BOBBY KENNEDY The night hope died
Controversy still surrounds the death of JFK’s brother, says DAVID ROBSON who recalls the night in 1968 when the charismatic politician was shot
WHEN Bobby Kennedy was shot, it was a death foretold. He knew only too well that living every day was like Russian roulette. He had said it himself. And Sirhan Sirhan, the 24-year-old Palestinian arrested on the spot for his killing, had written over and over again on paper found at his home: “RFK must die. RFK must be killed. Robert F Kennedy must be assassinated... before June 5 ’68.”
Only the timing was out. The bullet was fired late that night in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. Kennedy had just celebrated his victory in the California Democratic Primary with a big crowd of ecstatic supporters in the ballroom. His death in the Good Samaritan Hospital was announced at 1.44 the following morning.
Sirhan was arrested. He had a gun in his hand. He was spared the death penalty and sentenced to life imprisonment. The guilty verdict was more or less a formality. In the eulogy at Bobby’s funeral two days later Edward Kennedy said: “My brother need not be idealised but remembered simply as a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”
That in no way did justice to the complexities of his life. Neither did the arrest, trial and conviction of Sirhan Sirhan do justice to the circumstances of the assassination.
This week Bobby’s 64-year-old son Robert Kennedy Jr has called for the case to be re-opened. He is by no means the first. Paul Schrade, a trade unionist and campaign leader, was with Kennedy and also hit, is one of many certain that the 74-year-old who has been in prison for half a century did not fire and could not have fired the fatal shot which came at point-blank range and from behind.
Sirhan, who at his trial admitted the killing – though he has always said he has no memory of it – was, say the doubters, on the other side of the kitchen and at a different angle. What’s more it’s said there were 13 spent bullets in the room, far more than his gun could have fired.
IT was less than five years since the assassination of John, JFK, the elder brother Bobby had schemed and shepherded to the White House, always at his side, always ready to do whatever was needed for victory – no expense too great (they were loaded, they were Kennedys), no trick too dirty (they were ruthless, they were Kennedys).
Their father Joe, enormously rich and politically powerful, had reared his boys for greatness – and what boys they were! Their victory was agonisingly narrow but suddenly the USA seemed no country for old men. As the 1950s turned into the 1960s it felt like a new beginning.
JFK was young, handsome, charming, charismatic, magical and liberal. The man he had defeated – Richard Nixon – was none of those things. It was Camelot. But this was supposed to be just the beginning of the story: JFK would do his two terms, then in 1968 Bobby would follow him as president – the once and future kings. JFK gave his brother a cigarette box engraved: “When I’m through, how about you?”
Who knows what would have happened if JFK had lived? Perhaps he was spared the worst of times. The US operation in Vietnam was becoming an ever deeper quagmire. Maybe “Hey hey LBJ, how many kids you killed today?” – the protesters’ chant at Lyndon Johnson, the vice-president who stepped into his shoes, would have been “hey, hey JFK…” In 1968 Johnson, weary and reviled, decided to stand down from the presidency of what was now an angry and divided nation. Bobby’s moment had come.
Would he have got past his rival Hubert Humphrey to become the Democratic candidate? Yes. Would he have defeated the resuscitated Richard Nixon and become president? Nixon certainly thought so. But where there was despair would he have brought hope? Where there was doubt, faith; and discord, harmony?
Though he was only 42 his journey had been a long one. This Bobby who was now the liberals’ shining light had started out the very opposite. With his middling law degree from Harvard he began by assisting his father’s old mate, the evil senator Joe McCarthy, as a warrior against communism and all things Left – it was a year he tried hard to live down; he then became an investigator on the Senate Rackets Committee looking into organised crime. He was a formidable operator and a ferocious enemy. As his father said: “When Bobby hates you, you stay hated.”
In JFK’s White House he was the most powerful man after the president in areas far outside his sphere as attorney general (at 35 an amazingly young and nepotistic appointment). He took on the Mafia and corrupt union bosses. He was embarked on his road to liberalism but that didn’t stop him authorising wire taps on Martin Luther King because he suspected him of communist connections (later he became an ally). But he took up the cause of American Indians, he insisted that all areas of government become racially integrated. He actively protected the freedom riders campaigning for civil rights in the south and confronted the southern governors trying to prevent black people from entering schools and colleges.
When Lyndon Johnson, whom he hated, won his own presidential term, Bobby left the cabinet and, after a ruthless campaign of his own, was elected to the Senate. He started to involve himself in social and racial problems on a more down-to-earth human level.
He went out and met people. He supported and befriended Cesar Chavez, union leader and sometime hunger striker campaigning for fiercely exploited agricultural workers in the south, he threw himself into improving the abject lot of the inhabitants of Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of New York City’s most deprived areas. The Cold Warrior who had been one of the main proponent of the horribly ill-judged Bay of Pigs attempt to invade Cuba at the start of his brother’s presidency, now became a Cuba sympathiser. If in fiercely divided America of 1968 there was a white politician whom African Americans, Latinos and the poor believed in, it was Bobby.
HE was of course hated by many – he was a liberal, he was a Kennedy. But he was really something, the younger brother who had been the short, not-very-handsome, uncharismatic runt of the Kennedy litter had become not only a masterly hardas-nails politician but a campaigning hero who truly cared for people and people cared for.
On the day he was shot Bobby had been greeted in Los Angeles by enormous crowds cheering him, touching him, hugging him. They were soon overtaken by the million who lined the railway track from New York to Virginia to salute his coffin.
Later that year Richard Nixon became the 37th president of the United States. The Kennedy biographer Arthur Schlesinger Jr said: “John Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic; Robert was a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist.”
When the fatal shot hit, realism was badly wounded and romance was dead.