Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 6, 1993 TAG: 9306060209
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WARREN ROGERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
ON the day in January 1961 that he was sworn in as attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy was an exuberant Pied Piper leading his wife, Ethel, and their children, then totaling seven, to the White House for the ceremony.
As soon as the swearing-in was over and the last photograph taken, Bob led the six oldest children on a tour of the White House for a firsthand lesson in history.
Leading the way downstairs, Bob eschewed the steps, sat on the banister rail and slid the whole way down. There was a burst of yelling and, with Kathleen in the lead and Michael right behind her, follow the leader - all the Kennedys slid down the banister rail. Nanny Ena Bernard shrieked.
"Oh, Mr. Kennedy!" she cried. "Sliding down the banister at the White House! Imagine it! I can't believe it! Mr. Kennedy, you'll never grow up!"
He grinned even more broadly. And she knew she had spoken the truth. Part of him would always remain a boy. As she said later: "When it came to playing with his children, he never did grow up."
All of a sudden, someone said, "Somebody's coming!"
All fell silent. The children lined up, shoulder to shoulder, pressed against the wall. Bob too.
Around the corner came a man in a dark suit. His face lit up as soon as he saw that lineup. "Oh my, what beautiful children!" he smiled, patting a head or two before moving on. "So neat! And so nice!"
"Who was that man?" somebody asked.
"Hubert Humphrey," Bob said.
Indeed it was, the same Hubert Humphrey whose 1960 presidential ambitions had collapsed in West Virginia's primary a few months earlier, crushed by the "Kennedy juggernaut" that Bob directed at him. But then, the sunny Humphrey could never hold a grudge. He found much of the world nice, perhaps because, in truth, there was no fairer description of the man himself.
The children's `treasure' Bob Kennedy called Ena Bernard "our treasure." She joined the family as a nursemaid in 1952 and stayed on at the family home, Hickory Hill, long after the 11th and last of her charges, Rory, had grown to maturity. Bob always said that whatever Ena wanted Ena would get because the family could not function without her.
Ena was indeed Ethel's secret weapon. As Bob's sister Patricia Kennedy Lawford observed: "Everyone who wondered how Ethel could raise 11 children knew when they saw Ena in action."
Ena had to laugh at Bob's approach to babies. He treated them like eggshells that might crack in his hands if he were not careful. He never failed to visit the baby's room when he came home from work, but he was always tentative and restrained, a far cry from the roughhouse approach he took with the older children.
He looked awkward holding a baby, but he was completely at ease with the older ones, as a friend, an equal and not a father. They adored him for it, battling to reach him first when he returned from a trip.
It was indeed an experience to whip into the driveway at Hickory Hill with him at such a time. Before he could get out of the car, the front door of the house would burst open and the Kennedy horde would fly out in a howling, pell-mell stampede. Journalist Pete Hamill observed that Bob looked then like a man being overrun by a giant centipede.
Phone call from Hoover Bob was troubled as his brother's presidency neared the end of its third year. He had managed the campaign that put Jack in the White House. He had then served him well, as attorney general and as his most valuable adviser and most trusted confidant. But Bob did not intend to run the 1964 campaign or to stay inthe administration after Jack's expected re-election. He had talked to Ethel about moving on to other vistas, as yet undefined, perhaps in publishing or education.
Bob celebrated his 38th birthday on Nov. 20, 1963. Two days later, he was having a poolside lunch at Hickory Hill with Ethel, U.S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau of New York and Silvio Mollo, head of Morgenthau's criminal division.
A little after 1:30 p.m., Morgenthau saw someone running toward the pool, waving a little hand-held radio and shouting incomprehensibly. At the same time, a maid ran down, saying, "Mr. Hoover's on the White House phone." An extension telephone rang across the pool and Ethel went over and picked it up.
"It's J. Edgar Hoover," she called to Bob.
On the phone, Bob recalled later, Hoover said: "I have news for you. The president's been shot. I think it's serious. I'll call you back . . . when I find out more."
Morgenthau watched Bob put down the phone, turn away and clap his hand to his mouth. Ethel saw the look on her husband's face and went to his side. For a few seconds, they stood like that. And then Bob said, "Jack's been shot. It may be fatal."
Morgenthau said later he wanted to leave but felt Bob and Ethel should not be left alone. Upstairs, Bob talked on the phone to Dallas. He came down and told Morgenthau: "He's dead."
