So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (27 page)

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Now consider the Kansas speeches—and their focus on the gross national product.

Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction—purpose and dignity—that afflicts us all.… [The] gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are American.

In 1968 constant dollars, adjusted for inflation, annual per capita gross domestic product in the United States when Kennedy spoke was about seventeen thousand dollars; even with today’s economic turmoil, it now exceeds forty-four thousand dollars. And concerns about making life “worthwhile” amid growing wealth are huge, even as college kids worry about getting a job and paying off student loans.

But I thought the wealth comments didn’t seem particularly important to us then, and looking back, I think our judgment was correct. That sort of observation about Americans and wealth goes back to Thoreau and Tocqueville and probably even further. To talk about our perceived faults like that is a very American tradition. We try to find our flaws and fix them; sometimes, we fail or even make things worse, but we like to try.

This section of the speech, though, did receive some of the most tremendous ovations from the audience—which made me sit up and take notice. Neither I nor Senator Kennedy nor anyone else had expected anything from those lines. Even looking at them now, I remember nothing about how they came into being. Like everything in his speeches, they had to have started with a conversation in which Robert Kennedy told someone on his staff what points he wanted to make. Mostly vague antecedents to the Kansas remarks can be found in several Kennedy speeches going back at least to the summer of 1967. But how and why they came together that way on that day in Kansas? I have no idea. We knew right away, though, that we had found an argument—and a statement of that argument—which resonated with people. For the next two weeks, in Albuquerque, Phoenix, San Jose, Nashville, and other cities, Bob’s speeches repeated these paragraphs, but the press didn’t seem interested. Then Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the race and Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and we must have concluded that concerns about wealth were clearly disconnected from the challenges our country faced and the issues first on people’s minds.

Maybe I was right. Few people at the time thought
any
part of the Kansas speech was important. The TV news that evening and newspapers the next morning stressed the frenzy of the crowds, even criticizing RFK for unleashing too much emotion. And in his book
The Making of the President, 1968,
Theodore H. White called the trip to Kansas a “disaster” because of what he described as “frightening hysteria.” But, I wondered, “frightening” to whom?

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The way I remember the campaign, we spent our efforts focused on the pro-war candidacies of LBJ surrogates, like the governor of Indiana and the attorney general of California, who ran in the primaries as “favorite sons” who supported first Johnson and then Humphrey.

But in Oregon and California, RFK participated in one-on-one television debates with Eugene McCarthy.

McCarthy’s importance was exaggerated, I thought. He was never really much of an obstacle to winning the nomination. Our chief opponent, the person Kennedy had to defeat to win the nomination, was always Johnson and then Hubert Humphrey. LBJ had dropped out of the race, in my view, to avoid having his presidential career bracketed by losses to two Kennedys, JFK in the 1960 primaries and RFK in the 1968 primaries. If RFK had not entered the race, McCarthy would have defeated LBJ in early primaries, LBJ would then have withdrawn, and the nomination would have gone to Humphrey.

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Engraved at Robert Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery is an excerpt from what scholars call “invented rhetoric”—spontaneous, unwritten words RFK said on April 4, 1968, telling a crowd in Indianapolis that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed.

We had learned at the airport in Muncie, Indiana, after a campaign speech on that date at Ball State University—memorable because when one medical student asked, after a proposal by Kennedy that doctors serve for two years in a poor neighborhood as a condition for a license to practice, “Who will pay for those two years?” RFK had replied, “You will”—the shocking news that Martin Luther King had been shot, perhaps fatally, in Memphis. On the campaign plane back to Indianapolis, Bob and I talked of what he might say that evening at a scheduled speech in what was then called a “Negro” neighborhood, assuming King succumbed to his wounds.

Our discussion of the pending speech ended when we landed in Indianapolis and learned that King was indeed dead, and the motorcade began to form to take us to the site of the speech. Our local campaign leadership—and the city leaders—urged that the meeting be canceled, because security could not by guaranteed. That, Kennedy insisted, was one of the reasons he must keep the date. As he got into his car, Kennedy asked me to put together “some notes I can use,” putting down on paper—my yellow pad—the best ideas we had discussed on the plane. I told him I would do that on the press bus and get it to him as we arrived.

