85 Days

The Last Campaign of Robert Kennedy

Jules Witcover

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780062463913
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062660565
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The "definitive account" ( Washington Post) of Robert F. Kennedy's seminal presidential campaign.

85 Days is veteran Washington journalist Jules Witcover's masterpiece of political reportage. It brilliantly captures a lost moment in time when the politics of conviction seemed to converge with America's youth movement in opposition to the Vietnam War. At its center was the charismatic Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the slain President John F. Kennedy. Robert Kennedy's impassioned opposition to the Vietnam War, and his vision for a more egalitarian United States, launched him on one of the most memorable, though brief, campaigns in U.S. political history.

Witcover's driving narrative follows Kennedy's campaign throughout the primary season, as Kennedy mulled a run, developed his core issues and supporter base, and shot to the top of the polls, culminating in a victory in California just two days before he was tragically killed. A timeless work of political journalism,  85 Days captures the character and spirit of a man who came to symbolize an unforgettable era in America.

CHAPTER ONE

Fateful Delay

THE DECISION NOT TO RUN

ON THE MORNING of January 30, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York was sitting at a breakfast table in the private President’s Room at the National Press Club, answering probing questions from about fifteen political writers and columnists. It was one of those subsurface meetings that have become part of the institutional life of Washington, in which a prominent public figure speaks candidly under a protective arrangement that permits direct quotation only with his approval and limits the rest strictly for the newsmen’s “background.” The pertinent question had just been asked: were there any circumstances under which he would be a candidate for the Presidency in 1968 against Lyndon B. Johnson?

“No,” Senator Kennedy said, “I can’t conceive of any circumstances.”

A reporter began to suggest some possibilities. Maybe, after five years in the White House, President Johnson would not seek reelection.

“You’re talking,” Kennedy interjected, “about an act of God.”

From this remark, most of those sitting around the private breakfast table concluded that it would take that, and nothing less, to draw Robert Francis Kennedy into direct combat with Lyndon Johnson for the Presidency in an election year that already was one month spent. His own candidacy, he told the group, would tear the party apart, probably resulting in the election of Richard Nixon and a Republican House that would endanger worthwhile national programs in which he believed.

“If I ran I’d have to run in all the primaries,” he said. “I don’t think I could win the nomination. I would have to win every primary.” While he would stand a “fair chance” in each one as it came along, he said, sweeping all of them would be tough. He likened the situation to a horse who might win any given race, but who still would not be likely to be first in a string of them.

But having said this, Robert Kennedy clearly was a man in turmoil. During the backgrounder, this fact surfaced unmistakably in his expressions of deep concern about the Vietnam War and about the alienation abroad in the land—the disquiet among whites and Negroes, the young and elderly, the wealthy and poor. “The cause hasn’t been analyzed and dealt with,” he said. “There’s affluence, yet a feeling of unhappiness in the country. If someone touched the heart of that, and how to bring the country back together—if he could bind the wounds, appeal to the generous nature of Americans. . . .”

What the reporters around the breakfast table were hearing, of course, was the framework of what Robert Kennedy’s own campaign would be if he were to run. But in all the compassionate words, there was an overriding sense of futility, of personal helplessness. “If I thought there was anything I could do about it,” Kennedy said near the end, “I would do it.” He was trying to persuade them that there wasn’t, but at the same time he was trying to persuade himself. As one of the witnesses said later, “It was like seeing a man do battle with himself right there before your eyes.” After one of his longer explanations for not running, Kennedy concluded: “I know that isn’t very satisfactory. But I don’t see what I can do.” And as the backgrounder broke up, and he shook hands with his hosts, he asked of more than one of them: “Am I doing the right thing?” To some, he murmured, “I know what everybody is saying”—that when the chips were down, he lacked the courage of his convictions.

For Robert Kennedy, whose whole life had been a series of strong positive responses to personal, physical and political challenge, it was the greatest irony to find himself thus in the grip of such uncharacteristic uncertainty and inaction. But forces and circumstances that had been building all through 1967, causing him both political and emotional torment, now were restricting his freedom of action.

