Matthews - Bobby Kennedy

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ALSO BY CHRIS MATTHEWS

Tip and the Gipper

Jack Kennedy

Kennedy & Nixon

Hardball

Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think

American

Lifes a Campaign

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Copyright 2017 by Christopher J. Matthews

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Jacket Design By Jackie Seow

Front Jacket Photograph By Bill Eppridge/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images

Back Jacket Photograph Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos

Spine Photograph By Hulton Archive/Stringer/Getty Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-5011-1186-0

ISBN 978-1-5011-1188-4 (ebook)

PHOTO CREDITS

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John F. Kennedy Presidential Library:

Magnum:

For Michael, Thomas, and Caroline, to learn from this mans faith and share his lived compassion

Man is Spirit

W INSTON C HURCHILL

I long ago came to realize that movies are always about the present. It doesnt matter whether the wardrobe is Elizabethan or cowboy. The story is told by and for the living, those wholl be there to see it.

The same is true of biography. Jack Kennedy said the reason we read about famous peoples lives is to answer the question: What was this person actually like? Can I imagine being in their presence? Can I make the personal connection? Are they a hero to root for?

This book is about the Bobby Kennedy wed want to have today, the kind of leader we lack today.

The years of Bobbys public life were my times, toowhen the Kennedys first emerged in 1956; the excitement of that great presidential campaign of Kennedy vs. Nixon; the championing of equality for every American; and the campus unrest over Vietnam. All that youth and hope and sense of change: you couldnt be alive and not feel it.

In 1968 I joined the Peace Corps, spending two unforgettable years in Africa. That adventure took me to a new and a larger world. This, of course, I owe to the Kennedys arrival in Washington and the ideas they brought with them. For me, as for everyone I knew, those years were a shift from looking backward to gazing ahead.

The books Ive researched and written on Jack brought home to me again and again the essential role Bobby played in those historic moments. Those accounts appear here as a starting point for showing that the younger brothers role was indispensable to history. Among them: getting his brother elected to the Senate and then the presidency; handling the Cuban Missile Crisis; and pushing the Civil Rights Act to the national forefront of the Kennedy agenda.

And then there was Dallas.

And then there was Los Angeles.

To honor his life in politics, to mark the half century of his loss and the hope that our country can find its way back to the patriotic unity he championed... for all Americans, this is my story of Robert F. Kennedy.

Those who loved him stand in salute of Bobby Kennedys funeral train.

PROLOGUE

On March 16, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy stood in the high-ceilinged, marble-walled Senate Caucus Room where, eight years earlier, his brother Jack had announced for president. Bobby now was doing the same. After months of agonizing and second-guessing, hed decided to step up and make the commitment hed been hanging back from, fearful the timing at this moment was wrong for his future political career.

Walking into the Caucus Room that Saturday morning was for something more than a simple announcement. It was, in fact, a declaration of all-out political war. It would see him doing battle for the Democratic presidential nomination not just on one front, but two.

The first enemy Bobby was facing down was Lyndon Johnson, the president whod taken his oath of office in the shadow of Jacks assassination. His aggressive prosecution of the U.S. war in Vietnam had generated a dire national conflict, especially on college campuses.

But besides LBJ, Bobby had a second adversary, Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy, who was now holding aloft the banner of the growing antiVietnam War movement. The Minnesota lawmaker, with his cool professorial manner, had just, four days earlier, simultaneously thrilled the young while frightening Lyndon Johnson with a strong showing against the sitting president in the pivotal New Hampshire primary.

Thus, two very different men now obstructed the path to a Kennedy nomination.

Nonetheless, standing there at the lectern, surrounded by family members along with loyalist veterans of his brothers campaigns, the forty-two-year-old Robert Kennedy was about to take on both men. He began his statement by paying homage to his brother, a tribute clear to many listening. The opening words hed chosen were the ones Jack had spoken in that very place: I am announcing today my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.

With the sentence that followed, Jacks steadfast brother left the past behind and went straight to the heart of the troubled moment that was early 1968: I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be doneand I feel that Im obliged to do all that I can.

But its what he said next that held such power and still would today: I run to seek new policiespolicies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities, policies to close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, in this country and around the rest of the world. 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.