Mark Malcomson
Bobby Kennedy: An Enigma

Mark Malcomson | Bobby Kennedy: An Enigma

- Everybody. I think I usually do the seven o'clock London stint, so I usually say, “Good afternoon and evening to everybody,” but I think I’ve got a few people who are still in their mornings. So good afternoon, good morning, good evening. Appropriately for what we’re going to talk about today, I actually flew back from my summer holidays from Boston on Monday night, Tuesday morning. And so I had a chance to spend three weeks in New England, which I love, and it gave me a suitably refreshed, if possibly now a little jet lagged, kind of approach to what we’re going to talk about today, given the topic. But also, I seem to have brought Hurricane Ernesto with me because that was causing all sorts of bad weather off the coast of New England at the beginning of the week, and now seems to about to have an imminent downpour coming, heading from the north of England, right down to London. So it’s cold and miserable in London. I actually am sitting here at five o'clock on an August day with my lights on because it’s too dark otherwise. But anyway, when it was talked about about this particular session, so we sort said, “We’re doing a series around heroes,” and I was asked to think of who my personal hero was. And I think, for me, the reason I’ve chosen Bobby Kennedy is, and we’ll kind of look at this over the course of the next hour, is the complexity of his character, and the way that he changes and adapts over time to circumstances. For me, the ability to adapt and the ability to respond to difficult circumstances and the ability to learn both from positives, but also from your own mistakes, is something that I think is quite admirable.

I also find, I think for those of you who’ve heard me speak before, I’m fascinated by the idea of what-if, and of counter-history. And a lot of people say, “Yeah, well, it’s all redundant, isn’t it? Because it never happened, and what can you learn?” But I feel very differently about that. I feel that there’s so much about life that can be planned, but there is so much that is by chance. And the way that the world turns and the way the world kind of weaves can mean that completely different outcomes can happen. And the Kennedys are particularly a lot of what-ifs. We talked in the past, I did one about the Kennedy legacy, and we touched on Bobby Kennedy earlier on in the summer, but the what-ifs if John had lived, what if Joe had lived, Joe Jr? Would we ever be talking about John or Bobby? Because Joe would’ve taken the mantle forward. And I think because of the nature of both John and Robert’s assassination, it poses an even greater what-if, because both of them died in their 40s, both of them died at such a point where they were so young, that it’s very hard to not wonder where they might have gone. A lot of people talk about John, and I’m a fan of John Kennedy, don’t get me wrong, but I think there’s something about Bobby Kennedy that plays to my personal instincts about his view of family loyalty, his view of, as I said, the evolution of his character, particularly from being his brother’s keeper to very much his own person for the last four years of his life, that I find particularly interesting. So over the course of the next 55 minutes, I’m going to talk about him, his life, but I’m also going to try and put a little bit of context of what I think is interesting about him, and heroic, not necessarily, he was a great fan of the classics and the Greek philosophy, but I don’t think he’s heroic in that traditional kind of Marvel DC Comics type of hero, but a much more complex character.

But I think there is certainly a lot to admire in what he did and what he achieved. And there’s also certainly a lot to think about about what he might have achieved had things been very different. So I’m going to share my screen, which is always a moment of slight terror, assuming that it actually works. And it seems to have done, which is great. So I’ve titled the lecture “The Enigma” because I think there are many different parts to the Bobby Kennedy legacy that I think are important. The one that I’d like to tackle right from the beginning, and it comes from this cartoon that came out round about the time he ran for the presidency. So I’m going to go in backwards first. And Bobby had a real reputation for ruthlessness. But he also had a very good sense of humor. And I love this quote. “People say I’m ruthless. I’m not ruthless, and if I find the man who’s calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.” I love self-deprecating humor, because Bobby, particularly in the advocacy of others, was a hard-arse. He was ruthless, he was absolutely committed to ensuring that his family got their way, that people got their opportunities. John, in particular, John’s success was the focus life.

• So if there’s anything.

• And for many years, really from 1946 to John’s death. So in a sense is, he wasn’t ruthless in a more traditional sense of the word of where you have, “I’m ruthless to get my own ends for me,” but he was very ruthless and loyal about his family and about what they would achieve and what he could do to make them successful. And I’m going to read you what the cartoon says, because I think it really goes to that enigma nature of Bobby Kennedy. “These are the Bobby twins. One is good Bobby, one is a bad Bobby. Good Bobby is a courageous reformer. Bad Bobby makes deals. Good Bobby sent federal troops down to the South to enforce civil rights. Bad Bobby appoints racist judges down to the South to enforce civil rights. Good Bobby is a fervent libertarian. Bad Bobby is a fervent wiretapper. Good Bobby is ill at ease with liberals. Bad Bobby ill at ease with grownups. If you want one Bobby to be your president, you’ll have to take both. For the Bobbys are widely noted for their family unity.” It’s a great cartoon, and as all with great cartoons, it’s not just the funny nature of it, but it’s the real core elements of truth to it. And it goes back to that duality of nature. Yes, Bobby Kennedy was a great defender of civil rights, but he also bugged, authorized the bugging of Martin Luther King with J. Edgar Hoover. He did things that we look back and we found out later that we are embarrassed about, we think are awful in some ways, they were sometimes pragmatic decisions to various circumstances. But at the same time, he also was very principled in his standing around some other issues. And for me, the good Bobby, bad Bobby was probably maybe a little bit more bad Bobby more ruthless, certainly in the 1950s. And then they transitioned, and particularly transitioned after his brother’s assassination, to make him something that’s much more different.

