Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (12 page)

King’s assassination sparked riots in dozens of urban areas throughout the nation, including Baltimore; Chicago; Washington, DC; Louisville; and Kansas City. Fearing the same thing in Indianapolis, the police chief advised strongly against Bobby making his appearance. Ethel begged him to skip it as well. Bobby sent her back to the hotel and made his way to the rally with a handful of campaign workers. His police escort peeled off
and abandoned him as soon as he entered the ghetto. The message from the local authorities was clear: You’re on your own.

It was dark when Bobby arrived at the rally site—a vacant lot surrounded by tenements. He climbed onto the bed of a pickup truck, declined the speech his campaign had written for him, and removed from the pocket of his overcoat his own hastily scrawled remarks. It was then that he informed the crowd that Martin Luther King Jr. was dead.

Those assembled gasped in unison. Anguished shouts—moans, really—of “No! No!” rose from the audience. After a few seconds, the initial clamor died. Bobby continued:

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black . . .

Riots broke out in 110 cities nationwide that night. Thirty-nine people died in the violence, and more than 2,500 were injured. Indianapolis was one of the few major metropolitan areas that remained peaceful.

A few days later, Ethel flew with Bobby to Atlanta, where they attended King’s funeral service. There, she did her best to comfort King’s widow, Coretta. Though mere acquaintances, “we embraced each other,” Mrs. King reported. “It was a natural reaction from her to me, and I had that kind of warm feeling about her as a woman who reached out to me.”

Bobby won the Indiana primary on May 7. Early returns showed that minorities were turning out in large numbers for Kennedy. “Don’t you just wish that everyone was black?” Ethel asked, with her patented unfiltered honesty. Her frankness, spontaneity, and sense of the absurd were often buoying on an exhausting campaign. “Kennedy’s mood, often irascible, improved when Ethel was on the plane,” Bobby Kennedy biographer Evan Thomas noted.

On a campaign train in Colorado (following a decisive primary win on May 14 in Nebraska), Ethel arranged a surprise for Fred Dutton, Bobby’s right-hand man. As the train arrived in tiny Julesburg—Dutton’s birthplace—Ethel produced signs created by her and some of the women on the campaign. “Make Fred, Not War,” read one. “Fred Dutton’s Brother for Attorney General,” read another. Ethel had made “Dutton Buttons” and Bobby held up a sign reading “Sock It to ’Em, Freddy!” RFK led the puzzled crowd in a “We want Fred!” chant, and Ethel forced Dutton to deliver a speech imitating Bobby’s stock phrasing and sharp Boston accent.

In addition to her importance within the campaign, Ethel played her part in maintaining the family-centric Kennedy image. “I plan to remain active in my husband’s campaign [but] I want to spend at least three or four days a week at home with my kids,” she said. In early May, Washington columnist Maxine Cheshire reported that Ethel was pregnant with her eleventh child. In Davenport, Iowa, she played up her image as mother hen and homemaker. “I try to keep our family life happy and easygoing so [Bobby] doesn’t have to worry,” she said. “It’s important for him to know the children are well.”

But with both parents gone so much, not all was well at Hickory Hill. David in particular was beginning to cause trouble with increasing frequency. Neighbors complained that their homes were being vandalized, that firecrackers were being thrown at their houses and damaging their mailboxes. One particularly aggrieved neighbor, Jack Kopson, fired a shotgun near David’s feet late one April night in an attempt to scare the boy off of his property. In early May, shortly before the Indiana primary,
David and a classmate were picked up by the police for throwing a rock through the windshield of a passing motorist. The driver was unhurt and agreed to drop the charges on the conditions that the Kennedys pay for the damage and that they deal seriously with their son’s behavior. They came through on the first condition.

It does not seem, however, that Bobby and Ethel confronted David in any serious way. “David was chided and ridiculed by the Senator and Mrs. Kennedy, but not for what he did,” recalled Bob Galland. They “felt he was stupid to get caught. I think the Senator took Dave aside and they had a chat . . . but that was it.” The situation concerned Bobby, at least, more than Galland perceived. He spoke to child psychiatrist Robert Coles about what might have motivated twelve-year-old David to throw rocks at a car’s windshield. Because he wanted to hit someone, Coles responded. It was not to be the end of David’s difficulties.

10

A Tremendous Amount of Presence

Bobby lost Oregon. There was almost no minority population
in the state, and both the Teamsters and the state’s large progun hunting population—alarmed by Bobby’s advocacy of gun control—were well organized. Bobby was never able to gain any traction and lost to McCarthy by six points, 44.7 percent to 38.8 percent. It marked the first time one of Joe Kennedy’s sons had ever lost an election, and it stung. The campaign had left him exhausted, his face haggard, his voice shot. Each night at dinner, Ethel counted out a dozen or so pills for Bobby to take—mostly vitamins—and he was receiving a large B12 shot every other day.

