Working for Bobby
DURING THIS 50TH ANNIVERSARY YEAR, many people will be remembering 1968, its assassination shocks and the Vietnam War setting the national mood. The shooting of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. brought anguish and destruction, flames and troops to the streets. New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay said of the night of the assassination that he saw in the people of Harlem “great grief, emotion, very deep emotion, with people weeping, and frustrated and lonely. And terribly lost and let down.” Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s death only months later, less than five years after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, made heavier the burden of grief and civic despair. The once-unimaginable momentum to challenge a seated president, Lyndon Johnson, in the Democratic primary was halted by his decision not to seek reelection and then was further unsettled by the loss of the likely successor. Meanwhile, opposition to the war was growing. The national debate was bitter. Alistair Cooke reported home on his weekly BBC radio broadcast, “They are spitting across the dinner tables of America.”
Amid large events and forces, we live our own lives. This is what I remember of that time.
Twice in 1967, I had joined protests against the war, first a march to the United Nations in New York, and then a march in Washington to the Pentagon. Norman Mailer’s fierce nonfiction classic, The Armies of the Night, wound him into that moment, in contrasting style to the march’s other leading literary figure, the patrician poet Robert Lowell. For all its juiced-up journalism and self-centered focus, Armiescan still put a reader in the day’s zeitgeist. Not long afterward, a senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, reserved and intelligent, with little history promising such an act, decided to enter the Democratic presidential primary. His reason: the war.
Everywhere I turned, I met other people in their 20s who were going to New Hampshire to join McCarthy, even if only for a weekend. But I remained clothed in sentiment that came from having heard President Kennedy speak on campus during my senior year at Berkeley in 1962, summoning my generation to public service. Above all was the appeal of his manner and idiom, the way he carried himself, which was so sharply different from President Eisenhower and, more pointedly, Richard Nixon. The voting age in 1960 was 21, and I was 20, too young to vote for JFK. My admiration had grown after the Cuban Missile Crisis. His assassination marked for me, as it did for the nation, the leaving behind of innocence.
I had been against the Vietnam War since 1965, not out of any deep knowledge but rather because of a gut reaction against the war’s premises: the domino theory and the monolith of the international communist conspiracy. It seemed to me a civil war. Now I wanted Bobby Kennedy to run for president and was impatient with what I saw as his dithering. Having done my six months’ active military duty in 1963, I was lucky enough in that age of the draft to have only a year left in the reserves. I was working for Lindsay’s director of the budget, Frederick O’Reilly Hayes.
I went to Hayes’s office one morning and said
