When America Turned: Reckoning with 1968

Chapter 6. RFK

[137] CHAPTER 6 RFK In the summer of 1968, the last one spent living in my parent’s house, I walked the hot streets of San Bernardino campaigning for Eugene McCarthy. My canvassing took place on the eastern outskirts of the city where the houses gave way to vacant lots and tumbleweeds. Air conditioning had not yet colonized the Inland Empire, so most homes were equipped with swamp coolers and their big rotary fans. When people opened the doors of their darkened houses, I was often hit with a blast of humid wind. My father was a supporter of Robert Kennedy. He had taken my sister to see Kennedy on a campaign swing through our downtown and had come home saying, “He’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.” At the dinner table we abided our differences. On the evening of June 5, after my parents had gone to bed, I stayed up late to watch the primary election returns. To this day I cannot recall the emotions I felt as it became clear that Kennedy had won California. All the tensions ghosting our household were swept away a few minutes after midnight by a revolver fired in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. I remember knocking on my parent’s bedroom door and sitting with them in silence before the glowing screen. What I could not know was that Sirhan Sirhan’s bullet had also blown away McCarthy’s chances and was to leave the field open to two candidates who had no capacity for imagining how or why we needed to end the war. [138] CHAPTER 6 By the fall of 1963, Robert Kennedy had become the man who knew too much. On the day his brother was killed he remained, however, not at all certain of what he suspected. According to Daniel Talbot, author of Brothers (2007), RFK placed three investigative phone calls on November 22. Reaching a “ranking official” at the CIA, he asked, “Did your outfit have anything to do with this horror?” That evening, he called Julius Drazin, an expert on union corruption, to inquire whether the Mafia had been behind the assassination . He also spoke to Enrique Ruiz-Williams, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, “telling him point blank, ‘One of your guys did it.’” In Of Kennedys and Kings (1980), Harris Wofford invokes the “burden of knowledge—even of guilt that Robert Kennedy was carrying in the last years of his life.” Only after the 1975 findings of the Senate Select Committee on the CIA did these feelings begin to make sense. The committee revealed secrets the younger brother had worked hard to keep, secrets providing “motives for Castro, or the Mafia, or the CIA’s Cuban brigade, or some people in the CIA itself to have conspired to kill the President.” Once his brother had been shot, Robert Kennedy realized that “there was no way of getting to the bottom of the assassination without uncovering the very stories he hoped would be hidden forever.” The secrets went a long way back. Because of John Kennedy’s habitual sexual buccaneering, an activity faithfully monitored by the FBI, the Kennedys faced a continual threat of blackmail from J. Edgar Hoover. As a consequence, attorney general Robert Kennedy was unable to resist the pressure Hoover exerted on him, in the early 1960s, to authorize wiretaps of Martin Luther King Jr. And because the Kennedy administration chose to enlist both the CIA and the Mafia in assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, and because of his fears that these activities might become public, Robert Kennedy chose to defer to the Warren Commission’s lone gunman theory rather than to pursue a vigorous investigation of the story behind the assassination in Dallas. These interconnected networks of secrets provided much of the “pain” Robert Kennedy spoke of in Indianapolis in 1968, the pain which, in the days and years following November 22, 1963, seemed to fall “drop by drop” upon the younger brother’s heart. Behind it all was the more primal guilt to which he also began to give expression, as when he read Henry the Fourth’s death speech to the poet Robert Lowell. “Henry the Fourth, that’s my father,” he said. The remarkable rise of John, Robert, and soon, enough, Edward was, like the rise of Henry V, in some part due to and funded by a father’s “canker’d heaps of...