Despite the Oregon setback and his exhaustion, he and Ethel were hopeful for his success in California. On May 29, the day after the Oregon primary, Bobby arrived in LA and toured majority black and Mexican neighborhoods in the back of a convertible. The crowds were ferocious in their enthusiasm: They tore at his shirt, shredding it, his cufflinks a memory. He lost his shoes. With the crowd’s adoration, his weariness lifted. More than once, he turned to Fred Dutton and said, “These are my people.”

“He was being truthful,” Evan Thomas wrote. “There had not been since Lincoln, nor has there ever been again, a white national politician so embraced by people of color.”

Ethel had Bob Galland bring six of the children to be with their parents for primary night. On May 30, Galland and David, Kerry, Michael, Courtney, Christopher, and Max flew from Washington to LAX, where
Ethel met them and got them situated in a three-bedroom bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. After a surprisingly bland debate with McCarthy on June 1 in San Francisco, Bobby returned to LA and managed to spend half the day with Ethel and the kids at Disneyland. While you couldn’t say he stepped away from the campaign—the press was with them every step of the way—the hours with his family would, in retrospect, seem precious. “The kids were constantly badgered by the press” that day, remembered Galland. “Cameras in their faces, microphones in their faces. The photographers would be walking backward taking pictures and the kids would run ahead and get down on hands and knees so a guy walking backward would stumble and fall over them. Ethel got a kick out of it.”

The last day of the California campaign—June 3—was grueling for both Bobby and Ethel. They traveled from Los Angeles to a rally in San Francisco, then back south to San Diego and Long Beach—more than a thousand miles. At the rally in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a cluster of firecrackers exploded near Ethel and Bobby’s open convertible. The crowd tensed, fearing gunfire. Ethel crouched into the backseat, clearly frightened. Bobby remained standing, seemingly unafraid.

That night, Bobby, Ethel, and the six kids stayed at the Malibu beach house of film director John Frankenheimer. They relaxed together that night and spent the morning of the primary at the beach. When David became caught in the cold, crashing Pacific waves, Bobby went in after him. Both were rolled by the surf as Bobby, clutching his son, regained his footing and emerged onto the beach. He had an abrasion over his right eyebrow and David in his arms.

That evening, not long after Bobby had arrived at Room 516 of the Ambassador Hotel to await the returns from the primary, he learned that he’d already won the South Dakota primary that day with a full 50 percent of the vote. The Royal Suite was filled with family, campaign advisers, celebrities, and a few handpicked members of the press. Ethel arrived in her orange and white minidress and entertained the crew—who’d been drinking for hours—as they waited for the California returns. The four older children who’d come out to LA spent a few hours in the suite but,
tired from their day at the beach, returned to the Beverly Hills Hotel with Bob Galland around 10:30. Shortly before midnight, with the networks projecting Bobby beating McCarthy with 50 percent of the vote, Bobby and Ethel decided to head down to the Ambassador ballroom to declare victory.

The ballroom had been packed for hours with enthusiastic supporters, who exploded into cheers when Bobby and Ethel appeared. Bobby stood at a podium, crushed in among a throng of supporters, Ethel at his right shoulder, beaming.

He thanked various campaign workers, and his sisters and mother, and jokingly his dog, Freckles. “I’m not doing this in the order of importance but I do want to thank my wife, Ethel, as well,” he added with a sheepish laugh. She giggled good-naturedly beside him and the crowd cheered.

He urged those listening to help end the violence and strife that so characterized the late 1960s. “We are a great country, an unselfish country, and a compassionate country,” he said. “So my thanks to all of you, and now it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there.”

Bobby left the podium and was led by a maître d’ through the dense crowd into a back corridor near the kitchen, where he started shaking the hands of excited members of the kitchen staff. Having become separated from Ethel, he turned to look for her, at which point Sirhan Sirhan, a mentally ill, unemployed young man—who blamed Bobby for the troubles of the Palestinian people—stepped from the shadows with a snub-nosed .22 caliber pistol and opened fire. His first shot entered Bobby’s head just behind the right ear. The assailant then emptied his pistol around the room. Bobby covered his face with his hands and fell backward onto the cement floor.

Bill Barry, Bobby’s bodyguard, tackled Sirhan and a struggle involving several people ensued. Ethel broke free from where she’d been pulled to safety and rushed to Bobby’s side. Kneeling beside him, she stroked his face. He handled a rosary that a busboy had placed in his hands. “Is everybody else all right?” Bobby whispered.