But the family and the nature of family is key in understanding him. John Kennedy, in my view, family was important, and it played an important part in his huge success. But it was something that, in some ways, and I don’t want to oversimplify this, a means to an end. He rose to greatness with the support of his family. Bobby’s approach to family was something very, very different. Bobby, everything was about the family. He was one of nine children. He was seventh out of nine children. Now, I’m an only child. My daughter’s an only child. My partner’s one of eight. I find big families a complete conundrum, mystery and fascinating, because where you are, what role you play is things. When I grew up, there was me. There was no other compromise, I didn’t have to compromise with siblings, and you kind of know the world you navigate in. What happens when there are multiple siblings, you create a whole massive permutations of dynamics. And I think if you look at the Kennedy family, in hindsight in history, everybody puts John and Bobby together for obvious reasons, because in the 1960s, John and Bobby were kind of joined at the hip. They were absolutely part of an amazing team that achieved lots of things. But the reality is, John was number three and Bobby was number seven. There was eight years difference in age between the two of them, which is a lot. So if you’re a 15-year-old and you’ve got a little brother who’s seven, you’re not going to be spending much time with them. If you’re a 23-year-old and you’ve just finished university and gone off to war, the 15-year-old, little oik that you’ve got as your younger brother, is, again, somebody who you probably haven’t got that much common in.

And I think that dynamic is true when there’s siblings with quite an age difference as it is. I think it was also true because the Kennedys seem to have been born and operated in clusters. And so therefore you didn’t necessarily have that whole kind of dynamic of even keel. So the oldest three, Joe Jr, then Kit, then John, were very close, the three older siblings. And John in particular was devastated first by his brother’s death and then by his sister’s death. And so he assumed the mantle of the oldest child after two tragedies in very short order. So those three operated a unit, and then there was the group of sisters, and then there were the little ones. And if you look at this family photograph, I think it’s worth noting that the little ones are little. If you look at John and Joe Jr. and Kit and the other sisters, they’re big. Teddy Kennedy right in the middle is distinctly a little boy. And Bobby really strikes me, to a large degree, as a slightly bigger little boy who’s desperately trying to be a grownup. Teddy’s in shorts and Bobby’s in long trousers. And I think that piece really shows the challenge that, “If I’m that much adrift and I’m at the bottom end of the pile, then I have a very different set of expectations.” As Arlene points out is that Bobby was often called by his dad, “The runt of the family.” He was skinny, he was underweight. He was desperate, I mean, what comes out right the way through Bobby’s life is that desperate striving to be accepted and to be one of the big kids and to be fearless. He would always try and impress his older siblings. He would always get into scrapes at school and with his family of trying to be treated as one of the older ones.

And I think that he comes over as somebody who’s trying to find his role in a family that is complicated, and of course, massively dominated by the father, the patriarch of the family, who is this rather unsavory, in my view, character, who is an egotist, and he doesn’t think he’s going to be president, eventually, he thinks he might be for quite a while, but then he pushes that mantle very much on to his children. And the children have to take turns in who is responsible for taking that next step and to taking the glory of the family. In addition, you’ve got the complexity of Rose, the mother. And she’s a exceptionally devout Catholic. Bobby was very close to her. And she deals with her husband’s philandering and his megalomania by embedding herself even further into the Catholic Church. So you have all of these dynamics, and I’m not a psychologist and I certainly don’t want to be kind of teaching around some sort of Freudian nightmare of the Kennedy family, but I think it’s worth noting that the family dynamics are important, whatever you say. And this is kind of Bobby’s own quote about, “It’s a struggle to survive.” I think if you’re a kid of a, what was the equivalent of today’s multi-multi-billionaire, then it’s not quite the same of being born one of nine in abject poverty in Alabama. So I think the struggle to survive is possibly over-egged, but it certainly presents a lot of psychological challenges about how you make your place in the world.

