Daring (8 page)

“What's his name?” I asked over the intercom.

“He say Clay, you will know.”

“Clay Felker? On the Lower East Side?”

“Look like movie star.”

I burst out laughing at the absurdity of it. Out the front window I could see a sleek black town car. It must have been dropping off Clay. Tonight was the debut party of his new magazine at the Four Seasons. I wished I could have gone.

My block, East Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenues, was not accustomed to chauffeured town cars. This was a little Ukrainian village of immigrants who filled the streets with the smells of pierogi and kielbasa. These God-fearing immigrants shared the space with the new demimonde of the Lower East Side—proto-yuppies and promising artists with hair like the manes of wild animals who were happy to sacrifice safety and living space to pursue writing, acting, art, photography, or just joy, love. The most conspicuous new element in the neighborhood was the large influx of hippies, young fugitives from middle-class suburban privilege. They injected the dangerous element of speed (amphetamines). Accounts of stabbings, muggings, and robberies were becoming frequent.

I wore beatnik sandals and occasionally love beads, and I treasured the album
Rolling Stones: Now.
But with a four-year-old child, I was too responsible to spend any time being stoned.

Could it really be Clay Felker crossing the great social divide? His was the glamorous world of the Upper East Side—cocktails and canapés and charity balls for socially prominent diseases for which chic women spent the afternoon at Kenneth's getting bouffant hairdos that were perfect facsimiles of the style worn by former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

“I tell him come up?”

“Give me a minute. I'm just putting Maura down.”

“Okay, he's comin' gup—a fancy man!”

It was mid-April 1968. Clay had just launched
New York
as an independent weekly. The first issue wasn't off the newsstands yet and already the man was on the prowl for his next stories. I could hear him climbing the four flights of stairs, saddle-curved from a hundred years of cheap shoes, past the door of the playwright/pot dealer on two and the retired cop on three with the trigger-happy son who watched TV with the old man's service revolver on his knee. The rattle clink as I opened my three locks must have made him nervous. He burst into my apartment, pulling off his formal black tie as he peered down the long dark hall.

“Are you searching for hippies?” I teased. “There are probably some in the kitchen baking pot into brownies.”

“How do you live here all alone, Gail? It's not safe.”

“I bite.”

He laughed.

“Can I take your coat?”

As he wriggled out of a black Chesterfield, I noticed again how unusual he was: a king-size man propped on incongruously small, princely, high-arched feet. His body seemed locked in perpetual forward motion. His hungry eyes darted about the surroundings like a house detective taking mental notes on every detail. The apartment was probably not as slummy as he had imagined: a floor-through with a real dining room, a baby's room filled with books and mobiles, and even a sitting room overlooking the street where I banged out freelance articles on my secondhand electric typewriter and often pulled all-nighters (with a little help from speed).

“Sorry to barge in—but I didn't see you at the launch party,” he said as I led him into what passed for a living room and we sat down on the sofa. “I won't keep you up.”

“I really wanted to go, but no babysitter,” I said. “You must be so proud, Clay. To have your own magazine.”

“It's all I've ever wanted.”

He looked around at the homely evidence of domesticity, the scatter of toys, the odd socks, a curdle of spilled milk on the coffee table.

“You've probably never met a man like me.”

“And you may not have met a girl like me.”

He seemed intrigued.

“I know one thing—you can be a kick-ass writer.”

“Shhhh,” I said. “My little girl is sleeping.”

Abruptly, he changed the subject. “Do you understand politics?”

“My father's a country club Republican, an Anglophiliac, if you know what I mean. My Irish mother is a natural-born rebel. So I guess I understand politics—it's about fighting at the dinner table.”

“Then you'll understand Bobby,” Clay said, moving closer. The sagging sofa threw him off-kilter; he moved back.

“Bobby who?”

“Kennedy.”

“Bobby Kennedy!”

“I want you to follow his campaign.”