People began arriving: Director John McCone, from the Central Intelligence Agency; Supreme Court Justice Byron White; old football friends David Hackett and Dean Markham, and Edwin O. Guthman, Bob's press secretary and confidant. O
They went out to the lawn behind the house, Guthman following along as Bob strode back and forth, back and forth. Already, it seemed, he was beginning to blame himself for not preventing his brother's death.
"There's so much bitterness," Bob said. "I thought they would get one of us. But Jack, after all he'd been through, never worried about it."
They walked on wordlessly. When he spoke again, his voice was strained and expressionless: "I'd received a letter from someone in Texas last week warning me not to let the president go to Dallas because they would kill him. I sent it to Kenny O'Donnell (White House chief of staff), but I never thought it would happen. I thought it would be me. There's been so much bitterness and hatred, and so many people who might have said something have remained silent . . . ."
Guthman searched agonizingly for a word of comfort. He said hopefully that perhaps the country would unite now, that maybe people would learn from the enormity of the tragedy and there would be less bitterness in the land.
"No," Bob said. "This will make it worse."
In some quarters, at least, he was proved right immediately.
Teamster boss James Hoffa put out a statement saying the assassination made Bob Kennedy "just another lawyer." And, with almost every flag in the country lowered to half-staff, Hoffa ordered the one at Teamsters headquarters on Capitol Hill run up to the top of the pole and kept there. Nation in
turmoil
(America's political scene was in turmoil as 1968 began. In South Vietnam, a Communist offensive on the Tet holiday swept into Saigon, even into the U.S. Embassy. In Memphis, Tenn., escaped convict James Earl Ray shot and killed civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.; the 1964 Nobel Laureate for Peace. President Lyndon Johnson decided it would be too divisive for the country if he ran for re-election, and Robert Kennedy, with his most implacable foe out of the race, saw a chance to win the Democratic nomination despite early leads by Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey and Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy.)
In the Kennedy campaign suite, 516, at Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel, the air was festive. More so than on most other such election nights, there was cause for optimism. Kennedy had beaten his chief opponent, Eugene McCarthy, in their televised debate, the polls indicated, and there was every reason to believe he could reverse and erase McCarthy's victory over him in the May 28 Oregon primary. Democratic Sen. George McGovern, a staunch Kennedy worker, had called from South Dakota to report victory in his state, and Bob and his top people hoped that McCarthy's ranks might crumble.
Across the hall was the candidate's private suite, 511. Bob and Ethel were there getting dressed for the planned victory celebration in the Ambassador's Embassy Ballroom downstairs. I knocked on the door and heard Bob's "Who is it?" I identified myself. "Come on in," he said, and I did.
Bob looked extremely tired as he greeted me at the door, puffy-eyed and hollow-cheeked. He told me he felt fine when I inquired about his health. I knew it was his stock answer. He looked worn out.
The Embassy Ballroom was rocking with a party roaring toward a climax. A great shout went up when the crowd spotted the Kennedys, and it continued until Bob took over the platform's microphone. Rollicking cheers punctuated Bob's lighthearted, self-deprecating speech. He ended with a two-fingered V-for-Victory sign and a cry of "Let's win!" The crowd signaled back and took up a "We Want Kennedy!" chant as it swarmed around him.
I had told Bob that the "writing press" was demanding equal time with television, and he had agreed to meet with us immediately after his televised victory statement and before he went on to the victory party. He was on his way to us in the Colonial Room to keep his date, but a particularly boisterous batch of well-wishers blocked his path to the exit from the ballroom. Instead, Bob let himself be shunted in the opposite direction by Karl Uecker, assistant maitre d'hotel of the Ambassador, toward the tunnel-like kitchen area that offered a shortcut, connecting the ballroom and the Colonial Room.
In the Colonial Room, we watched the scene on closed-circuit television. But the TV camera had lost him, apparently, as he made his way into the kitchen from the ballroom. I decided to go get him and lead him in.
It was then that I heard the shots.
In the next split second, I was running through the swinging doors. I banged into a wave of people, mostly young girls screaming, "He's shot! He's shot! Get a doctor!"
