Civil Rights Events

Robert Kennedy

Presidential Campaign

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

In 1968, America was a wounded nation. The wounds were moral ones; the Vietnam War and three summers of inner-city riots had inflicted them on the national soul, challenging Americans’ belief that they were a uniquely noble and honorable people. Americans saw news footage from South Vietnam, such as the 1965 film of U.S. Marines setting fire to thatched huts in the village of Cam Ne with cigarette lighters and flamethrowers, and realized that they were capable of committing atrocities once considered the province of their enemies. They saw federal troops patrolling the streets of American cities and asked themselves how this could be happening in their City upon a Hill (Clarke 2).

Fifty years ago this week [2018], Robert Kennedy declared his candidacy for president. In the wake of Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary, Kennedy’s candidacy was not greeted with universal acclaim — that would grow over time. Although some considered it a political crusade, to others, it smacked of rank political opportunism.

Over the years, the perception of Kennedy as a candidate and his place in the liberal tradition of the Democratic Party have been framed more by the untimely end of his crusade than by the decision to embark on it in the first place. But there are clear lessons that prospective candidates can draw from Kennedy’s vacillation and eventual campaign. To triumph, candidates must plunge in, innovate, inspire and unify their parties — things Kennedy only partially succeeded in doing.

As early as 1962, Kennedy was considered a future presidential candidate. But when anti-Vietnam War activist Allard Lowenstein approached him about running in September 1967, Kennedy declined, despite growing disenchantment with his party’s positions on inner cities and Vietnam. Lowenstein then persuaded McCarthy to run, setting up a future conflict between the McCarthy and Kennedy camps (Bradshaw 1).

Bobby deputed his brother [Ted] to meet with McCarthy. If he would agree to add poverty amelioration to his agenda, RFK might remain on the sidelines. But McCarthy “just was basically uninterested” in the deal, Teddy reported.

Edward Kennedy urged his brother to wait until 1972 to try to restore Camelot. Johnson would be in retirement, and the path back to the White House for the Kennedys might be clearer. Moreover, both Teddy and his sister-in-law Jackie feared for Bobby’s safety on the presidential campaign trail. “A feeling of dread” is how Teddy’s chief of staff described the senator’s premonition of doom (Perry 3).

Over the winter of 1967-1968, Kennedy agonized over whether to run or to wait. Some advisers, including his brother Ted, argued that challenging an incumbent from one’s own party was madness and would lead to a GOP victory in the general election. Others countered that Kennedy was the only candidate who would halt the Vietnam War and address the poverty and race issues articulated by the Kerner Commission (Bradshaw 2).

One might have thought that Ethel Kennedy—who knew that during her husband’s term as attorney general the telephones at Hickory Hill, the Kennedys’ home in McLean, Virginia, had rung with threats such as “We know where your kids go to school and we know how they get there” and “Do you know what hydrochloric acid can do to your eyes?”—would be the last person to want Bobby to run (Clarke 4). But she did.

Kennedy and his advisers were concerned that had he been the first to challenge President Lyndon B. Johnson, he would have exacerbated the perception that he was ruthless, in part because of the longtime feud that existed between Johnson and Kennedy. But his late entry into the contest triggered consternation and grumbling anyway, because McCarthy had become the darling of the left and student activists, both constituencies Kennedy saw as naturally his. Detractors labeled him “Bobby come lately,” and infuriated columnist Murray Kempton cabled Ted Kennedy, “Your brother’s announcement makes clear that St. Patrick did not drive all the snakes out of Ireland.”

Kennedy’s vacillation owed both to political and policy calculations. Pushing him to run was concern about potential damage to the United States if policies were not changed. More selfishly, he wondered if passing on a run might freeze him out of the White House until at least 1980 should Johnson win reelection — as the professional political operators on Kennedy’s team assumed — and anoint his preferred successor in 1972, presumably Vice President Hubert Humphrey (Bradshaw 2-3).

Kennedy was concerned that, if he ran, an increasingly unstable Lyndon Johnson might “wag the dog,” provoking an international crisis or even starting a war to upstage the challenger’s candidacy. In late 1967, as Kennedy was completing Thirteen Days, his account of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, he had told Adam Walinsky, “You know, we had 13 people in that room [the Cabinet Room in the White House], and if any one of 8 of them had been President, we would have had a nuclear war.” During the same conversation, he said, “The problem is that if I run against Johnson, I don’t know what he’s going to do.” Kennedy told Walinsky that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had also served in J.F.K.’s administration and who initially did not encourage Bobby’s running in 1968, stoked his fears, perhaps on purpose, by recounting conversations during which Johnson had spoken about possible, and frightening, countermoves against North Vietnam and China. The fear that Johnson’s obsessive hatred for him might prompt Johnson to act irrationally had also inhibited Kennedy’s criticism of the president’s Vietnam policies. “I’m afraid that by speaking out I just make Lyndon do the opposite,” he once told the Village Voice reporter Jack Newfield. “He hates me so much that if I asked for snow, he would make rain, just because it was me” (Clarke 3).

