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.”
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.”