And I think that kind of plays large for quite a big percentage of Bobby’s life. And it really isn’t until the huge tragedy of his brother’s assassination that Bobby really starts to spread his own wings and become somebody that’s kind of interesting in his own right, because up until that point, he’s really having to play second fiddle around a lot of things. One of the things I think that’s interesting about him is his school career was nondescript, but then again, on the whole, the Kennedys’ school’s careers were very bumpy. They sort of did well eventually in terms of academics, but they were boisterous, they got into trouble a lot. Bobby was much more of the good boy altar boy than Jack. Jack was constantly in trouble for being in bad company, and pranks and just general mischief. Whereas Bobby wanted to be accepted. He didn’t like doing it particularly, he kind of suffered things. You get this impression of kind of just intensity. I think that’s one of the words I would describe about him. One of the things he found great joy in was actually marrying early, whereas John Kennedy marries way later in his life way into his 30s, Bobby marries young. And in Ethel Skakel, he finds an ideal partner for him. Somebody who has this sense of mischief, somebody who adores him. And they’re kind of in that, I don’t know, I’m about to offend somebody in the audience, but when you hear husbands and wife talking about, “Oh, we’re each other’s best friends,” something about that I always find it a bit weird.

But actually, in this case, I think it was really true, that Ethel was a traditional politician’s wife, and of course, the Kennedy women as a whole were there to serve the ambitions of the men in so many ways, whether it be the sisters or the wives, but she was probably the one that was nearest to having a really partnership relationship with her husband. The other thing that I think is fascinating, and obviously we’re seeing it a bit today, is the 11 children. And in a sense is, I think it was even then, was still a massive Catholic family, but today’s standard, you just go, “11?” And of course, Bobby Kennedy Jr. is playing out his own psychodrama now at the moment, and will he, won’t he withdraw from the presidential race? Virtually all of his siblings have disavowed him and say that he’s not reflecting what his father was. But I think it’s interesting that the 11 children have each been involved in, so there’s a number of them have been involved in politics in various ways, and there’s also been a whole history around some challenges around mental health for some of them, and just an awful legacy of the assassination of their father when some of them were still very young.

And in fact, Rory, the youngest, wasn’t born until four or five months after their father was assassinated. So you’ve got the family life, which I think gave him a sense of calm, a sense of, “This is my place.” The house they lived in was, of course, a classic Kennedy compound. It was a mixture between some sort of massive fraternity in some ways, but also an intense place of loving, he was a very, given that he was doing about 20 different jobs at various points, he seems to have found a lot of time for his children. The place was something of a place where you have the very sophisticated John Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy having the White House, as Pablo Casals coming to play, all these good and the great, but it’s in a very traditional, quasi-academic way. You have, on the other hand, Bobby Kennedy, famous people coming in and out, lots of curated different people, interacting people, but it’s going to end with somebody being thrown into a swimming pool at midnight. Whereas, as I said, John Kennedy’s kind of way of doing things was much more traditional. Bobby’s had a sense of fun and a sense of enthusiasm and energy around it. So I think, in a way, that that kind of troubled youth, the troubled, finding my role. Who am I? Where do I fit in?“ Ethel and the family gave him something that steadied him and allowed him to be the ambitious man that he was. But the definition of Bobby, to a very large degree, is with his relationship to John.

And in the late 1940s, John has become a congressman. Bobby is kind of helping out somewhat, he helped campaign, but he doesn’t play a prominent role. It isn’t until 1952 that he starts to actually get very heavily involved in John’s career. And the reason it really starts to become more than just a usual family helper is there’s a lot of tension between John and his father in the senatorial race of 1952. So the father, Joe Sr., wanted Jack to run for governor of Massachusetts. It was a shoo-in, in theory, it was a much easier race, it was a vacancy, there was no incumbent. But John decides that, because his interest is a lot around foreign affairs and he wants a national stage to operate on, that he’s going to run for senator against a popular and very esteemed Republican opponent who is an incumbent, Henry Cabot Lodge. Henry Cabot Lodge, of course, plays an important role in the fact that Nixon chooses him eventually to be his running mate in 1960 against John Kennedy. A really dumb decision in the history of dumb decisions of choosing vice presidential running mates. Not that he wasn’t a good man, but it added nothing to the ticket. It actually reinforced that Kennedy had beaten parts of the tickets against the odds previously. And the campaign was shambolic to start off with. And Bobby gets drafted in initially to kind of mediate between the dad who’s bankrolling the campaign and John who wants to do it his way. And eventually what happens after peace is made, Bobby becomes the person who kind of runs the campaign. And this is part of where the reputation of ruthlessness and the reputation of somebody who will do anything to ensure a goal is achieved no matter what happens and really starts to make its showing in 1952. His view is that he has to do anything to get his brother elected. And he does.

