The House of Kennedy(45)
On September 25, 1966, politics falls away when, barely two years after Ted’s plane crash, yet another one leaves Bobby’s family bereaved. A light plane carrying Ethel’s brother George Skakel Jr., president of New York’s Great Lakes Carbon Company, and four other passengers, crashes near Riggins, Idaho, during a failed landing. The fatal incident intensifies lingering grief over the 1955 deaths of Ethel’s parents, George and Ann, who also’d died in a plane crash, in an Oklahoma field.
Following the loss of his brother-in-law, “Kennedy immediately went into seclusion,” UPI reports. “It was not known if Mrs. Kennedy was with him.” Not long afterward, Bobby tells Ted Sorensen, “You had better pretend you don’t know me. Everyone connected to me seems to be jinxed.”
On October 30, 1966, Bobby and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. meet at P.J. Clarke’s saloon in New York City to discuss the newly released Warren Report on JFK’s assassination. “RFK wondered how long he could continue to avoid comment on the report,” Schlesinger recalls. “It is evident that he believes that it was a poor job and will not endorse it, but that he is unwilling to criticize it and thereby reopen the whole tragic business.”
The following spring, Bobby receives a pointed reminder of the broad scope of human suffering. The source is Marian Wright, a twenty-seven-year-old Yale Law School graduate and the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi bar, who testifies before the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Labor, and Poverty on behalf of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Wright invites committee members to see for themselves the dire living conditions poor people endure. Bobby and Pennsylvania senator Joseph Clark accept, traveling with Wright to Mississippi on April 9, 1967. On April 11, John Carr, a young reporter for the Delta-Democrat Times in Greenville, Mississippi, gets a tip from his editor. “There’s a big story checking out of the Holiday Inn.”
Driving his own VW Bug, Carr follows Bobby’s blue sedan nearly to the cotton fields and a cluster of fenced-off houses known in Mississippi as “quarters.” Bobby “spoke in a low, breathy voice,” Carr writes, “and at times we reporters and the blacks we had inflicted ourselves on had to strain to hear him.” What most startles Carr is a repetitive gesture Bobby makes as he talks, first to the impoverished residents—one family’s refrigerator contains only a jar of peanut butter—and then to the press. “Kennedy would…touch his neck right above the collar with his right hand. It got to be eerie; it reminded me of his brother’s reaction to the first shot that had hit him.”
“I’ve been to third-world countries and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Bobby tells his aide, Peter Edelman. For Marian Wright (who fifteen months later marries Edelman), Bobby has an immediate and activist recommendation: “Tell Dr. [Martin Luther] King to bring the people to Washington.” King agrees, and announces the Poor People’s Campaign, saying that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of which he was president, “will lead waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited to Washington, DC, next spring to demand redress of their grievances by the United States government and to secure at least jobs or income for all.”
Some who encounter Bobby speak of sensing a transformation in his character at this time. As Wright remembers, “I’d formed an image of him as a tough, arrogant, politically driven man from the Joseph McCarthy era. These feelings dissolved as I saw Kennedy profoundly moved by Mississippi’s hungry children.”
“I’ve been with him many times since he entered the United States Senate, and I still find him growing and changing,” Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen states in his memoir. This man is the opposite of the “Bad Bobby” of 1960, described by a JFK aide as “a petulant baseball player who strikes out in the clutch and kicks the bat boy.”
“Somewhere in this man sits good” is Martin Luther King’s assessment, while still wary of Bobby’s conservative politics dating to his days as a McCarthy acolyte—and later as an attorney general who favored wiretapping many of the individuals the government was monitoring, including King himself. “Our task is to find his moral center and win him to our cause.”
Bobby’s cause, he himself insists, is to effect social justice, not to seek the presidency. “I would say that the chances for a Kennedy dynasty are looking very slim,” he says in 1967. “Bobby had a psychic violence about him,” actress Shirley MacLaine observes, adopting wartime language. “Let’s be violent with our minds and get this thing changed. Let’s not be violent with our triggers.”
Ever mindful of his numbers—a May 10, 1967, Gallup poll shows Kennedy support declining—it’s no wonder that on US Senate stationery Bobby directs Sorensen:
Teddy, old pal—Perhaps you could keep down the number of adjectives and adverbs describing me in 1955 and use a few more in 1967. OK? Bob
On March 2, 1967, Bobby gives a speech on the unpopular and ongoing war. “Three Presidents have taken action in Vietnam,” Bobby said. “As one who was involved in those decisions, I can testify that if fault is to be found or responsibility assessed, there is enough to go around for all—including myself.” Ironically, by taking a portion of the blame, he effectively transfers the burden from himself and his brother Jack and onto President Johnson.
That summer, antiwar activist Allard Lowenstein approaches Bobby with an ambitious plan to attack Johnson on the “immoral” conflict in Vietnam, with the ultimate goal being to “dump” Johnson from presidential contention. Bobby is intrigued, but ultimately declines to participate: “People would say I was splitting the party out of ambition and envy. No one would believe I was doing it because of how I felt about Vietnam and poor people.”