EXCERPT: 1968 in America, by Charles Kaiser

The next morning, Kennedy seemed suddenly desperate. He promised to quit the race if McCarthy beat him in California. And, for the first time, he agreed to a debate. “I’m not the same candidate I was before Oregon, and I can’t claim that I am,” he said. McCarthy switched to a larger chartered jet to accommodate his swelling press corps. Ronald Reagan said he was “delighted” by Kennedy’s defeat. Nevertheless, on the streets of Los Angeles that day, there were tremendous crowds, the screaming, grabbing, worshiping crowds Bobby loved, the mobs that always stole his cuff links and squeezed his hands until they bled. He said that after Oregon, Los Angeles felt like “Resurrection City.” The next day he took a whistle-stop tour from Fresno to Sacramento. “My family eats more tomatoes than any family I know,” said Bobby, “and my wife and children all wear cotton clothes. I’m doing more for the farmer than McCarthy or Humphrey.” In Watts, McCarthy gave a qualified endorsement to Black Power.

On Friday, Pierre Salinger explained why only one debate was necessary between Kennedy and McCarthy: “Studies of the 1960 debates between JFK and Nixon clearly showed that the only one that anybody paid any attention to was the first.” McCarthy compared Kennedy’s newest warning, that he would quit if he lost again, to “the threats of a child holding his breath unless you do something for him.”

Saturday was showdown day. The only debate between Kennedy and McCarthy would be broadcast nationally that evening by ABC. Since Kennedy had resisted this encounter for so long, most people assumed he was the underdog. He closeted himself with his aides in self-conscious emulation of the “skull sessions” his brother used in 1960 to prepare for Nixon. McCarthy was briefed by his speechwriters, Larner and Gorman—and Robert Lowell. Then Lowell paid an unofficial call on Kennedy and got a lecture on why McCarthy should get out of the race. The poet did not enjoy the experience. “I felt like Rudolf Hess parachuting into Scotland,” he told Blair Clark.

In different ways during the debate, each candidate managed to corroborate the worst fears of their fans, and their enemies. The main controversy started after McCarthy suggested that some ghetto residents should have the opportunity to move into the suburbs, to avoid “adopting a kind of apartheid in this country.” Spotting an opportunity, Kennedy quickly distorted McCarthy’s statement: “You say you are going to take ten thousand black people and move them into Orange County,” he said. Orange County was very conservative and very white, and McCarthy had said nothing of the kind. Kennedy had invented the number and the location to make a none-too-subtle appeal to white racism. McCarthy partisans, outraged by the fabrication, waited impatiently for their man to correct the record. They waited in vain: McCarthy never bothered to contradict his opponent. One McCarthy aide wondered if he had “merely grown bored.”

In an hour McCarthy had dissipated the momentum of Oregon. The Minnesotan thought “it had turned out almost a draw.” Larner believed “Gene had the better of it because he was cool while Bobby was undeniably cheap; yet there was a way in which Gene lost that debate—lost as a man and as a leader.” Tom Finney, McCarthy’s newest campaign guru, was disgusted: “He flubbed it! Blew it! Threw it away! How can you get him elected?” A Los Angeles Times poll said viewers, by a ratio of two-and-a-half to one, felt Kennedy had won the encounter.”

On Sunday in the New York Times, Charlotte Curtis reported the newest bumper sticker in California: FIRST ETHEL, NOW US. That morning McCarthy finally hit back at his opponent. He accused Kennedy of “scare tactics” and a “crude distortion” of his proposals, but it was much too late to repair the damage. Kennedy replied that if McCarthy felt he had not been precise, “he had ample opportunity to respond when we were face to face.”

The day before the primary Kennedy traveled in an open car through San Francisco’s Chinatown. His wife, Ethel, slumped in her seat when she thought she heard shots—six loud bangs. They were only firecrackers, and Bobby never flinched, but he did ask a reporter running alongside to climb into the car to comfort his wife.

Kennedy slept late on election day; the polls said he would win. He was staying at the Malibu home of John Frankenheimer, the director of The Manchurian Candidate, and six of his children had been flown out from Hickory Hill to be with him. Twelve-year-old David dived into the Pacific and disappeared in the undertow. Bobby dived in after him, bruising his forehead in the course of the rescue, but father and son were both fine when they emerged from the water. Then Bobby had lunch with Teddy White. He told him he hoped McCarthy’s kids would finally come over to him if he won that evening. He was tense through the afternoon until White got the first projections from CBS. The network’s exit poll indicated he would beat McCarthy by eight points. For the first time since Johnson’s abdication, Kennedy began to relax.

The liquor flowed happily in suite 516 of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles that evening. Bobby Kennedy had won the most important victory of his life, and Oregon was just a distant memory. Jimmy Breslin was there, as were George Plimpton and Teddy White; so were Sorensen and Goodwin and Steve Smith, and occasionally Kennedy would retreat into the bathroom with one of them for a moment of privacy.72 South Dakota had also voted that day, and Bobby had won big there, too, with 50 percent of the vote, compared with 30 percent for a delegate slate allied with Humphrey and just 20 percent for McCarthy.73 Teddy White went on television with Walter Cronkite and called the two results “the most complete repudiation of the administration…. This is the clearest revolt yet of a new kind of politics against an old kind of politics.”