He runs a very successful campaign. And everybody kind of in hindsight gives the, if a candidate wins, the candidate gets the credit, but in reality, it’s often the campaign behind the candidate. Obviously John Kennedy was a very attractive candidate, both in physical, but also intellectually, war hero, et cetera, et cetera. But when you’ve got at a race against an incumbent, and you’ve got to remember that 1952 was the year that Eisenhower swept the nation with a landslide for the Republican Party, John Kennedy was the only Democrat to dislodge a Republican that year in the Senate. Eisenhower had big coattails, a lot of Republicans won that year. John Kennedy went against that tight. Now, it’s great credit to John Kennedy as a candidate, but also give you an idea of how well that campaign was run, and that goes down to Bobby. Bobby started to earn enemies at this point, which is inevitable if you have to be, you have the candidate glad-hands and makes nice speeches, but nasty deals have to be done, people have to be put in place. Bobby was getting very fed up by the fact that there were a lot of old hangers on from his father’s kind of and his grandfather’s campaigns and the Boston Mafia of the Democrat Party. And Bobby kicked ass.

There’s no doubt about it. John wins, Bobby wants to go off and make his own name. And he does by actually, he doesn’t separate himself, he could’ve gone off and been a journalist, he could’ve gone off and done a number of things, but he actually becomes, for most of the 1950s, and kind of goes up the hierarchy in terms of a congressional staffer, and works on labor committees around racketeering, but also works for Joseph McCarthy. Joseph McCarthy is a whole separate saga, one of the nastiest individuals in the last century of American history in my view. Bobby is there because his dad gets him a placement with McCarthy, and initially believes what McCarthy is trying to do is a good thing to rid America of communism, but starts to see the horrors of McCarthy and Roy Cohn and how they worked and the unscrupulous nature of destroying people, that wasn’t about destroying communism, it was about their own ends. But during that time, he writes a book about the fights with the Mafia, and the Teamsters Unions and organized crime, and he makes a name for himself. But at the same point, he’s constantly drawn back into the orbit of his brother, and the orbit of his brother is around is John going to become a presidential candidate? And if so, when? Bobby works on the Adlai Stevenson campaign in 1956, is disillusioned with Adlai Stevenson, and actually, and ends up voting for Eisenhower by all accounts. But he goes as a delegate from Massachusetts to the convention for the Democrat Party.

And Stevenson, to make the convention interesting, because he is a wild card throw of the dice, second time of going, Eisenhower, is how’s he going to make the convention interesting? Well, what he does is he throws the vice president, he says, "I’m not going to appoint a vice president, I want to throw it to the floor of the Congress for the convention. And you suddenly have this scramble of trying to get a campaign together. Bobby Kennedy is in charge of trying to get his brother the nomination. Bobby ultimately fails. Jack, in hindsight, thinks it’s the best thing that could’ve happened because he gains prominence by being a runner-up. He becomes a surrogate for the Eisenhower, sorry, the Stevenson campaign, but he makes his name in his own account. However, Bobby takes it personally. He thinks he’s failed his brother, et cetera. But he learns, and this is the point about learning, he learns how to run a floor operation. He learns how that you corral votes, et cetera, that people will say one thing, and then they will do something X. So you’ve got to just constantly battle around these different elements. And I think that, for Bobby, was very, very important in terms of his development, and ultimately, was probably one of the best thing that happened for John when it comes to 1960. When you get to 1960, John is running a campaign in his own right.

Now, I’m going to do a whole series of lectures over the next two months about important elections of the kind of late 20th century and the early 21st century. There’s six of them, and they’re going to lead up to doing 2016, the night before this year’s election. So hold on to your hats for that one. So I’m not going to spend too much time of talking about the 1960 election, but from Bobby’s perspective, they know that they will not win the campaign by going through smoke-filled rooms. Primaries still are only taking place in the minority of states. A lot of the favorite sons of various states wield a lot of power. And people like Lyndon Johnson think that that old route is the best route to get the Democrat nomination. And John Kennedy, because he’s a young usurper, sees the way that he has to do it is by winning primary, showing he’s popular with the people, and then to arrive at the convention to be able to say, "I have the votes and the popular force behind me.” And that’s what happens. And Bobby does an amazingly good job of ensuring that John is elected on the first ballot. And he does that.