By the fall of 1967, two issues were dominating public concern and feeding a growing mood of disaffection in the United States. The first was the war in Vietnam—mired in stalemate, consuming American men and money at an ever-spiraling rate, casting a pall of pessimism and gloom over the conduct of public affairs in every area. The second was the depth of racial unrest at home—the big-city riots, the escalating militancy of the Negro revolt, the consequent demand among fearful whites for stiffer repression and a diminishing interest among them in the removal of racial injustices at the root of the ferment.

Central to these two causes of national disenchantment was the personality of Lyndon Johnson, whose conduct of office, whose style, appearance and excesses drew the lightning of all the dissent. Johnson had contributed to the national climate by his own peculiar brand of dissembling—raising the American stakes in Vietnam by a series of camouflaged intensifications of the conflict; voicing hope for military victory and willingness to talk peace at times when neither was present; promising the eradication of poverty and injustice at home when neither was a realistic possibility in light of federal programs and public attitudes then holding sway.

The two major dilemmas facing the United States, one abroad and one at home, were not of course of Johnson’s making, and for all his deficiencies it could not be said that he had not grappled mightily with them. But he had been elected in 1964 as a kind of super-doer, and he was not getting done those things that most needed to be done. Unlike his two immediate predecessors in the White House, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson could not count on any storehouse of public goodwill to see him through adversity. He was not, as one of his closest advisers was said once to have told him point-blank, “a likable person.” When things went wrong, his image as an insensitive head-knocker impervious to the niceties of personal or diplomatic behavior invariably generated the worst possible public response.

And on the two major issues of the war and urban unrest, and inevitably in the matter of the deep suspicion and animosity toward the occupant of the White House, it was Robert Kennedy who stood as the unchallenged touchstone of the national dissent within the Democratic Party. Not only was he the brother, confidant and political heir of a martyred President and the emotional link to the recent past of taste and elegance in the conduct of national affairs; he also was a bridge to the new America of concerned, involved youth who were particularly disenchanted with the war, the bigotry and Lyndon Johnson. In that period in the months of September and October, those who wanted to change things—and had any pragmatic hope of doing so—had no one else to look to but Robert Kennedy, then in his forty-second year of an eventful and controversial life.

The leading elements of political activism in the dissent—college students and faculty talking of a new politics of participation, well-educated middle-class Americans still embracing the old liberalism, all but the most extremist Negro leaders—saw him as the one man who could chart a new national course. Some valued him chiefly for his electability—the late, deified President’s brother whose own ascendancy was somehow preordained, and whose destiny was clearly written in the huge and often frenzied crowds that turned out to see, hear and touch him. There was always the incredible compulsion to touch him—perhaps to take hold of a moment in history or at least to brush against it, or to communicate the compassion that went out from one human being to another in a mutual personal and national loss whose pain lingered.

But there also were others, the campus crowd especially, and the Negroes and white immigrant minorities, who believed they recognized in Robert Kennedy an empathy for their disillusionment with American life. For these groups, the trouble was keyed to Vietnam and to the racial crisis at home, and for many of them the two were inseparable. So it was with Kennedy too. Accordingly, he was better positioned than any other man in public life to forge from these elements and their concerns a potent political coalition that could challenge—and maybe even bring down—the tradition and the power that were supposed to assure an incumbent President renomination by his party.

Kennedy, since his election to the United States Senate from New York in November, 1964, had earned this role as the political embodiment of the nation’s dissatisfaction. He was the first politician with serious aspirations and chances for the Presidency to rise in the Senate and broach the unthinkable: that the National Liberation Front would have to be part of any negotiation to end the Vietnam War. He observed on February 19, 1966, that the United States would have to start thinking about the possibility of a coalition government in Saigon in which the NLF would play some role. The idea, at the time Kennedy first expressed it, was written down by many as the greatest political faux pas of his career. Indeed, the public mood had not begun to reject the jingoism that the Johnson Administration had spread like a protective coating over all it did in Vietnam, and the general disposition, except among the early Vietnam critics, was to agree with Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey’s likening of the Kennedy notion to letting “a fox in the chicken coop.” Throughout 1966 and 1967, Kennedy continued to hound the Administration about its refusal to halt the bombing of North Vietnam and to enter into peace talks. In other areas too—delay in achieving a treaty against nuclear arms proliferation, dealing with Communist China, the decay of the Alliance for Progress in Latin America, the failure to cope with hard-core poverty in the big-city ghettos and in Appalachia—Kennedy hammered away at the executive branch controlled by his own party.

