The House of Kennedy(44)
These are extreme measures against Bobby, who two days before the convention had announced his intention to exit the Capital Beltway for the Empire State. He tries on the prospect of holding his first legislative office, imagining, “I’m not just a senator. I’m Senator from New York. I’m head of the Kennedy wing of the party.”
To satisfy residency laws, on September 1, 1964, Bobby and Ethel (pregnant with their ninth child) move into Marymead, a home leased for them by Kennedy brother-in-law and finance manager Stephen Smith. (“Ask not what the Kennedys can do for you, but what you can do for the Kennedys,” Smith riffs on his role.) The twenty-five room, three-story, Colonial-style white house in exclusive Glen Cove has a swimming pool and a view of Long Island Sound.
On September 3, 1964, Bobby resigns from the Justice Department. That day, the New York Times editorializes, “It is doubtful that any Attorney General before Robert Francis Kennedy entered or left office under circumstances of such strong public feeling.”
Not long after the thirty-eight-year-old begins campaigning against the incumbent, sixty-four-year-old Republican Kenneth Keating, more strong public feeling arises. This time, the furor is over the identity of Bobby’s new neighbor—Jackie—who has leased Creek House, a property nearby Marymead. According to Jackie’s secretary, Pamela Turnure, the former First Lady personally chooses the ten-room fieldstone house for the “maximum privacy” it affords herself and her young children. But proximity inspires a round of rumors of a Bobby/Jackie romance. “Though there was no affair,” says Florida senator George Smathers, “I believe Bobby’s wife thought there was one.”
For his part, Keating, an intense critic of the Kennedy administration’s stance on Cuba, holds zero affection for Bobby. He wastes no time blasting him as a carpetbagger who hasn’t lived in New York since the Kennedy family moved away from Bronxville when Bobby was twelve years old. “I think it’s an unprintable outrage,” a leading Democrat comments off the record to the New York Times about Bobby’s move to New York, though the same article reports that “a new figure”—Bobby—“has caught the public fancy.”
“His appearance,” Bobby’s daughter Kerry Kennedy writes, “is ever modern: the shaggy hair, the skinny ties, the suit jacket off, the shirt sleeves rolled.” And when the crowds can get close enough to the candidate, who campaigns standing atop his car, they try to claim a piece. During a swing through Westchester and the Bronx, Bobby complains to Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s running mate, that “too many young people are pulling at him.” The attention “makes me feel like a Beatle,” he jokingly declares, flashing that Kennedy smile.
On October 27, 1964, in a contentious debate televised on WCBS from two different studios—each candidate seated opposite an empty chair—Senator Keating openly mocks Bobby’s star appeal, saying, “The squeals of the bobby soxers could be registered in a juke box but not in an election box.” Three days later, on October 30, following a face-to-face debate broadcast by radio and ending after midnight, Bobby appeals to Keating, “Let’s just go home.” Keating misses the chance to remind voters that Kennedy’s home is a mansion.
As the race tightens, Bobby needs to secure endorsements. Jackie steps up, arranging an interview with the publisher of the New York Post, where instead of sidestepping Bobby’s biggest perceived character flaw (“People say he is ruthless and cold”), she offers a touching explanation: “He isn’t like the others. I think it was his place in the family, with four girls and being younger than two brothers and so much smaller. He hasn’t got the graciousness they had. He is really very shy, but he has the kindest heart in the world.”
On November 3, Election Day, the Post backs Bobby for senator.
He wins the Senate seat by seven hundred thousand votes. (By contrast, in the 1964 presidential election, Johnson took New York state from his Republican rival, Barry Goldwater, by a margin of nearly three million.)
Despite his win, Village Voice writer Nat Hentoff expresses an opinion held by many—that “Bobby the K,” as Hentoff calls the senator-elect, won’t be local for long. “I am bugged when Kennedy beaters of the bush try to con me by pretending New York State is anything but a way-stop for this man on the run.”
Chapter 29
During JFK’s final White House cabinet meeting, the president scrawled a single word on his notepad. Poverty.
Bobby now looks at that crumpled piece of paper every day. It’s framed and hanging on his office wall.
Though the memory of Jack is ever-present, the Kennedy brothers’ rivalry proves irrepressible. “Step back a little, you’re casting a shadow on Ted,” a photographer tells senator-elect Bobby during a visit with Ted in Boston’s New England Baptist Hospital. “It’ll be the same way in Washington,” Ted answers.
Mercurial Bobby, according to the majority leader, Senator Mike Mansfield, is “in the Senate, but not of it.” Ted, who in his second term is the more experienced legislator, helps Bobby launch his ambitious social agenda. It works. George Gallup documents Bobby’s “meteoric rise” in popularity between February and August 1966. Though negative respondents fault the first-term senator for having a “poor personality or temper” as well as being “power hungry” and “riding on the Kennedy name” (although “being a Kennedy” is also a leading positive response), Bobby ties Johnson in a “Trial Heat” poll, roughly two years out from the 1968 presidential election.