And as a result, the shenanigans that could well have happened if it had gone to a second, third and fourth ballot, which has happened so many times in history prior to that, where candidates start to come up and where people like Lyndon Johnson or other candidates would’ve taken advantage, never gets off the ground. Bobby then gets very heavily involved with the choice of vice president. Not that John consults him, John offers Lyndon Johnson, which I think, as much as people didn’t like Lyndon Johnson at that point and were worried about him, he was by far the most logical choice to ensure that the ticket was balanced and it also had gravitas. And I think it goes down in history as one of the great kind of pragmatic, but influential decisions of a vice president and to help the president win an election. However, Bobby is furious. Bobby hates Lyndon Johnson. There’s a lot of bad blood that goes from the previous decades of where Johnson was disrespectful to the Kennedys, and Bobby really knew how to bear a grudge. And as a result, Bobby tries to persuade Johnson that he doesn’t want to be on the ticket, and just botches it. John is very clear, there’s not great communication between the brothers at that point, but John assures Lyndon Johnson he wants it, Johnson accepts. And as we might say, the rest is history. The campaign is run brilliantly after that kind of hiccup. Johnson adds value, he almost certainly brings Texas to Kennedy and also solidifies the wobbliness of a Catholic candidate in the South, ensuring that a number of other states in the South are secured for Kennedy.

Remember, it’s one of the closest elections in history and could’ve easily gone the other way. So Lyndon Johnson played his part, obviously John Kennedy played a massive part, and Bobby played an important part in running a very, very well-run campaign. We look back and think, “Well, John Kennedy won. He was going to win.” No, he wasn’t, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion by any stretch of the imagination. And what essentially happens is that you have John Kennedy becoming president. Bobby thinks finally that he can go away and do his own thing. He might run for the Senate. Again, he might go into journalism. The Kennedys constantly toy with journalism and have various journalist accreditations, but they’re not serious about it. And Dad intervenes, and forces both brothers and said to John, “You essentially need somebody who you know is on your side at all times. You should give Bobby a significant role in your cabinet.” John doesn’t think it’s a great idea. Bobby really doesn’t think it’s a great idea. Dad forces the hand. And remember, Robert Kennedy is a law graduate. He has never practiced. And at the age of 35, he gets made attorney general of the United States, one of the great posts in the United States cabinet. And there is a lot even on the Democrats’ side of, “What the hell just happened there?” And it’s a wobble, it’s a distinct wobble.

What isn’t helped in Bobby’s view, and Bobby’s absolutely furious about it, John Kennedy had a great sense of humor, much more so than Bobby, he’s kind of like, John Kennedy was good with the off-the-cuff flippant mark. And he actually plays in, he leans into the lack of experience of his brother. And the quote here is from John Kennedy, I’m sorry, paginated a bit wrong, so he’s gone rogue. “I can’t see that it’s wrong to give him a little legal experience before he goes to practice law.” And I think it’s actually very funny, but if you imagine you’re Bobby and you’re full of insecurities and you know in reality you’re not up to that job in terms of qualifications, then your brother actually kind of labeling it and saying it out there, I think, in some ways, diffused it, but he was furious. But he becomes, in my view, one of the great attorney generals, if not the greatest attorney general in American history. There’s a great picture from George Bush, George W Bush’s presidency, of where now the major Justice Department building’s named after Bobby Kennedy. People in hindsight look back to Bobby Kennedy’s time as attorney general as somebody who got an enormous amount done. Now, I think that was partly driven by being driven by demons wanting to prove himself. But what it does mean is that you have an incredibly activist attorney general. He is somebody, and remember, the attorney general’s brief is huge. For those who aren’t American, we have an attorney general in Britain, and it’s a very low ranking kind of hierarchy in the cabinet.

It’s not one of the great offices of state. In America, attorney general is really important. But he has to contend with a number of things. Most notably, we already talked about the rivalry he has with Lyndon Johnson, he also doesn’t get on well and neither do the Kennedys with J Edgar Hoover, who runs the FBI. And Bobby, again, leans into this, and has a phone on Hoover’s desk, which is a hotline between the attorney general and the director of the FBI, who after all, the director of the FBI is his boss. Hoover hates this. And Kennedy, at one point, when somebody else answers the phone and says, “The director’s office,” he’s like, “I want him to answer the phone. I want to make him actually respond to me.” And eventually they come to a working arrangement. Hoover is very much driven by the desire that the main thing in life is to eliminate communism. Bobby Kennedy, much more realistically is saying organized crime is a massive problem in the United States, and also so is civil rights. Hoover, in my view, thoroughly nasty individual, was certainly not a proponent, if not even a downright negative around civil rights, certainly over the earlier decades. And Kennedy, in a lot of ways, gets his way around a time that is very challenging between the two of them. And there’s a lot going on in his brief. So if Bobby Kennedy was only to be attorney general, that would be enough. But the reality is that Bobby becomes more important very early on.

The Bay of Pigs debacle, where Kennedy inherits a plan from the Eisenhower administration to have a foe rebellion in Cuba goes disastrously wrong. There are over 1,000 US soldiers taken captive. There’s negotiations. Bobby takes charge of negotiations and basically works behind the scenes to sort out a problem that’s not really in the attorney general’s remit. Over time, he becomes more and more important, never more so in my view than when the Cuban Missile Crisis takes place. And the brothers essentially take a role, where if you’re going to use a British analogy, I think that Bobby Kennedy, for all intents and purposes, becomes John Kennedy’s prime minister. John Kennedy knows that there is no personal ambition. Every prime minister, every president, always has to keep a little look around, who’s positioning themselves for the next go? He knew with Bobby that Bobby would serve him faithfully because he’s family and because it’s something, Bobby’s main objective in life is to ensure that his brother has a successful presidency. And the two of them work so tremendously well together.