But it was political calculation that initially kept Kennedy out of the race. He cited Johnson’s ability to control events; the fickle nature of opinion polls — which showed him ahead of Johnson for most of 1967; and the adverse mathematical calculations for delegate selection. This latter element was important in the pre-reform era of fewer primaries and party boss control. Kennedy concluded that a winning campaign “simply could not be put together” and said as much publicly in early 1968.

But then, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote, the Tet offensive, launched by the North Vietnamese in late January, “changed everything” for Kennedy, altering his careful calculations about both politics and the greater good. When the administration rejected Kennedy’s idea of a commission to investigate the U.S. commitment in Vietnam, Kennedy reversed himself (Bradshaw 3).

Richard Nixon, who had lost the presidency to J.F.K. in 1960, watched Kennedy’s announcement from a hotel room in Portland, Oregon. John Ehrlichman, one of several aides in the room with Nixon, later wrote, “When it was over and the hotel-room TV was turned off, Nixon sat and looked at the blank screen for a long time, saying nothing. Finally, he shook his head slowly. ‘We’ve just seen some very terrible forces unleashed,’ he said. ‘Something bad is going to come of this.’ He pointed at the screen, ‘God knows where this is going to lead.’ ” Meanwhile, by one account, Kennedy was telling Nicole Salinger, the wife of J.F.K.’s 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” (Clarke 3).

Kennedy's plan was to win the nomination through popular support in the primaries. He delivered his first campaign speech on March 18 at Kansas State University, where he had agreed to give a lecture honoring former Kansas governor and former Republican Presidential candidate Alfred Landon. At Kansas State, Kennedy spoke to a crowd of 14,500 students. In his speech, Kennedy apologized for early mistakes and attacked President Johnson's Vietnam policy saying, "I was involved in many of the early decisions on Vietnam, decisions which helped set us on our present path," but he added that "past error is not excuse for its own perpetration." Later that day at the University of Kansas, Kennedy spoke to another crowd of 19,000. He said, "I don't think that we have to shoot each other, to beat each other, to curse each other and criticize each other, I think that we can do better in this country. And that is why I run for President of the United States."

Kennedy went on to campaign in the Democratic primaries in Indiana, Washington, D.C., Nebraska, Oregon, South Dakota, and California. His speeches emphasized racial equality, non-aggression in foreign policy, and social improvement. His campaign attracted support among America's youth, while it did not engender support from the business community. Businesses leaders criticized him for the tax increases that would be necessary to fund Kennedy's proposed social programs. During a speech given at the Indiana University Medical School, Kennedy was asked, "Where are we going to get the money to pay for all these new programs you're proposing?" Kennedy referred to the medical students and said "From you."

Although he enjoyed support from many in the anti-war movement, Kennedy did not express support for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. military personnel from Vietnam or an immediate end to the conflict. He said that he wanted to end the conflict by strengthening the South Vietnamese military and reducing corruption within the South Vietnamese government. He supported a peace settlement between North and South Vietnam.(1968 2-3).

“Black Bobby,” as his own family once called him in reference to the brooding, bitter, pragmatic enforcer who scoffed at liberals as impractical, even weak, dreamers—had evolved into a sad-eyed and genuinely empathetic champion of Americans who had been left behind: black people living in squalid urban ghettos, Latino immigrants laboring for pennies in California’s vineyards, poor white residents of Appalachian coal towns that had long ago been stripped to their veins.

At frantic rallies and in frenzied motorcade swings through black and Latino neighborhoods, Kennedy transformed into something bordering between Christ-like and celebrity. “The crowds were savage,” one of his advisers remembered. “They pulled off his cufflinks, tore off his clothes, tore ours. In bigger towns with bigger crowds, it was frightening.” Kennedy would stand in an open-topped convertible, a young aide kneeling with his arm wrapped around the candidate, who wore a weary half smile as residents reached out to touch his limp arms and hands or tear off a piece of clothing as a keepsake. “It was like he wasn’t there,” another aide observed. “His stare was vacant.”

