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.
But he’s not the next victim.
Chapter 30
On April 9, 1968, thirteen hundred mourners file into Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Bobby and Ted Kennedy are there, along with other men vying for the presidency—Senator Eugene McCarthy, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Nixon. At Bobby’s invitation, Jackie attends, her presence a comfort to the nation’s newest famed widow, Coretta Scott King.
Five days earlier, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot while leaving Room 306 on the second floor of black businessman Walter Bailey’s Lorraine Motel in Memphis. King had been under Memphis police protection since March 28, when his demonstration for the rights of local sanitation workers had turned violent.
Just after 6:00 p.m., on April 4, civil rights leaders Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, and Reverend Ralph Abernathy witness King’s assassination by a rifle shot that severs his spinal cord.
“I don’t even think he heard the shot [a Remington-Peters, soft-point, metal-jacketed bullet] or felt any pain,” recalls Young. “You see a picture of Andy [Young] and I pointing,” Jackson explains of the iconic photo of the eyewitnesses at the crime scene. “We’re pointing because the police were coming to us with drawn guns and we were saying the bullet came from that way,” which was a rooming house facing the hotel walkway. “And I said, ‘Martin, don’t leave us now, don’t leave us now. We need you,’” says Jackson.
* * *
As law enforcement searches for the gunman who shot King, Bobby is campaigning in Indiana in advance of the May 7 Democratic presidential primary.
He’s about to make the seventy-six-mile flight from Muncie to the state capital, Indianapolis.
On board the plane, Bobby’s press team alerts him that Dr. Martin Luther King has been shot. At Muncie’s Ball State University, Bobby had earlier reassured a black student who challenged, “You’re placing a great deal of faith in white America. My question: It this faith justified?” In an airborne interview with Newsweek’s John J. Lindsay, Bobby is distressed at the response he gave the student in light of what’s happened. “You know, it grieves me…that I just told that kid this and then walk out and find that some white man has just shot their spiritual leader.”
The plane lands, along with the news that King has succumbed to his injuries and has been declared dead. According to Lindsay, Bobby seems to “shrink back, as though struck physically.” Confronted with yet another reminder of Jack’s assassination, he hides his face in his hands, saying, “Oh, God. When is this violence going to stop?”
Across the country, cities are erupting in riots, and more conflict is anticipated on the streets of Indianapolis, where Bobby is scheduled to speak. Mayor Richard Lugar tries to intervene, but Bobby refuses to change his plans. “I’m going to Seventeenth and Broadway,” Bobby says. “I’m going there and that’s it and I don’t want any police going with me.”
He sends a fearful Ethel on to the hotel as word of King’s death continues to spread. “Dr. King is dead and a white man did it…Why does he [Kennedy] have to come here?” a black woman beseeches a white pastor in the gathering crowd, some of them armed.
Bobby’s police escort leaves him on the outskirts of the ghetto (later called the Kennedy-King neighborhood). His only protection are the words of press secretary Frank Mankiewicz. “You should give a very short speech. It should be almost like a prayer.”
In a parking lot, Bobby stalwartly climbs onto a makeshift podium, the back of a flatbed truck equipped with a microphone. Under the dark sky, the weather has turned. “He was up there,” television correspondent Charles Quinn recalls, “hunched in his black overcoat”—one that used to belong to Jack—“his face gaunt and distressed and full of anguish.”
Bobby announces King’s death to a collective cry of disbelief. Though the Washington Post has cataloged Bobby’s public-speaking flaws—“the nervous, self-deprecating jokes; the trembling hands on the lectern; the staccato alternations of speech and silence; the sudden shifts of mood”—all of these awkward mannerisms fall away as he speaks for the next six minutes.
In the midst of his remarks, Bobby makes his first public reference to Jack’s assassination. “For those of you who are black and tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”
Over one hundred cities see riots that night, but not Indianapolis. McCarthy campaign volunteer Mary Evans, sixteen, stands among high school classmates and listens to Kennedy speak. “The minute he started talking, it was like the laying on of hands. Every word out of his mouth was a balm. The whole crowd was swept up in the emotion, and I stopped being scared.”
Abie Washington, a twenty-six-year-old navy veteran, says, “My level of emotion went from one extreme to another. He had empathy. He knew what it felt like. Why create more violence?” And to Black Radical Action Project member William Crawford, “The sincerity of Bobby Kennedy’s words just resonated, especially when he talked about his brother.”