A clutch of fear tightened inside. “Me? I'm not a political analyst.”

Clay suddenly became passionate. I remember his advice as something like this: “Gail, the way to make your name as a journalist is not to do lots of little stories. No matter how good they are, they won't start a new conversation. Tackle a big story, something everybody's talking about, but they don't know the
why
.”

“
BOBBY,” AS EVERYONE CALLED HIM,
had announced his candidacy a month before, sounding very much like his idealistic older brother. He was running, he said, “to close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old.” Much of the public was suspicious. Here was a dyed-in-the-brine Cape Cod, Massachusetts, man who dropped into New York State on a carpetbag and used his slain brother's gilded connections to help win a Senate seat.

By 1968, America was murdering its dream of itself. TV cameras were showing our dark side. We had witnessed three summers of inner-city racial convulsions; brave black students being prodded like cattle; federal troops patrolling American cities; and U.S. Marines torching thatched huts in South Vietnam with women and children inside.

In Indianapolis two weeks before, on April 4, a largely black crowd had an hour to hear Senator Kennedy speak. The city's police chief had warned him not to appear. As Kennedy's car entered a black neighborhood, his police escort veered off. Kennedy turned to his aide and asked, “Do they know about Martin Luther King?”

They didn't. On the platform, Kennedy faced the crowd and told them the horrific news: King had been shot dead that night in Memphis, Tennessee. The crowd gasped and wailed in horror. Kennedy spoke reverently of King's dedication to “love and to justice between fellow human beings” and assured the crowd that “he died in the cause of that effort.” As an undercurrent of anger began to build, Kennedy reached beyond and into the hearts of the crowd to make a human connection.

“For those of you who are black and are tempted to . . . be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling,” he said. “I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”

That reminder of his personal tragedy cut through the color barrier. While sixty American cities erupted in rage and grief, in the city of Indianapolis where the words of Robert Kennedy had been heard, there was no fire.

A man of enormous empathy was not what I expected from Robert Kennedy. I had read about an edge of cruelty. Even his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, an unapologetic fascist, had described his youngest son as “a hater.” But during the two weeks when the world had teetered on the edge of nuclear war, back in 1962, as President Kennedy and his advisers debated what to do about photographs showing missiles on Cuban soil, it was Robert Kennedy who offered the voice of reason. In a man legendary for his aggressive behavior, it was a complete reversal of character. Here was the arch anti-Communist who represented Senator Joe McCarthy in his witch hunt now going up against the advice from almost all the members of the president's executive committee convened to respond to the Cuban missile crisis.

“I could not accept the idea that the United States would rain bombs on Cuba, killing thousands and thousands of civilians in a surprise attack,” Bobby argued, as later revealed in Robert Caro's exhaustive account in
Passage to Power
. Kennedy believed the Russians had to be allowed to pull back without losing face. The rest of the advisers were surprised at the passion with which he put forward his moral argument. When Kennedy saw his brother, the president, alone, by the White House pool, he persuaded him to give Khrushchev every chance to reconsider, and above all, to avoid war by miscalculation. Bobby may have saved the world from destruction.

As a young liberal woman fiercely against America's misadventure in Vietnam from the start, I was primed to like Bobby Kennedy. I had baptized my baby in antiwar marches in Washington. And he had captured me with a speech he made at Kansas State University earlier that spring. After students at Columbia had occupied university offices and race riots had convulsed more than one hundred American cities, Kennedy's voice cracked when he praised colleges and universities that “breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.” It was a wildly incendiary thing for any politician to say, especially in conservative Kansas, but by then, even young moms like me were marching on the Pentagon while young men burned draft cards.

When Kennedy tried to depart the Kansas campus, he was overrun by adoring students who pulled at his hair and ripped his shirtsleeves. I heard my friend the photographer Stanley Tretick, of
Look
magazine, cry out, “This is
Kansas
, fucking Kansas! He's going all the fucking way!”