And it must’ve been a nightmare being defense secretary or secretary of state because Bobby will have been everywhere. As well as running an incredibly activist civil rights part of the attorney general, he is dealing with desegregation in the South. He is sending his lawmakers, his law enforcement officials down into deep trouble in states that have got hostile governors, the brothers are working closely on that, but he’s also dealing a lot on foreign affairs, which is certainly not the normal remit of an attorney general. And I have to say, it works well. I mean, John Kennedy’s popularity is high. He does well as a president. He’s allowed to be more presidential knowing he’s got somebody where, in a sense, Bobby’s role is, one, as a cabinet minister, but also, to some degree, he is somebody that is almost like chief of staff, but more than chief of staff because it’s family. So it’s a very unconventional role. Eventually Congress passes what they call, it’s called the Bobby Kennedy Act, which prohibits close members of a president’s family being a member of the cabinet or in sort of senior paid jobs because this is so unusual. And under normal circumstances, I’d say that’s true. But in a sense, this one really worked, well, it worked very well for John, and he did it at the cost of Bobby’s independence. But I think it’s important. But you have the situation where Bobby is not setting himself up to be the next president. There are talks about, “John will get reelected in ‘68, Bobby will run, and then Bobby will do two terms, and then Teddy will come.”

But that’s mostly by other people. Bobby’s not pushing his own agenda. Bobby is ensuring that his agenda is around his brother. And I think this is where the existential pivot in Bobby’s life takes place is when his brother is assassinated in Dallas, in November, '63. Bobby then takes, in traditional patriarchal society, the role of the chief mourner as his brother and the oldest boy, even though he’s still down the pecking order in terms of the sisters. But he’s also a cabinet member. He’s also very close to Jackie. And this whole terrible time for him, because he is attorney general, he’s the chief head of the law enforcement in the country. His brother’s just been assassinated on his watch. He has personal anguish. He has anguish about protecting his sister-in-law and the young children. And he’s dealing with the rivalry with, with, ah, the rivalry with Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson’s flexing his muscles. It’s just a lot of things are going on. Undoubtedly, I think most people think that Bobby sank into a really deep depression over the course of the next six months as he tries to grapple with having had a purpose in life, which was to serve somebody else, to try and find his own space and his own way of operating. It isn’t made easy by the fact that the new president is Lyndon Johnson.

Already, as I said about the vice presidency, they have loathing. There’s a great book, which is somewhere behind here, called “Mutual Contempt,” which is the fraught relationship, sorry, I’m looking for it, I can never find it when I turn around to my bookshelves, the fraught relationship between Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy. Johnson is paranoid that the vacancy in the vice presidency, he will have the Democrat convention, Bobby Kennedy foisted upon him. And then if he wins election, people will, in Lyndon Johnson’s insecurities, say that he only won it because there was another Kennedy on the ticket. And that’s the problem. There’s a rivalry, there’s a predisposition of Kennedy looking down on Lyndon Johnson. Suddenly Lyndon Johnson’s superior. Johnson immediately asks all the members of the cabinet to stay in their post. He inherits and keeps Kennedy’s cabinet, and it means keeping Kennedy as attorney general. This uneasy relationship obviously can’t last. And what happens is that before Bobby can actually be kind of drafted into being vice president, Johnson’s already working that the nomination for vice president takes place before Bobby Kennedy gives his speech. So you can’t have a stampede, like happened in 1952 with Adlai Stevenson’s nomination.

But Bobby preempts that in quite a clever way. He decides to run in 1964 to be senator for New York. And of course, people think, “Well, the Kennedys, they’re Massachusetts,” but actually Bobby Kennedy has spent more of his life growing up in New York than he had in Massachusetts, and he had longstanding connections there, But it was still a bit odd. Kennedys, Massachusetts, that’s what you think of them. He’s running against an incumbent Republican. He gets accused of being a carpet bagger. Johnson’s relieved on one hand because it takes Kennedy out of the picture on a national scale, and they actually campaign together. Kennedy’s campaign is really bumpy, it does not go well. And in the end, there’s a very strong argument to say that Lyndon Johnson’s coattails in 1960 pulled Bobby Kennedy over the finish line. I mean, if you look at comparative amounts, Lyndon Johnson wins New York State by over two million votes. Bobby Kennedy’s majority is 700,000 votes. Now, 700,000 votes is still a big majority, but it’s in a state that was going to go Democrat almost convincingly. So Bobby Kennedy now has a separate platform. He also has been very used to either playing subservient to his brother, but also having a huge amount of power and a huge amount of say in getting things done. The challenge with the Senate is, it’s you’re one of 100, it’s all built on seniority. Actually, in terms of seniority, he’s a more junior member than his younger brother, Teddy, who had become Senator in 1962. So he has to come in and regear.

