye to him, listening to the pumps that kept him breathing.” Each of his ten children took turns sitting with their father and praying opposite Ethel.
Fifteen-year-old Joe Kennedy was deputized to tell his brothers and sisters assembled outside the operating room that their father was dead. At the hospital, Kennedy described a “hellish environment7” as doctors and nurses who had been attending to Bobby wailed and screamed after he died. He was forty-two years old. Ethel, thirty-eight years old and pregnant, was the newest Kennedy widow.
When the body was taken back to New York City, more than a hundred thousand mourners lined up to pay their respects at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The coffin was placed in the nave of the church, and with their grandmother Rose the family held a private service. “Jackie broke down and wept as she hadn’t allowed herself to when we buried Uncle Jack,” wrote Kennedy in his memoir. On Friday, during the wake, the family took turns “standing honor guard” around the flag-draped casket while the mourners filed past.
Bobby’s eldest sons, Joe, Robert Jr., and David, participated in the Mass at the historic church. Leonard Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic, and Williams, a friend of the family, sang “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Bobby’s favorite song. The mourners who packed the church sang along. Williams and his wife had been in Los Angeles during the primary and had been on their way to meet Bobby and Ethel for a celebration at the Factory disco when he saw that Bobby had been shot on the TV in his hotel room.
The crowds that lined the train route as Bobby’s casket traveled from New York’s Penn Station to Washington’s Union Station for his burial at Arlington National Cemetery were somber and stood at attention. The journey, normally four hours long, took double the amount of time because of the massive crowds; some two million people lined the route to pay their respects. Windows were removed from the the final train car—there were twenty-one cars in total with seven hundred campaign workers, family, and friends on board—and the casket was propped up on six chairs so that mourners would have a clear view as the train passed. Two people died in Elizabeth, New Jersey, when a train running on a parallel track struck a group of mourners at a crossing. One of them was cut in half—a scene witnessed by David, twelve years old, whose head was outside the train window during most of the trip. The train was delayed as organizers demanded that such an accident not happen again. Penn Central ended up canceling all northbound trains and provided a “pilot train” for security. At Union Station, Lyndon Johnson met the train with a hearse that drove the coffin to Arlington National Cemetery, where Bobby would be buried next to his older brother.
“No one came after him8 who could speak simultaneously for the unemployed black teenager and the white worker trapped in a dead-end job and feeling misunderstood,” wrote reporter Jack Newfield, echoing what many of Bobby’s supporters felt about his passing.
***
It was Joe Kennedy, a few months shy of his sixteenth birthday, who was allowed to sit in his father’s chair at the dining room table days after the burial. Ethel had pronounced him “man of the house” on June 15, the same day the family assembled around the table at Hickory Hill to celebrate David’s thirteenth birthday. For Ethel, Joe had surely earned the distinction for the very mature way he had carried himself after his father’s death. On the train that had carried his father’s body to Washington, it was Joe who had dressed up in one of his father’s suits and made the rounds of the mourners with his mother, thanking them for their support.
Perhaps it was jealousy over Joe’s new role in the family that drove Kennedy in his endless practical jokes, for during the lackluster celebration on David’s birthday that year, he spiked everyone’s drink with a laxative.
Of all the Kennedy children, David was likely the hardest hit by his father’s death. On the final days of the campaign in California, he had had premonitions of his father dying, and on the day of his death he nearly drowned in the undertow at Malibu. The family was staying at the home of Hollywood director John Frankenheimer. It was Bobby who saved David when he saw him struggling in the surf.
On the night of the California primary, David Kennedy was alone in a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel watching his father’s victory speech on television when he saw the news of the shooting. He watched the chaos on the screen and his father’s head being cradled by the busboy, whose hands were covered in blood. In the confusion no one thought to check on him, assuming that he had gone to sleep. By the time astronaut John Glenn and the author Theodore White looked in on him several hours later, the twelve-year-old was still sitting in front of the television set, unable to speak.
“He was alone9 and supposed to be asleep, but the excitement of the day had kept him awake,” wrote his older sister Kathleen Kennedy. “In the aftermath of the tragedy, it was some time before someone came to check on him. It was Presidential biographer Theodore White who found the boy ‘devastated at the sight he had just seen.’ Without stopping to rationalize why, White ordered a soothing hot chocolate from room service and cradled and comforted the shaken youngster.”
In the period immediately following his father’s death, as the children were home from school, Kennedy’s practical jokes became a constant thorn in Ethel’s side. At a memorial Mass for his father he played a trick on Phil Kirby, a Hyannis Port neighbor who had been asked to assist at the Mass. Kirby had asked the priest to let him know when he had to ring the bell at the Mass. The priest said he would tap him on the shoulder when it was time. At the beginning of the Mass, Kirby felt a tap and rang the bell; he was mortified when he realized he had done so at the wrong time and looked back at the smiling Kennedy.
Ethel, who had a short fuse when it came to her children, sank into anger and depression after her husband’s death and ordered Bobby Jr. to leave the house more than once. When the family flew with Uncle Teddy to Connecticut to charter a boat to the family compound in Hyannis Port, Ethel was so angry with both Bobby Jr. and David that she hit them with a hairbrush and began to make plans to send them away. “Everyone takes their licks,” she told her children, according to Kennedy’s memoir, reminding them that there were children in Watts and Harlem who had lost their parents and didn’t have the support they had.