Thus, as the 1968 Presidential election year approached, Kennedy had ample grounds and credentials, in terms of the major issues, for contesting Johnson’s renomination. He was deeply aware of the dark mood of America and he fully shared the sense of many that the country, somehow, had lost its way in the four and one half years since the bright promise of his brother’s leadership had been snuffed out by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas. And when all was said and done he too placed much of the blame at the feet of his brother’s successor—though he went out of his way to avoid personality clashes with Johnson, to a degree few outside his inner circle ever realized.

It was inevitable, in the light of the history of unhappy personal relations between the two men, that much of Kennedy’s issue-oriented criticism was interpreted almost entirely in terms of the Kennedy-Johnson feud. That fact caused Kennedy great consternation throughout 1966 and 1967, and no more so than in the fall of 1967, when he began seriously to weigh the possibility of challenging the renomination of an incumbent President. There was no doubt that he wanted to depose Johnson, nor could there be any doubt that he considered the President the usurper of his brother’s New Frontier. But Kennedy needed, for himself, to move as his own man, for his own good reasons unrelated to the bitterness of the past. He was convinced—or at least had rationalized—that what was driving him chiefly was not personal pique toward Johnson, but a broader, impersonal certainty that Johnson’s policies at home and abroad were tearing the country apart. The question was: could he run against Johnson on the issues, without having the whole effort dismissed as a personal vendetta, thus splitting the Democratic Party and the country wide open, delivering the White House to a Republican and, in the process, destroying his own political future?

The feud, of course, was very real, despite periodic efforts by both men to deny its existence. In background, education, modus operandi, circle of friends, heroes and foes, the two were utterly different men. Kennedy, as everyone in public life knew, hadn’t wanted Johnson as John F. Kennedy’s running mate in 1960, and Johnson had rejected Robert Kennedy as his own Vice Presidential candidate in 1964. Moreover, there always was the bitter irony of this crude Texan—flamboyant, earthy, insensitive to subtlety—assuming the Presidency that had been so elegantly carried by Robert Kennedy’s dashing, polished, sophisticated brother. For the public, no one seemed to have a greater, more justifiable dislike for the man who gained the White House as a result of the Kennedy family tragedy than the younger brother who once had been the New Frontier’s second most influential figure.

Actually, both Kennedy and Johnson often expressed regret to associates that there had to be ill will between them. Still, their relationship, purely in terms of governmental responsibilities, was a sore point to each when the other had the upper hand. Johnson resented the fact that Kennedy during his brother’s Administration had continued to consider him to be outside the President’s close inner group; Robert Kennedy as holdover Attorney General under Johnson and later as a Senator chafed at the short shrift he received. When Kennedy returned from fact-finding trips to Latin America and other places in placid times he never was asked to tell Johnson or the State Department what he had learned. But when he went to South Africa as a Senator in 1966 and won wide acclaim for his outspoken opposition to apartheid there—at a time Johnson was being mightily embarrassed by Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Vietnam—the summons finally came. Stopping at his New York apartment on his return, Kennedy got a phone call from Walt W. Rostow, Johnson’s chief national security adviser, asking him to come to the White House that night. It was the first such invitation to Kennedy since he had left the Johnson Administration, and he was bitter. “That s.o.b.,” he told a reporter when he hung up the phone. “All the other times I came back with something to tell, and he never asked me.” Kennedy deliberately waited until the next day to accede to Johnson’s request.

Yet the impact of the feud on the public was a source of continuing concern to Kennedy. It was not because he found fault with the premise that he did indeed dislike Johnson, but because he saw the feud explanation as a great oversimplification for his dissent, robbing him of a political identity of his own. “He couldn’t look at Lyndon Johnson without the eyes of the country trained on him,” a Kennedy intimate recalled later. “And he felt it more acutely because it had some basis in truth.” Nor was Kennedy’s concern without personal political motivation. He was fully aware that one of his own major political problems was the public impression that he was “ruthless”—that he acted out of personal vindictiveness or righteousness to get his way.