Now, he’s not the only person to have had to done this. Hillary Clinton went from being first lady to being a senator from New York. And she got a lot of plaudits for the way that she buckled down and really embraced the collegiality of the Senate and became a good model senator. I think Bobby’s kind of interesting because Bobby tried, but wasn’t very good at it, because he would still have his way of, “But something has to be done.” But over the course of the four years as senator, I think he did very well. He uses his experience around foreign policy with effect. He becomes, of course, an increasing critic of the Johnson administration around Vietnam. And he becomes, to a large degree, the leading voice around Vietnam. But it’s always seen, and he is very aware it’s seen as the prism of, “Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy hate each other, so is Vietnam just a place that they do battle rather than an act of policy?” But he also does a lot around child poverty. He does a lot around the rights of workers, works with Caesar Chavez. He becomes, as I said, his own man finally. It’s a very interesting metamorphosis for a man who is in his late 30s, early 40s, suddenly to come out into the forefront. He becomes a more accomplished speaker.

He’d never been a particularly great speaker. He has that kind of Boston twang that sometimes doesn’t work, and sometimes, I’m about to offend anybody from Boston, I apologize, but can sound to a different ear a little nasal and a bit whiny. His voice, he finds his resonance a bit more. And I think it’s interesting to see that time, he’s always been seen not as a senator, but seen as a potential future president, and when’s that going to happen? And he tries to make it not about that. But Vietnam becomes such a running saw in the Democrat Party and in the nation. And he is trying to moderately speak out, but at the same time, not make it personal, which of course, by the hatred between him and Lyndon Johnson, made it almost impossible to get that balance right. Lyndon Johnson has to go through and be nominated as the Democrat presidential candidate again. And Bobby Kennedy says he is not running and he’s not going to challenge him. He’s going to probably wait 'til 1972, and he will stand by and see what happens. Eugene McCarthy arguably is braver, according to McCarthy’s people, or just is less fettered by perceptions, decides to run against Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. McCarthy does surprisingly well, doesn’t win. Everybody kind of thinks in hindsight, “Oh, he won,” but he didn’t, Johnson still won. But it was by such a thin margin that Johnson had lost a lot of credibility. And then out of the blue on March the 31st, 1968, Johnson announces that he is not going to run for the presidency again. Kennedy had already decided to get into the race. At this point, Hubert Humphrey, the vice president, also enters the race.

But Humphrey, he doesn’t do the usual route, he doesn’t go through the primary system. And so it’s left between Kennedy and Muskie, sorry, to Kennedy and McCarthy, Eugene McCarthy, to fight it out in the primaries. And Kennedy is winning most of them. But then he stumbles a bit in late May, and he stumbles into Oregon. And McCarthy’s campaign rebalances itself. And the campaign has lots of different elements to it. And you see in March the horror of the assassination of Martin Luther King. Kennedy is scheduled to speak in Indianapolis. He lands and is told King’s assassination, is told by local law enforcement that he should not speak. And he goes and addresses the crowd. And 60 major cities in the United States riot that evening. And the only city that doesn’t is Indianapolis. And it’s partly, or mostly because Kennedy delivers such a heartfelt speech about how he knows what, it’s very rarely addressed in public his brother’s assassination, but he does it that day. And he finds his voice, I think is the way to say it. He finds his voice to talk about the underclass. He finds his voice to talk about those who are dispossessed, whether it be Caesar Chavez’s workers in California, or African Americans in the South, or the white poor in places like West Virginia. He starts to talk about things in a way that is very different from a politician that normally would do. And he was almost uninhibited about it. He’s less tactical about it than you would be. It’s not thinking in policy and focus groups. And he’s running a cracking campaign.

And it’s all down to, if he can win the California primary on the 5th of June, he’s then going to be able to become a major force. He won’t win, because there’s still a lot of states that don’t have primaries, but he will be able to enter the Chicago convention with a massive following win and a validation to go against Hubert Humphrey, who’s obviously the establishment candidate. What happens is he campaigns like mad, he’s exhausted. Some point, he’s on the back of cars, he’s had shoes pull off, his hands are red raw. There’s a real kind of a fervor around his campaign. But a constant threat of violence. His brother’s been assassinated, Martin Luther King has been killed, and there is a real worry. And he is not accorded, and we’ve just seen this in the last couple of months, as a candidate, he’s not accorded full Secret Service protection. He’s got bodyguards, but it’s very minimal. And given what’s happened, it’s nigh on irresponsible from the government’s perspective. And actually afterwards, Johnson orders that all candidates going forward will have major security attached to them. But as we’ve seen, as I said, a month ago, that it still doesn’t even work correctly in the way that it should do. He wins, he wins that fight. And he goes to the Ambassador’s Hotel to give his victory speech. He gives a victory speech. It’s mostly perfunctory, it’s thanking people, et cetera.