Bobby veered sharply between preaching a message of reconciliation and lobbing bruising attacks on those representing wealth, privilege and power (he was never so effective as when those attacks were aimed at his nemesis, President Johnson). To the black and brown voters who composed the base of his support, he seemed a savior. But to many middle-class white Democrats, Kennedy’s rallies and motorcades were unsettling. In their heat and intensity, they seemed eerily of a piece with violent antiwar protests and urban riots that defined that most disorderly time. “You have to turn it down,” implored Ted Sorensen, a longtime Kennedy family confidant. “We can’t,” Bobby replied. “It’s too late.”

The myth of Kennedy’s interracial appeal was born in Indiana, where the candidate trounced his cooler, more professorial rival, Eugene McCarthy. In the immediate aftermath of the primary, the influential political columnists Robert Novak and Rowland Evans noted that in Gary, “while Negro precincts were delivering about 90 percent for Kennedy, he was running 2 to 1 ahead in some Polish districts.” Such findings quickly formed the basis of Bobby’s image as a candidate of racial reconciliation. He was a tough, Irish Catholic Democrat with unimpeachable credentials as a Cold Warrior and law enforcer. But he was also the preferred candidate of the urban ghetto—a truth speaker on racial and economic injustice. “Kennedy’s Indiana Victory Proves His Appeal Defuses Backlash Voting,” one headline declared.

Historians and political scientists see the matter differently today. Kennedy’s own vote counters later conceded that he lost 59 out of 70 white precincts in Gary. While Kennedy’s internal polls showed him faring better than might be expected among former supporters of George Wallace’s bid for the Democratic nomination four years earlier, he nevertheless struggled to retain working-class, white ethnic voters and relied instead on robust turnout in minority neighborhoods for his electoral cushion.

… Kennedy and his team instinctively understood that their real base was among people of color. As early precincts from Gary reported on May 7, opening up a wide gap in what early returns had shown to be an unexpectedly close race against McCarthy, Ethel Kennedy, the candidate’s wife, crowed, “Don’t you just wish that everyone was black?”

What does seem clear is that Kennedy struggled with educated white professionals, a group central to the Democratic Party’s ambitions in 2018 and beyond. The journalist David Halberstam attributed much of the problem to style. Kennedy’s motorcades and rallies captured the very fever that many suburbanites hoped to quell. “There would be two minutes of television each night of Robert Kennedy being mauled, losing his shoes, and then there would be 15 free—that was painful—minutes of Gene McCarthy talking leisurely and seriously about the issues” (Zeitz 5-6).

In primary after primary that year, Bobby was showing an ability to reach beyond his comfort zone and across normal political boundaries. … In Nebraska, an impressive 51.7% of Democratic Cornhuskers pulled their levers for Bobby, compared with McCarthy’s 31.2%, Humphrey’s 7.4%, and 5.6% for former president Lyndon Johnson. Even in South Dakota, Humphrey’s birthplace, the results were encouraging: 49.5% for Bobby, 30.1% for the vice president, and 20.4% for McCarthy (Tye 2).

Kennedy was successful in four state primaries: Indiana, Nebraska, South Dakota, and California; as well as Washington D.C. McCarthy won six state primaries: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Oregon, New Jersey, and Illinois. Of the state primaries in which they campaigned directly against one another, Kennedy won three (Indiana, Nebraska, and California) while McCarthy was only successful in one (Oregon) (1968 4).

Heading into the Oregon primary, Bobby rued that “it’s all white Protestants. There’s nothing for me to grab a hold of.” On the eve of the ballot, the candidate turned to his aide, Joe Dolan, and observed, “You think I’m going to lose.” “I know you are,” replied Dolan. “We don’t have blacks and Chicanos, and we do have gun nuts.” (Kennedy became an early gun safety supporter after his brother’s assassination, a position that was no more popular in certain pockets then than it is now.) (Zeitz 7).

The Oregon primary posed several challenges to Kennedy's campaign. His platform, which called for an end to poverty and hunger, and which focused on minority issues, did not resonate with Oregon voters. The Kennedy campaign pointed out that McCarthy had voted against a minimum wage law and repeal of the poll tax in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The McCarthy campaign responded with charges that Kennedy illegally taped Martin Luther King, Jr. as United States Attorney General. On May 28, McCarthy won the Oregon primary with 44.7 percent; Kennedy received 38.8 percent of vote.

