The House of Kennedy(46)
Bobby sends Lowenstein a note quoting the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. “For Al, who knew the lesson of Emerson and taught it to the rest of us. They did not yet see…that if a single man plant himself on his convictions and then abide, the huge world will come round to him. From his friend, Bob Kennedy.”
During the last two days of January 1968, celebration of the Lunar New Year veers into a strike known as the Tet Offensive. The wave of surprise attacks by North Vietnamese forces on targets throughout South Vietnam results in headline-making US and South Vietnamese casualties. Addressing the Washington press on January 30, the question of a presidential run inevitably arises. Bobby declares that “under no foreseeable circumstances” will it happen.
Despite Bobby’s public projection of certainty, the Kennedy inner circle is roiling with indecision on the matter.
“Is my Daddy going to run for President?” Arthur Schlesinger recalls “little David Kennedy,” age twelve, asking him “gravely.”
David’s mother, Ethel, newly pregnant with her and Bobby’s eleventh child, votes yes, even going so far as to send out an election-themed Christmas card. SANTA CLAUS IN ’67 read the signs Ethel and the children are pictured holding on the front of the card; and on the back, a photo of a smiling Bobby embellished with the thought bubble “Would you believe Santa Claus in ’68?”
“She [Ethel] wanted to be First Lady, that’s true,” says Rose Kennedy’s secretary, Barbara Gibson. “But she also believed that Bobby had so much to give.”
Ted’s on the no side. Bobby tells Life magazine reporter Sylvia Wright, “My brother thinks I’m crazy. He doesn’t like this. He doesn’t go along. But then, we’re two different people. He doesn’t hear the same music. Everyone has to march to his own music.”
“He usually follows his own instincts and he’s done damn well,” Ted admits. But while he’s unsure what Jack would’ve advised, he’s confident how Joe Sr. would lean if he wasn’t incapacitated by the stroke. “I know what Dad would have said…Don’t do it,” he tells aide Richard Goodwin.
News from Jackie further complicates the situation. Her romantic relationship with wealthy, divorced Greek industrialist Aristotle Onassis—whom she first met through her sister, Lee, in August 1963 after the death of baby Patrick—is deepening. Their age discrepancy (she is thirty-nine; he is sixty-two) and religious differences (Onassis is Greek Orthodox, not Catholic) makes him highly controversial as a potential second husband to America’s most famous widow. “For heaven’s sake, don’t marry him,” Ethel begs. “Don’t do this to Bobby. Or to me!” Jackie knows how to be a good Kennedy. Bobby’s decision comes first.
On March 16, 1968, Bobby returns to the Caucus Room of the Old Senate Office Building in Washington. He’s forty-two years old. Eight years earlier, he had watched proudly when Jack, then also age forty-two, had launched his 1960 presidential campaign from this very room. Now it’s Bobby’s turn.
Finally, Bobby is granted the respite that’s been eluding him since Jack’s death. Soon after his announcement, Bobby tells Nicole Salinger (wife of press secretary Pierre Salinger), “I’m sleeping well for the first time in months. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but at least I’m at peace with myself.”
Little else about the 1968 presidential contest is peaceful. More often, it’s not only heated but bitter. Bobby’s announcement comes just four days after the New Hampshire Democratic primary, where antiwar senator Eugene McCarthy nearly upset Lyndon Johnson, who as sitting president is on record for having sent half a million troops into peril.
Senator McCarthy will never forgive Bobby for crashing the 1968 race. Though McCarthy remains cordial with his Senate colleague Ted, for decades McCarthy insists, “Bobby had an inferiority complex, but Jack never did.”
Not twenty-four hours after the New Hampshire polls close, Bobby is quoted in the press: “I am actively reassessing the possibility of whether I will run against President Johnson.” McCarthy, an Irish Catholic like the Kennedys, takes special note of Bobby’s tactics and timing. “An Irishman who announces the day before St. Patrick’s Day that he’s going to run against another Irishman shouldn’t say it’s going to be a peaceful relationship.”
On March 31, in a live television address, Johnson makes a surprise announcement. He’s calling an end—not to the war in Vietnam, but to his bid for a second term as president. (Instead, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, will belatedly join the race on April 27.)
“You’re kidding,” Bobby exclaims. “I wonder if he would have done it if I hadn’t come in.” Ethel breaks out a celebratory bottle of Scotch. “Well, he didn’t deserve to be president anyway,” she tells her husband.
A few days earlier, at a dinner party in New York, Jackie served up some provocative table talk to Arthur Schlesinger. “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby?” Jackie told him. “The same thing that happened to Jack. There is so much hatred in this country, and more people hate Bobby than hated Jack…I’ve told Bobby this, but he isn’t fatalistic, like me.”
Just as Jackie’s premonitions of violence in Dallas went unheard by Jack, so does her latest fear. Jackie is right. Bobby never does learn to respect the power of fate.