He takes a shortcut through the kitchen, having been advised not to. And he is gunned down by Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian. He doesn’t die immediately. In fact, one of the things I think I find very impressive about him, when he’s lying on the floor of the kitchen, he asks has anybody else been hurt. He’s more concerned about other people. He eventually lapses into unconsciousness, is taken to the hospital, and dies the next day. The country is, it’s a massive tragedy. It leaves the Democrat nomination in complete disarray. The funeral is he is flown back to New York, it takes place at St. Patrick’s, and then the train carrying him goes down to Washington. Huge scenes of grief and emotion take place. The whole train journey is mobbed on the way down. A couple of people get killed by a train coming in the other direction. It’s a kind of Greek tragedy writ large the whole thing. And eventually he is buried just down, for those of you who’ve been to Arlington, he actually wanted to be buried in Massachusetts, but his family insisted that he get buried in Arlington. And you have the very grand grave of his brother, who, as you would expect, as a president who’d been assassinated, is monumental. And then just along to the side, you have this very simple tomb and sort of headstone and cross, which I think is very interesting because, of course, he wasn’t a president. He might have been. And I think, for me, that’s the bit that I find interesting, kind of looping back. If you look at his life, it was in service to his family. It was also in service to the country.

Now, I’m sure there are some Republicans on here, or some Democrats who did not like Kennedy, but I think that there was a selflessness, as well as a ruthlessness, to what he did. But then that piece, and that’s what I find so interesting is that piece between his brother’s assassination and his assassination of where he really starts to grow into something that I think could’ve been fascinating as a president. I feel that, personally, the what-ifs of a John Kennedy, sorry, Bobby Kennedy presidency in 1968 would’ve been something worth beholding. It might’ve ended up being a huge disappointment, but I think, having been such a vocal critic of Vietnam, he would’ve tried to end the Vietnam War earlier. It didn’t end well in the 1970s, but it might’ve saved quite a lot of lives as a result of that.

But it’s also that element around social justice that I think would’ve been at the forefront of a presidency that I don’t think we’ve seen since. And so it’s one of those big questions of what would a Bobby Kennedy presidency been like? I seem to think towards the better angels, but I think that it might well have gone wrong. He might not have lived up to it. One of the arguments I think is, because he’d seen the presidency of his brother so close and been such an integral part of it, he wouldn’t have been doing what a lot of new presidents do is finding his feet in the job. I think he would’ve known how it works, and therefore would’ve known the levers to pull and the things to press. So it’s a what-if, it’s some British guy’s view of American history. But it is one that I hope has proved a little bit interesting over the course of the last hour. I’m trying to have a quick look at the questions.

Q&A and Comments:

The Kennedy males, there’s a question about Kennedy males. I think it’s interesting, I think it’s one of the big criticisms of the Kennedy family, and I agree with it, is the obsession with the Kennedy males was very much that patriarchal approach by the father. And the boys were going into politics and the girls were to support them in going into politics, and do other stuff. I think the sisters, a number of the sisters were as impressive, in some cases, if not more impressive. And being given the opportunities and the support by the family, they would’ve been equally if not more impressive.

Q: And so what biography would I recommend about Bobby Kennedy?

A: I’ve read a few. Arthur Schlesinger’s book is beautiful. Schlesinger writes beautifully. But I would just say that it’s very much Schlesinger’s view is of the family. It’s almost like an official biography. The one I quite like, he now panics again because I’m looking around, Larry Tye’s “Bobby Kennedy” is very good. Larry T-Y-E. Very well acclaimed when it came out. I also like “The Last Patrician,” which I read about 20 years ago, when it came out, and I can’t for the life of me remember who it is. But I think the Larry Tye one is very good. The Schlesinger one is beautiful, 'cause it has a lot of family access, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, and sorry, yes, it wasn’t US soldiers were captured, it was Cubans that were captured under the auspices of the Americans. So I apologize, David, for making that mistake.

Q: And what would Bobby Kennedy have been if he hadn’t been a politician?

A: He always said a journalist. I don’t think it was just the father that wanted him to be a politician, I think he was a politician to his DNA. He was so good at it, he would’ve been great.

I’m going to let everybody go. I hope you join me for the first of, the dates are just going up in the next few weeks, of the election specials. And thank you for being in for today.