After losing momentum in Oregon, Kennedy hoped to take the California and South Dakota primaries on June 4. The demographics of California appeared to be right for his voter-appeal. But McCarthy's California campaign was well-funded and organized and a defeat would have been a serious blow to his hopes of winning the nomination. Kennedy had some disadvantages in the South Dakota primary. McCarthy was a Senator in neighboring Minnesota and Humphrey had been raised in South Dakota.

On June 1, during the final days of the California campaign, Kennedy and McCarthy met for a televised debate. The debate turned out to be a draw, but after the debate, undecided voters favored Kennedy over McCarthy by a 2 to 1 margin. Kennedy's campaign was nothing if not energetic and on June 3, Kennedy traveled to San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Long Beach. He told Theodore H. White on June 4 that he believed that he could sway Democratic Party leaders with wins in both California and South Dakota (1968 5-6).

Kennedy won the South Dakota primary, beating McCarthy, 50 percent to 20 percent of the vote.

In the California primary, … Bobby was buoyed by unprecedented turnouts and majorities in black and Mexican American districts. He won 46.3% of the vote, compared to McCarthy’s 41.8% and 12% for an unpledged slate headed by Thomas C. Lynch. The trend was encouraging enough for Bobby to go on TV and quietly claim victory, for journalists and friends gathered across the hall at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel to start the party, and for America to imagine what it might be like to have another Kennedy in the White House (Tye 3).

The Netflix documentary, “Bobby Kennedy for President,” opens with bracing—almost jaw-dropping—footage of Bobby campaigning in open-topped convertibles throughout California. It was days after his defeat in Oregon, and he was in the fight of his life. The crowds are interracial, to be sure, but upon close examination, they are composed of people of color in sharp disproportion to the state’s population in 1968. We don’t know how Kennedy might have fared among working-class whites if he had survived into the fall. But it’s fair to say that he was one of the first national Democrats in the aftermath of the Voting Rights Act to solidify the loyalty of black and Latino voters in large and meaningful numbers (Zeitz 5-7).

… in the words of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy had run "an uproarious campaign, filled with enthusiasm and fun... It [had been] … also a campaign moving in its sweep and passion." Indeed, he [had] challenged the complacent in American society and [had] sought to bridge the great divides in American life - between the races, between the poor and the affluent, between young and old, between order and dissent. His 1968 campaign [had] brought hope to an American people troubled by discontent and violence at home and war in Vietnam. … (Robert 3).

…

… Bobby Kennedy ran for president at the high-water mark of white backlash, in a year when America seemed at war with itself. It’s possible that no candidate—even one so apparently hard-wired for the challenge—could have bridged racial and class divides. (Another candidate, Richard Nixon, knew how to profit from them.)

…

… Ultimately, the 1968 election results were painfully close, with Nixon taking 43.4 percent of the popular vote to 42.7 percent for Humphrey and 13.5 percent for George Wallace. It’s not impossible to believe that he [Kennedy] might have shaved off enough points from Wallace among white-ethnic and blue-collar workers in key East Coast and Midwestern states to win the race.

…

… Robert Kennedy in his final years had indeed transformed himself into a rare and noble voice for America’s forgotten communities. He preached a vital message of reconciliation and appealed to people’s better nature. There’s much to admire, and even venerate, in that legacy (Zeitz 12-13).

Works cited:

“1968: Robert Kennedy’s Presidential Campaign.” Live Journal. April 9, 2018. Web. https://potus-geeks.livejournal.com/955716.html

Bradshaw, Chris. “What Robert Kennedy’s Presidential Campaign Can Teach Democrats for 2020.” The Washington Post. March 18, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/03/18/what-robert-kennedys-presidential-campaign-can-teach-democrats-for-2020/

Clarke, Thurston. “The Last Good Campaign.” Vanity Fair. May 1, 2008. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/06/rfk_excerpt200806

Perry, Barbara A. “What If Bobby Kennedy Had Skipped the 1968 Race, as Brother Teddy Advised?” The Hill. Web. https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/389741-what-if-bobby-kennedy-had-skipped-the-1968-race-as-brother-teddy-advised

“Robert F. Kennedy.” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Web. https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-family/robert-f-kennedy

Tye, Larry. “Robert Kennedy Was a Raw Idealist Cut Down Just When the Presidency Seemed within Reach.” USA Today. June 5, 2018. Web. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/06/05/robert-f-kennedy-died-presidency-reach-column/672530002/

Zeitz, Joshua. “The Bobby Kennedy Myth.” Politico Magazine. June 5, 2018. Web. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/05/rfk-bobby-kennedy-myth-legend-history-218593