CBS kept projecting wider and wider margins of victory for Kennedy—now Cronkite was saying he would beat McCarthy by fourteen points, 52 to 38. Bobby was unusually relaxed in a long interview with Roger Mudd. When the reporter asked him if he would run with Humphrey, Kennedy parried, “In what order?” Then he criticized Humphrey for saying that he was still ready to step aside if Johnson decided to get back into the race. “You’re either in it or you’re not in it,” Kennedy said. Blair Clark came on the air to report McCarthy was in the race to stay, regardless of the outcome that evening. But the atmosphere was somber at McCarthy headquarters at the Beverly Hilton. The comedian Carl Reiner came onstage in the Grand Ballroom. “We’re going to try desperately to make a long evening seem short,” he said.

CBS went off the air at 11:13 P.M. in Los Angeles, when it was 2:13 in the morning on the East Coast. Kennedy still hadn’t made his formal declaration of victory, but at this hour CBS figured even the most serious political junkies wouldn’t mind waiting to watch that part of the celebration the next morning. A reporter in Kennedy’s suite thought the young candidate finally seemed “liberated.” The Kennedy magic was back, and it was definitely Bobby’s magic. He was forty-two, but he still looked barely over thirty. To Kenny O’Donnell, one of the family’s oldest retainers, Kennedy said, “I feel now for the first time that I’ve shaken off the shadow of my brother. I feel I made it on my own.”

By midnight the crowd downstairs was getting rowdy. They were singing “This Land Is Your Land” and chanting, “We want Kennedy!” Bobby told Ethel he was ready to go. Inside the ballroom he stood behind a lectern with a single KENNEDY sticker stuck on it, under the logo of the hotel. He began with baseball: “I want to express my high regard to Don Drysdale, who pitched his sixth straight shutout tonight, and I hope that we have as good fortune in our campaign.” He said California had voted “for peace and for justice and for a government dedicated to giving the people mastery over their own affairs.” He praised McCarthy for “breaking the political logjam” and making “citizen participation a new and powerful force in our political life.” And he asked McCarthy’s troops to join him—“not for myself, but for the cause and the ideas which moved you to begin this great popular movement.” Larner thought it was Bobby’s best speech of the campaign.

Then he thanked everyone: the blacks, the Mexicans, his siblings, his mother, “and all those other Kennedys”; even his dog, Freckles. “What I think is quite clear is that we can work together. We are a great country, an unselfish country, and a compassionate country.” There were no policemen inside the hotel. The crowd went wild, and in the film clip that would be repeated endlessly on television for the rest of the week, dozens of white boaters emblazoned with Kennedy’s image bobbed happily up and down in the ballroom. Finally he was done. “My thanks to all of you. And now it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there!” He gave the V sign, for victory—which also meant peace in 1968—pushed his hair off his forehead in a familiar gesture, then turned to exit through the kitchen.

Andrew West, a radio reporter for KRKD, trailed Kennedy as he left the podium. West had an old-fashioned radio voice: slightly theatrical. This is what his listeners heard:

“How are you going to counter Mr. Humphrey as far as the delegate vote goes?” West asked.

“We’re just going to start to struggle for it,” said the candidate. 

It was 12:16 A.M., and Bobby paused in the kitchen to shake hands with Jesus Perez, a dishwasher. Then West started speaking again—rather hysterically: “Senator Kennedy has been shot. Is that possible? Is that possible? Is it possible ladies and gentlemen? It is possible he has—not only Senator Kennedy. Oh, my God. Senator Kennedy has been shot, and another man, a Kennedy campaign manager—and possibly shot in the head. Rafer Johnson has a hold of the man who apparently has fired the shot.” Now West sounded desperate: “He still has the gun—the gun is pointed at me right at this moment I hope they can get the gun out of his hand. Be very careful, get that gun get that gun GET THAT GUN! Stay away from the gun; stay away from the gun. His hand is frozen. TAKE A HOLD OF HIS THUMB AND BREAK IT IF YOU HAVE TO; GET HIS THUMB! All right, that’s it Rafer, get it, get the gun Rafer. Hold him, hold him. We don’t want another Oswald.”

A British reporter noted, “The blood is always so much more splotched about than you would think from pictures or movies.” In the ballroom next door bewilderment turned into terror. A young girl screamed, “No, God, no! It’s happened again.” A black man pounded the wall. “Why, God, why? Why again? Why another Kennedy?” Six people in the kitchen were hit by the barrage of bullets, but only one was fatally wounded. Most people believed Bobby never regained consciousness, but two witnesses insisted that he had talked with them. When Ethel leaned down over him, she thought she heard her husband ask, “How bad is it?” And Max Behrman, an ambulance attendant, swore Kennedy spoke again when he tried to pick him up. “Please don’t,” said the stricken man. “Please don’t. Don’t lift me.” On the kitchen wall, five feet from where Kennedy had fallen, someone had scrawled five words: “The once and future king.” On West 57th Street in Manhattan, CBS News scrambled to get back on the air. “If he lives, he’ll be president,” someone remarked inside the control room. “And if he dies,” said CBS News president Richard Salant, “we don’t have a camera at the hospital.”

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Featured image of Robert F. Kennedy campaigning in Los Angeles: Wikipedia 

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