Unlike other politicians who deal with the electorate from the start of their careers, Robert Kennedy had been essentially a private man for most of his sixteen years in government. His only real constituency was his brother John, and cast in the role of a behind-the-scenes lieutenant, his function was not to be popular, but to get things done. After 1963, when he decided he must become a public man with his own constituency in order to pursue his aims, all that changed. The manner in which he did things, and how he dealt with people, became a matter of great public interest. Robert Kennedy soon learned this fact, and became painfully aware that his early brashness had left a scar on his public image. He labored to remove it, tried to joke it away and was intimidated by it. It became a key element in his feud with Johnson; the nature of that relationship, and of Johnson’s ascendancy to the White House, always kept that scar in public view. Any move against Johnson and toward the Presidency itself would be interpreted by many as entirely personal and self-serving.

And beyond the political damage this interpretation could do to his chances of success, there were other equally deep-seated apprehensions: that the fiber of his criticism would be dismissed without consideration of its merits, that the substance would be lost in the reflex reaction of attributing it out of hand to the feud; that a Kennedy candidacy might harden Johnson’s position on the war, or even lead him to escalate the fighting and the stakes; that Kennedy would sacrifice his seemingly inevitable political rise to power for nothing.

There probably was not a major policy statement Kennedy made in the Senate from 1965 through 1967 that was not carefully reviewed by him or his chief aides to focus criticism on the actions or policies of Johnson, or on a problem, rather than on the personality in the White House. But the public and the press were conditioned by then to gauge the current temperature of the feud through Kennedy’s speeches. Because he was attacking or at least expressing reservations about a spectrum of Johnson policies, it was certain that each new statement would be met with a rash of stories on the latest chapter of the Kennedy-Johnson personal breach. Perhaps Kennedy was naive to expect any other reaction, but it constantly irked him.

Kennedy’s first major break with the Johnson Administration over the Vietnam War came in his February, 1966, statement that to admit the NLF “to a share of power and responsibility” in the Saigon government was “at the heart of the hope for a negotiated settlement.” Kennedy had labored and agonized long over the speech and had talked to many friends in the Administration about it, trying to keep it issue-oriented and on target. But the statement was viewed immediately in the press as a soft-line escape scheme and the deepest evidence yet of the Kennedy-Johnson feud. He spent the next several days seeking to counteract those impressions, even to the point of conferring with Johnson’s press secretary and his own friend, Bill D. Moyers, about ways to narrow the gap that had been opened by the statement.

A year later, Kennedy returned from Paris after talks with the French foreign office and was called on the White House carpet by Johnson for supposedly indicating he had picked up a Vietnam peace feeler there. He denied it in a stormy forty-five-minute meeting that also added much fuel—justifiably—to the feud talk. The session reinforced Kennedy’s concern about his ability to effectively oppose the war in the face of his relationship with Johnson—and his impression that any time he criticized the war, it only hardened the President’s policies. The Senator took the public posture that he supported Johnson for reelection, a close confidant recalled later, “because he felt it liberated him to criticize the war—that it took his criticism out of the bounds of personality. It may have been inconsistent, but that was how he felt.”

A week after that early February, 1967, White House meeting, Kennedy gave a major speech at a University of Chicago seminar on China, urging “a search for a new China policy.” As he prepared the speech, the low ebb of his always rocky relationship with Johnson was much in his mind—and in the consciousness of the press and public. On the late afternoon of the day of delivery, the advance text was provided in Washington to Andrew Glass, then of the Washington Post, and me, the only two reporters who would be accompanying him to Chicago. There was no general distribution of the text; it was given to us because a late and hurried departure was anticipated and the lead time enabled us to write early stories before leaving. As we prepared our accounts, Kennedy and aides reviewed the speech text in his Senate office. It was decided to insert a phrase specifically absolving any one President for American policy failures toward Communist China—an obvious effort to keep the focus on the substance of the criticism and off the...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Fateful Delay: The Decision Not to Run
• Chapter 2: An End to Caution: The Decision to Run
• Chapter 3: The First Days: All-Out Against Johnson
• Chapter 4: Indiana: Quest for an Issue
• Chapter 5: Nebraska: “Disposing” of McCarthy
• Chapter 6: Oregon: First Taste of Defeat
• Chapter 7: California: The Comeback
• Chapter 8: Triumph—and Despair: The Last Days
• Chapter 9: The Last Farewells: The Long Trip Home
• Chapter 10: The Letting Go: Camelot Goes On
• Epilogue: The Legacy
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Photos Section
• About the Author
• Praise
• Also by Jules Witcover
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher