Glimpses of Robert F. Kennedy (Senior)
(source: MO 2021.4.249 at the JFK Library)
from Herb Caen’s column, January 5, 1968:
At 12:45 p.m. on Wednesday, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was standing curbside on Sacramento St. near Montgomery, dripping charisma all over the place. He was chatting with two of his henchmen (Democrats have henchmen, Republicans have aides) and his mere presence had an electrifying effect. Motorists slowed down to gape at him. A chubby, giggling Japanese waitress emerged from a coffee shop to wait, shivering, for an autograph.
An elderly Japanese in a black overcoat asked for one, too (you know how these Easterners stick together). Four men emerging from the Red Knight suddenly stopped, transfixed, to stare at him as they picked their teeth with toothpicks. The Senator glanced at them with a tentative smile. They moved on, still picking their teeth.
“Lunch,” he said, jaywalking toward Jack’s with a young henchman, Peter Edelman. We went upstairs to Private Dining Room One, a one-windowed cubicle barely big enough for three. The Senator-it’s hard to refrain from calling him “Bobby” although his friends call him “Bob” —stared at the buzzer on the wall. “To summon the girls,” I said. He looked nervous till I explained that it USED to be possible to take girls upstairs at Jack’s. “Now then,” I went on, “let’s light up cigars and nominate a Vice-President” (I forgot to tell you, I’m great fun at parties). He smiled a tiny one. The waiter whispered nervously in my ear: “How do I address him?” “Senator,” I whispered back. “Sir,” said the waiter, clearing his throat, “would you like a drink?” The Senator ordered a beer-“Coors.” …
In casual conversation, the celebrated toughness isn’t apparent. In 90 minutes, he made only one bitter remark—while talking about an Air Force decision (made over McNamara’s objec-tions) that cost us nine planes in Vietnam. He went on to the “futil-ity® of bombing North Vietnam, and recalled how, during World War II, German production had actually increased under heavy bombing. “The Air Force,” he snapped, “is never right.”…
We ordered fresh cracked crab. “This is wonderful,” he enthused.
With a glance out the window: “What a beautiful city.” Helping himself to more mayonnaise: “I could sit here all afternoon, eating cracked crab.” He asked about Joe Alioto and (a note of concern here how Eugene McCarthy is doing in California, but he wouldn’t be drawn out on the subject. Hunters Point came up and I mentioned that Eastern newsmen were always saying that our slums are garden spots compared to theirs. He nodded: “It’s better to be poor in San Francisco than rich in New York.”
“If the war is still on when your oldest son reaches the draft age,” I said, “what will you tell him?” He took evasive action. “Well, we’d talk about it, all about it, and then I guess it would be his deci-sion.” Then he told, with apparent approval, an anecdote about a friend of his who had been “a terrific hawk” before he went to Viet-ham and who is now “a terrific dove.” “He has an 18-year-old son,” Kennedy went on, “and he told me ‘If that kid doesn’t burn his draft card, I’ll do it for him!'”
***
We stepped outside and he was immediately engulfed by auto-graph-seekers. “Senator,” somebody called out, “your helicopter is waiting”— just like in the movies, and he drove away with a wave and that shy smile. Would I vote for him for President? Well, a man who likes our cracked crab and thinks it’s better to be poor in San Francisco than rich in New York …
Steve Shapiro took these photos:
They’re sometimes cited as being from RFK’s presidential campaign, but the one above is from a 1966 trip to California, where he did some campaigning with Pat Brown.
That one New York, Senate campaign.
I found them in Shapiro’s book, American Edge.
California again. That must be the Berkeley Greek Theater. Here’s how The New York Times reported on that speech (front page):
Screenshot
From Ted Kennedy’s memoir True Compass:
(source)
from a Miller Center interview with Reagan campaign aide Stuart Spencer in November, 2001:
I did a thing at Annenberg School last week. It’s a journalism school at University of Southern California communications center. Ed Guttman is involved with it. He was one of Bobby’s guys, and he was there that night. I said to Ed, Maybe you don’t want to answer this question, but one thing that’s always in my mind: politically, why did Bobby, once he became Attorney General, decide to go after the people his father had put together to finance some of this effort? It was a lot of the hoods and Chicago guys that he’d done business with when he was a bootlegger. There’s been references to it, but did Bobby not know that this transpired? Or did Bobby say to his dad, The hell with it, this is good politics. The hell with it—I believe this—these are bad people. He went right to the heart of what thirty years before were Joe Kennedy’s business associates.
There are conspiracy theories out there that cost him his life. I don’t know if they’re true or not, but God, that’s a fascinating triangle. He wouldn’t answer the question. He said, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never seen that before in our life. It’s like you have the support of the National Rifle Association or the National Environmental Council and you get into power and you gut them. I’ve never seen that before. But he went after them tooth and toenail.
(source: https://www.loc.gov/item/98509265/ )
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, Bobby Western talks to his lawyer, Kline. Kline gets going on the Kennedys (the bold is mine, long but intriguing):
You didnt have some connection with the Kennedys.
No.
I worked with Bobby in Chicago in the early sixties. Briefly. We were working with a guy named Ed Hicks who was trying to get free elections for the Chicago cabdrivers. Basically Kennedy was a mor-alist. Before long he was to have an amazing roster of enemies and he prided himself on knowing who they were and what they were up to. Which he didnt, of course. By the time his brother was shot a couple of years later they were mired up in a concatenation of plots and schemes that will never be sorted out. At the head of the list was killing Castro and if that failed actually invading Cuba. In the end I dont think that would have happened but it’s a sort of bellwether for all the trouble they were in. I always wondered if there might not have been a moment there when Kennedy realized he was dying that he didnt smile with relief. After old man Kennedy had his stroke the Kennedys for some reason felt that it would be all right to go after the Mafia. Ignoring the longstanding deal the old man had cut with them. No idea what they were thinking. All the time Jack is schtupping Sam Giancana’s girl-friend—a lady named Judith Campbell. Although in all fairness-quaint term—I think that Jack saw her first. Or one of his pimps did. Some guy named Sinatra.
What are you going to say about the Kennedys? There’s no one like them. A friend of mine was at a houseparty out on Martha’s Vineyard one evening and when he got to the house Ted Kennedy was greeting people at the door. He was dressed in a bright yellow jumpsuit and he was drunk.
My friend said: That’s quite an outfit you’ve got on there, Senator. And Kennedy said yes, but I can get away with it. My friend-who’s a Washington lawyer-told me that he had never understood the Ken-nedys. He found them baffling. But he said that when he heard those words the scales fell from his eyes. He thought that they were probably engraved on the family crest. However you say it in Latin. Anyway, I’ve never understood why there is no monument anywhere to Mary Jo Kopechne. The girl Ted left to drown in his car after he drove it off a bridge. If it were not for her sacrifice that lunatic would have been President of the United States. My guess is that with the exception of Bobby they were just a pack of psychopaths. I suppose it was Bobby’s hope that he could somehow justify his family. Even though he must have known that was impossible. There wasnt a copper cent in the coffers that funded the whole enterprise that wasnt tainted. And then they all died.
Murdered, for the most part. Maybe not Shakespeare. But not bad Dostoevsky.
Castro was no part of this.
No. In the end as it turned out he wasnt.
When he took over the island he threw Santo Trafficante in jail and told him that he was going to be shot as an enemy of the people. So of course Trafficante just said:
How much? You hear different figures. Forty million. Twenty million. It was probably closer to ten. But Trafficante wasnt happy about it. The Mafia had a long history of running the casinos for Ba-tista. Castro should have treated them bet-ter. The Mafia. He’s lucky to be alive. The odd thing is that Santo ran three casinos in Cuba for another eight or ten years after that. Language is important. People forget that Trafficante’s first language is Spanish.
Anyway, he and Marcello have run the Southeast from Miami to Dallas for years.
And the net worth of this enterprise is staggering. At its height over two billion a year. Bobby Kennedy wouldnt have deported Marcello without Jack’s okay, but by now the whole business was beyond disentanglement. The CIA hated the Ken-nedys and were working at cutting themselves loose from the administration al-together, but the notion that they killed Kennedy is stupid. And if Kennedy was going to take the CIA apart piece by piece as he promised to do he’d have had to start about two administrations sooner. By his time it was way too late. The CIA hated Hoover too and Hoover in turn hated the Kennedys and people just assumed that Hoover was in bed with the Mafia but the truth was the Mafia had endless files of Hoover as a transvestite-dressed in ladies’ underwear-so that was a Mexican standoff that had been in play for years.
There’s more to it of course. But if you said that Bobby had gotten his brother-whom he adored —killed, I would have to say that was pretty much right. The CIA hauled Carlos off to the jungles of Guatemala and flew away waving back at him. Hard to imagine what they were thinking. They left him there-where he held a counterfeit passport-and his lawyer finally showed up and then the two of them were frogmarched off into the jungles of El Salvador and left to fashion new lives for them-selves. Standing there in the heat and the mud and the mosquitoes. Dressed in wool suits. They hiked some twenty miles until they came to a village. And, God be praised, a telephone. When he got back to New Orleans he called a meeting at Churchill Farms-his country place-and he was foaming at the mouth over Bobby Kennedy. He looked at the people in the room-I think there were eight of them-and he said: I’m going to whack the little bastard. And it got very quiet. Everybody knew it was a serious meeting. There was nothing on the table to drink but water.
And finally somebody said: Why dont we whack the big bastard? And that was that.
I’m not sure I understand.
If you killed Bobby then you had a really pissed off JFK to deal with. But if you killed JFK then his brother went pretty quickly from being the Attorney General of the United States to being an unemployed lawyer.
How do you know all this?
Right. The thing about the Kennedys was that they had no way to grasp the in-appeasable war-ethic of the Sicilians. The Kennedys were Irish and they thought that you won by talking. They didnt really even understand that this other thing existed. They used abstractions to make political speeches. The people. Poverty. Ask not what your country blah blah blah.
They didnt understand that there were still people alive who actually believed in things like honor. They’d never heard Joe Bonanno on the subject. That’s what makes Kennedy’s book so preposterous.
Although in all fairness there’s some question as to whether or not he ever even read it. I’m having the chicken grande.
All right.
You want to pick the wine?
Sure.
Michael Herr talking about the Kennedys in Las Vegas in The Big Room;
Because even then his kid brother was around like a mongoose on Benzedrine, watching, keeping tabs and running the connections down to their root-ends, to see exactly who was friends with who, and who to play up, or down, or chop completely. The older brother’s playground was the younger brother’s nightmare. Still, the action was invigorating. It’s possible that more of the New Frontier was inspired here at the Sands than back on the Massachusetts bedrock or looking dreaming out of the office window at the Jefferson Memorial.
One more from Brother Edward:
