Later that night, Bobby phones Coretta Scott King, saying, “I’ll help in any way I can.” When he hears of Mrs. King’s plans to retrieve her slain husband’s body from Memphis, Bobby makes a generous offer. “Let me fly you there. I’ll get a plane down.” She accepts, ignoring advisers’ concerns about the possible impropriety of accepting an expensive favor from a presidential candidate.
* * *
Bobby downplays King’s assassination in his campaign stops, though he does comment to journalist Pete Hamill, “It’s very interesting that they can’t find the killer of Martin Luther King, but they can track down some twenty-two-year-old who might have burned his draft card.”
Although Memphis police arrived on the scene of King’s assassination within minutes, it takes months for them to track down the gunman, easily identified as James Earl Ray from the copious fingerprints he leaves at the crime scene, including on the gun, and on a newspaper detailing Dr. King’s whereabouts. Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary, manages to escape Memphis for Canada and then England before finally being arrested in London two months later on June 8, 1968, and sentenced to life in jail.
Long before Ray is captured, on the eve of Dr. King’s funeral, Bobby meets with the King family, as well as the leaders in the black community, who are all trying to find their way forward. Reverend Hosea Williams recalls a collective desire “that Bobby Kennedy would come up with some answers,” since “after Dr. King was killed, there was just no one left but Bobby.” The civil rights leader John Lewis feels the same way. “Dr. King may be gone but we still have Bobby Kennedy, so we still have hope.”
But Reverend Williams warns Bobby, “You have a chance to be a prophet. But prophets get shot.”
Chapter 31
In May 1968, pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s portrait of Bobby, his brown hair swooping over his forehead, appears on the cover of Time magazine. Compared to his close-cropped 1950s cut, Bobby has been growing out his hair, sixties-style.
The longer length appeals to young voters. At Hickory Hill, hours before Bobby announced his presidential candidacy, Ted had tried to intervene with Bobby’s barber, saying, “Cut it as close as you can. Don’t pay attention to anything he says. Cut off as much as you can.”
Before the upcoming West Coast Democratic primary swing (Oregon, May 28; California, June 4), Bobby flies to Cape Cod to visit his parents. “How will you feel being the mother of two presidents?” Bobby appeals to Rose. “That makes you quite a girl, doesn’t it?”
On his way to victory in the Indiana primary with 42 percent of the vote, Bobby had chipped a front tooth (when a crowd in the town of Mishawaka pushes him up against his car) and spent a fortune campaigning. (Bobby admits to six hundred thousand dollars, perhaps only half the actual amount.) Rose Kennedy, a veteran campaigner, is on hand with a page from Joe Sr.’s script on politics and money. “It’s part of this campaign business. If you have money—you spend it to win. And the more you can afford, the more you spend.”
Bobby has another Kennedy lesson for McCarthy. “I don’t know whether people think it’s so good to be second or third. That’s not the way I was brought up. I was always taught it was much better to win. I learned that when I was about two.”
Having run Jack’s victorious senate and presidential campaigns, Bobby well knows that a candidate’s fortune can turn in a day. As he admits to the press, “It’s a long time until August” and the Democratic national convention that will be held in Chicago at the end of that month.
Bobby aims to keep topping the primary ballots, and sets himself a steep goal: “I have to be able to win in every state.” But the issues of race and poverty feel less urgent to Oregon’s largely white middle-class suburban constituents, who are more attuned to McCarthy’s antiwar message. At Portland State College, two students wave signs at Bobby reading, “Cut your hair, then we’ll vote!”
Not enough of them do vote for Kennedy on May 28. The next morning, the front page of the Oregonian delivers the news: “Senator Eugene McCarthy won a dramatic victory Tuesday night—becoming the first candidate to defeat a Kennedy.” It’s a crushing blow to the RFK campaign—and the Kennedy family. “Let’s face it,” Bobby admits. “I appeal best to people who have problems.”
In Hyannis Port, Bobby is determined to make up the loss, confiding to his wheelchair-bound father, “Dad, I’m going to California for a few days and I’m going to fight hard. I’m going to win one for you.” With the Oregon defeat rankling Bobby, there is no turning back.
Kennedy California campaign headquarters is on Wilshire Boulevard, and from there Bobby rallies his staff: “If I died in Oregon, I hope Los Angeles is Resurrection City,” he tells them. There is much ground to cover before the primary, set for June 4 (the same date as the South Dakota primary). Bobby campaigns by train and in open-top cars, shaking hands until his own are painfully swollen.
The “Hollywood for Kennedy” committee, led by singer Andy Williams, offers some glamorous relief by organizing two “star-studded” nationally televised galas on May 24 in Los Angeles and June 1 in San Francisco.
On June 2, writer George Plimpton is hosting a campaign-themed live call-in radio show and has an alarming exchange with an anonymous voice on the line demanding, “Is Bobby Kennedy ready?” and then in response to Plimpton’s “Ready for what?” yells, “Ready to be killed. He’s doomed! He’s doomed!”
Another local threat against Bobby occurs months earlier, on April 4, 1968, the same day Martin Luther King Jr. is shot. Alvin Clark, a Los Angeles trash collector, recalls a conversation with a man on his route with whom he’s talked politics over the past three years. The two express mutual dismay over King’s death, but when their conversation shifts to the upcoming primary, they disagree. “I told him I was going to vote for Kennedy,” Clark says, recalling that the man responded, “What are you going to vote for that son of a bitch for? Because I’m planning on shooting him.”
Two days before the primary, on June 3, Bobby travels more than twelve hundred California miles. In San Francisco’s Chinatown, a loud popping sends Ethel crouching into the wheel wells of the convertible. Earlier in the campaign, Bobby had vowed to Charles Quinn of NBC News, “If I’m ever elected president, I’m never going to ride in one of those God-damned [bulletproof, bubble-top] cars.” When the pops in San Francisco prove to be Chinese firecrackers, Bobby continues to greet the crowds there and in Los Angeles and San Diego, where he nearly collapses from fatigue.
On June 4, Bobby, Ethel, and six of their children stay in Malibu as guests of the film director John Frankenheimer. While voters take to the polls, the family enjoys the beach—until David, a week and a half shy of his thirteenth birthday, is caught in a dangerous undertow. Though Bobby rescues his son, David, a sensitive, good-looking boy (“If we ever go broke,” Ethel once told journalist Dolly Connelly, “we’ll make a movie star of David and live off his earnings”) is traumatized by the event, and both Kennedys sustain minor bruises and scrapes.