Reporting on the victory festivities live for Mutual News, Andrew West reported what he saw as it happened. What he said about Ethel, as
the chaotic scene unfolded in front of him, is revealing. “Ethel Kennedy is standing by,” West reported. “She is calm. She is raising her hand high to motion people back. She’s attempting to get calm. A woman . . . with a tremendous amount of presence. A tremendous amount of presence.”

She motioned for a hovering cameraman to stop shooting, but he crassly shot back, “This is history, lady.” Ethel somehow maintained her composure in the madness. Five other people had been hit by Sirhan’s bullets—a forty-three-year-old campaign worker who had been friends with the Kennedys; two newsmen, one of whom was just nineteen years old; a seventeen-year-old campaign worker; and a forty-three-year-old political activist who was actually supporting Bobby’s opponent, Eugene McCarthy.

Two medics arrived and began to lift Bobby onto the stretcher. “Gently, gently,” Ethel said. Bobby, in obvious pain, cried, “Oh, no, no, don’t,” before slipping into unconsciousness.

All of Bobby’s children were asleep by the time he was shot, except for one. At the Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow, David—about ten days shy of his thirteenth birthday—sat quietly watching television with Bob Galland when, in front of his eyes, his father was gunned down. According to Galland, “he said something like, ‘Oh, man, it’s over . . . they got him, too.’ ”

Over the next twenty-six hours, except for the hours he spent in surgery, Ethel would not leave Bobby’s side: in the ambulance on the way to Los Angeles’ Central Receiving Hospital, where doctors attempted to assess his condition and where he received absolution and last rites from a priest; or through his transfer to Good Samaritan Hospital a couple of hours later. She left his side only when he was wheeled into surgery. Surgeons tried to remove two bullets—one lodged in the midline of the brain, the other in the back of the neck. Ethel sat in a tiny room near the surgery unit for nearly four hours as doctors tried to save his life. When Bobby was finally wheeled to the recovery room, Ethel climbed onto a surgical table and lay next to him.

Years later, daughter Kerry—eight at the time of her father’s death—would still fight tears as she described how she learned of the shooting. She’d gone to bed with her siblings back in the hotel room, then woke up at four or five o’clock in the morning and turned on the television to
watch cartoons. “And the news just kept coming across about Daddy,” she said through tears.

After the surgery, Bobby showed no brain function but was breathing on his own. Throughout the night and the next day, Kennedys began arriving. As Bobby faded in intensive care, a calm but purposeful Ethel led the discussion of his funeral arrangements.

On June 6, 1968, at 1:44 a.m., nearly twenty-six hours after he was shot, Robert Francis Kennedy was pronounced dead.

Robert Kennedy’s body lay in state in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City for two nights and a day. Mourners lined up for twenty-five blocks to walk past his coffin and pay their respects. Ethel went over arrangements for his funeral mass, which she insisted would differ in tone from the solemn ceremonies surrounding Jack’s death in 1963. “If there’s one thing about our faith,” she told one of the priests, “it’s our belief that this is the beginning of eternal life and not the end of life. I want this mass to be as joyous as it possibly can be.” With her fellow mourners, too, she wore a brave face and did her best to enforce good cheer. Greeting a weeping friend in the days before the funeral, she said, “Don’t cry now. We’ll all have a good cry later.”

On Saturday afternoon, after the funeral mass—at which Teddy memorably eulogized him 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”—Bobby’s body was carried by a twenty-one-car funeral train from New York to Washington, a 226-mile stretch of tracks lined with hundreds of thousands—perhaps a million—of mourners, members of the general public who stood along the tracks in the June heat to pay their respects.

Bobby’s casket was in the final car, where Ethel spent the first part of the trip alone with him. “It was the only moment, then or since, that I saw her cry,” said RFK aide Carter Burden, who glimpsed Ethel with the coffin. “She sat there, immensely still, and hunched over in a plain, straight-backed chair. She had a rosary in her hands, and her head was resting against the casket.”

It was not a posture she allowed herself for very long. She grabbed her eldest son, Joe, and walked through all twenty cars in the stifling heat, thanking people for coming, seeing how they were holding up, hugging, laughing, kissing friends on the cheek. She greeted nearly every one of the train’s 1,100 passengers.

It was just before 9:30 p.m. that his funeral train arrived in Washington. Ethel rode with Bobby’s coffin in the hearse as it was taken to Arlington National Cemetery, the motorcade passing tens of thousands of people along the route. She stood on the hillside at Arlington as Bobby’s coffin was conveyed to his burial plot, only feet from where Jack was buried. A priest said a prayer, and the flag on the casket was folded and presented to Ethel. She and Teddy knelt and kissed the casket before it was lowered, at 11:34 p.m., into the ground.