“
CLAY, I CAN
'
T WRITE ABOUT
Bobby fucking Kennedy!” Hanging out on the road with the big boys had already infected my language.

“Look, every good reporter has to jump in and scramble until they get it,” Clay said, impatient now. “Read the clips. Read history! The same two or three political stories go on repeating themselves as if they never happened before.”

“Let me think about it.”

“No! The Oregon campaign starts this week. Then follow him in California, that's the make-or-break primary.”

Frantically, I thought,
What about Maura?
My sister could stay with her for a few days.

Clay didn't wait for my answer. “You can do it!”

“
LET
'
S GO!
” The moment the advance man opened the door of the private air terminal at Washington Dulles, a mob of reporters rushed out like penned-up cattle, racing for the best seats on Senator Kennedy's chartered plane. All men, with a couple of exceptions. Startled, I lagged behind.

“Where are you from?” The Boston Irish accent was unmistakable. It was Robert Kennedy himself who fell into step beside me.

“Gail Sheehy,
New York
magazine.”

“Happy to have you with us, Gail.” He grinned, pushing the flop of wavy hair off his forehead. With his next words, he swept me off my feet. “How'm I doin' in New York?”

I couldn't wait to tell Clay: the senator from New York with the royal political family name was asking
me
, a mere pup from a month-old magazine he's hardly heard of, how he was doing with the voters of New York. Clay laughed and gave me my first lesson in political journalism: “He's trying to flatter you into feeling like you're part of his election team. Don't hold it against him, but don't buy into it.”

Anyone walking down the aisle of an RFK flight would see rows and rows of seats occupied by the “Kennedy Mafia,” the men and women linked to the family through friendship, marriage, work, and political alliances and ready to put their lives on hold to help any Kennedy win an election. I was so low on the pecking order behind national journalistic stars like Sam Donaldson, my chances of getting an interview with the senator were slim to none. The only other woman on that plane, a wire service reporter, tipped me off to ask for the help of Fred Dutton, Bobby's behind-the-scenes campaign manager, a rare advocate of women in politics.

Most of Kennedy's campaign flights were jolly affairs marked by singing, drinking, and practical jokes played by his resident imp, Dick Tuck. On one long night flight, Ethel Kennedy led off a songfest with “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Campaign folksingers John Stewart and Buffy Ford crooned all the patriotic songs they knew while a stewardess made up the senator's bed. At 3:30
A.M.
, Robert Kennedy dragged down the aisle from a TV taping session, shirt unbuttoned, tie hanging. From his mouth dangled a burned-out cigar. A pretty stewardess brought him a scotch and water. He sat on the armrest in the aisle and asked for “We Shall Overcome” and then “Hymn to Young People.” He kept drawing on the dead cigar, sometimes singing, sometimes leaning his head on his hand. His sad blue eyes seemed to rove planets away. Later he asked the folksinger Buffy to sit on the floor, beneath him. Now and then his hand absently picked up a strand of Buffy's long taffy-colored hair. It was a characteristic moment—the melancholy flitting through joy, the distance and the need for closeness, the complete Irishness.

On our third day in Oregon, Dutton let me know the senator was taking a very small plane to hop up and down the Cascade Mountain Range—probably twenty stops or more. “A nail-biter. You won't have any competition for a seat.”

We flew over the Cascade Range of pine-studded mountains. When we landed in Roseburg, Ethel froze. Her husband had to walk through a mob of angry, rifle-toting Oregonians to debate the gun-sale issue. Rain started to fall. John Birchers were out in force, waving professionally printed signs:
PROTECT YOUR RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS
.

A woman holding a McCarthy sign stopped him; “I hear your dog bites.”

“He only bites children.” Kennedy's quick wit usually melted hecklers, but in this place it was not working. The woman grew surlier. “They say you're ruthless.” He flashed his big, blunt, uncontainable eighty-eight-keyboard smile. “Now, can anybody with a smile like this be ruthless?”