What we had not counted on, however, was that the local police assigned to guide and guard our motorcade peeled off just as we crossed the dividing line between white and black Indianapolis, leaving the cars pretty much on their own. After we drove past the fire trucks blocking access in and out of that part of town, we no longer had police protection. The press bus, soon detached from the rest of the convoy, was being driven by a man who did not know the African-American neighborhoods. As a result, when we finally arrived at the speech site and I ran toward the flatbed truck that RFK had mounted, he had already started to speak. It was, as it turned out, one of the great speeches of the campaign, all off-the-cuff and spontaneous and almost certainly the only impromptu speech of any American politician, anywhere, ever, that quoted Aeschylus correctly or, for that matter, at all.

Looking back now, we know the crowd was roughly divided between people closest to the speaker’s platform, who had arrived early, in those days long before cell phones, and knew nothing of the MLK shooting, and groups roaming along the edge of the crowd, who knew about King’s death, were angry, and seemed eager for violence. Some carried guns, chains, or knives. On the video clips, you can hear Robert Kennedy ask, “Do they know about MLK?” And the answer from the person standing next to him on the crowded platform, “To some extent, we have left that up to you.” Someone shouts into the microphone, asking people to please lower their signs. Robert Kennedy’s words, in full, spoken with no notes, and as recorded by television news media on the scene, are as follows. His occasional repetitions and awkward phrasing are entirely spontaneous; it all comes from within Robert Kennedy and includes almost none of what we had discussed on the airplane:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I’m only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening, because I have some—some very sad news for all of you—Could you lower those signs, please?—I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world; and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black—considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible—you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.

We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization—black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with—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. 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 get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poem, my—my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:

Even 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 and lawlessness, but is 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 whether they be black.

So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King—yeah, it’s true—but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love—a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We’ve had difficult times in the past, but we—and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it’s not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.

And let’s dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

We didn’t know then that anything about those remarks was special. How Bob’s remarks had gone, how the press might play them, was the furthest thing from our minds. If anyone had asked any of us, including Robert Kennedy, if there had been anything special about his words in Indianapolis, we would have thought the question was irrational. Where to go, what to say, what to do, how to better understand what was happening in the United States, how to somehow go somewhere and say something and do something helpful and positive, how to stop in silence, pause and respect and reflect on the terrible new truth with which we all suddenly had to live—all of that was challenge enough. Robert Kennedy never said to me, or to anyone else I know of, anything about that evening and those remarks in Indianapolis.

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All those times in those situations when someone is in trouble and one asks, “Is there anything I can do to help?”—really just expressing concern and not expecting the other person ever to really ask for anything—in my experience the answer almost never comes back, “Yes, as a matter of fact, there
is
something you can do.” But that night was different.

Earl Graves, then a fellow RFK staff member, and I were alone with RFK in his hotel room in Indianapolis when he called Coretta King and asked, “Is there anything I can do to help?” Graves, an African-American who had been active in the civil rights movement, knew the King family well. Their welfare, and the violence apparently spreading that night across America’s cities, were on our minds. RFK paused, listened, his face intent and his eyes focused in the distance, and then he said on the phone, “Of course, we’ll take care of that,” at which Earl turned to me and said, “I think you and I have just been given a job.” He was right. We were then assigned the task of getting King’s body from the police in Memphis and transporting it to Atlanta for the funeral.

That meant, apart from the basic transportation problem, getting information from the distraught King family, including the name of the funeral home in Atlanta—the church name was easy—and getting permits in Memphis and Atlanta (not so easy, with the police and the coroner involved) and then, what we thought would be the easiest part, getting an airline to undertake this flight. But in turn, each regular airline flying that route refused, citing some obscure regulation or company policy but each, I thought, afraid of violence from friend or foe, at either end of the voyage.

Finally, in the very small hours of the morning, we reached an RFK supporter in Atlanta who had his own plane and who agreed to do the required paperwork and get his plane to Memphis and back to Atlanta in time for the necessary preparations for the funeral. Earl and I could relax just in time to get ready to leave, early in the morning, for Cleveland. Our baggage—along with a treasured coat of mine, as well as other cold-weather items—had been sent ahead to Alaska, originally planned as the next quick overnight stop, never to be seen again.