And then I crashed into a tight knot of men, a half-dozen or so, all twisted together. At once I was part of it. There were people pressing me into a melee from behind and people clutching from both sides. I could recognize some. Rosey Grier, Rafer Johnson, (security guard) Bill Barry, staffer Dun Gifford and George Plimpton, also closely connected with the campaign. My cheek pressed hard against somebody's face. The man was going, "Yuk, yuk, yuk!" There was an arm around his neck - Rosey's, I believe - and another around his head - perhaps Barry's. Our cheeks jammed harder together, my eye against his eye, and his was wild and glistening. This was the assailant, the Jordanian named Sirhan Bishara Sirhan.
As we banged into the kitchen's stainless steel steam table, I saw Rafer Johnson trying to peel Sirhan's fingers from the butt of his .22-caliber, snub-nosed pistol. Somebody in the pack started a rocking motion that kept slamming Sirhan's hand and the pistol on the top of the steam table. This made a loud and rhythmic noise, but the weapon still refused to come loose.
At agonizingly long last, the fingers slowly uncurled from the pistol. Rafer Johnson held the weapon in his big hand, staring down at it as if unable to comprehend its existence. The others, carrying Sirhan spread-eagled, hustled him out through the swinging doors into the Colonial Room.
I watched this tableau off to my left, and then I looked to my right, toward the ballroom end of the corridor, and my heart broke.
There, on his back, his shirt torn wide, his mouth open, his eyes rolling back in his head, his bloodied right hand clutching a rosary, his right ear a red smear, a blood-soaked handkerchief on his bare stomach, lay Bob Kennedy.
Ethel appeared calm as she knelt over her fallen husband, a tiger protecting her cub. She cooed to him. His jaw worked as if he were talking, or trying to. She looked up quickly when I dropped to one knee beside her and I saw her eyes were wide and excited, although her voice and her movements were deliberate and controlled. "Help me," she said. I mumbled that an ambulance and a doctor were on the way.
The rush afterward
Upstairs in the Kennedys' suite, a young boy sat transfixed in front of a television set, trying to comprehend what was happening to his father and mother. David Kennedy, who would be 13 in less than two weeks, was all alone. His little brothers and sisters were already asleep. He planned to wander downstairs shortly to see the party, but he figured a better place to watch his father's victory speech was in front of a big-screen TV. Somebody was supposed to come for him and take him downstairs. When it happened, though, nobody thought about him. He watched and his mouth fell open and he kept on watching, not crying or reacting in any way, just watching. He was all alone until somebody happened in and saw him.
The ambulance men moved more quickly than gently. Bob grimaced and rolled his head from side to side, and I saw the ugly little hole in the mastoid area just behind the right ear. I knew then that he would die, or that, if he survived through some medical miracle or lucky chance, he would never again be the man we knew.
"Oh, no! Don't!" Bob cried as he was moved. And those were the last words I heard him speak, ever. He fell completely unconscious.
Ceremony up close (The 1968 California presidential primary was on
Tuesday, June 4, and Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy that night, about 10 minutes past midnight, California time. He died about 24 hours later, on June 6. He was waked at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, and taken by funeral train on Saturday, June 8, to Washington, where he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery next to his brother John.)
At Arlington, the world will remember a solemn burial ceremony, with thousands of hand-held candles twinkling like tiny stars. From a distance, it must have looked like one more superb production by what many then called "the well- oiled Kennedy machine." But, up close, it was different.
The pallbearers were told only to walk up a hill, bear left and stop. In the dark, uncertain of their footing, trying to maintain a dignified pace, they kept walking and looking for where they were supposed to be. Stephen Smith, Bob's campaign manager and husband of his sister Jean, was searching for a place to stop, as the lead pallbearer, without betraying his dilemma.
Pallbearer Averell Harriman said, "Steve, do you know where you're going?"
"Well, I'm not sure," Smith said.
Pallbearer John Seigenthaler, an aide to Bob and later editor of the Nashville Tennessean, said, "I have a feeling we've walked too far."
"So do I," Smith said. "Let's stop, and you go over and ask the man where we should be."
"No, you go," Seigenthaler said. "You're the campaign manager."
Smith asked the first person who looked as if he might know something, and the man said, "You've been doing fine, but you've just gone a little too far."
Seigenthaler started laughing, and so did some of the others. He said later, "I could hear Bobby laughing and saying, `You really screwed it up - again!' "
Smith said later, "I distinctly heard a voice coming out of the coffin saying, "Damn it, put me down and I'll show you the way."'
Reprinted with permission of Harper Collins Publishers Inc.
by CNB