Bobby Kennedy Quotes

Fear not the path of Truth for the lack of People walking on it.

Here's an interesting form of murder we came up with: assassination. You know what's interesting about assassination? Well, not only does it change those popularity polls in a big fucking hurry, but it's also interesting to notice who it is we assassinate. Did you ever notice who it is? Stop to think who it is we kill? It's always people who've told us to live together in harmony and try to love one another. Jesus, Gandhi, Lincoln, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, John Lennon, they all said, "Try to live together peacefully." BAM! Right in the fucking head. Apparently we're not ready for that.

I cannot bear that chirpy Bobby Kennedy, always building his beaver's nest with a few more facts. He needs to look into the abyss.

White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption—which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards—is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy's assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals.

It’s hard to deny that an alarming number of those who stood for peace, not war, were either killed by deranged lone gunmen or else died in suspicious circumstances. We refer of course to the likes of JFK, Martin Luther King, Benazir Bhutto, Bobby Kennedy and John Lennon, to name but a few.

I remember, for example, when the ex-Attorney General, Mr. Robert Kennedy, said that it was conceivable that in forty years in America we might have a Negro president. And that sounded like a very emancipated statement, I suppose, to white people. They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard. They did not hear (and possibly will never hear) the laughter and the bitterness and the scorn with which this statement was greeted. From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barbershop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday and now he's already on his way to the presidency. We've been here for four hundred years and now he tells us that maybe in forty years, if you're good, we may let you become president.

There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction. ~ John F. Kennedy

When asked by Bobby Kennedy where he’d gotten $20,000 in cash to invest in a business venture, Hoffa replied, “From individuals.

Bobby Kennedy called Jimmy Hoffa “the most powerful man in the country next to the president.” Part

At one point Hoffa told Bobby Kennedy regarding the tapes, “To the best of my recollection, I must recall on my memory, I cannot remember.” There

Bobby Kennedy said that when he had been a boy there were three major influences on children – the home, the church, and the school – and now there was a fourth – television.

Our great stumbling block, in our stride toward freedom, is not the White Citizens’ Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner. It’s the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who constantly says, like Bobby Kennedy: ‘I agree with the goal you seek, but I cannot condone your methods.’ He paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.

I can appreciate that,” says Henry. He’s adding to the list. I look over his shoulder. Sex Pistols, the Clash, Gang of Four, Buzzcocks, Dead Kennedys, X, the Mekons, the Raincoats, the Dead Boys, New Order, the Smiths, Lora Logic, the Au Pairs, Big Black, Pil, the Pixies, the Breeders, Sonic Youth… Henry, they’re not going to be able to get any of that up here.” He nods, and jots the phone number and address for Vintage Vinyl at the bottom of the sheet. “You do have a record player, right?” My parents have one,” Bobby says. Henry winces. What do you really like?” I ask Jodie. I feel as though she’s fallen out of the conversation during the male bonding ritual Henry and Bobby are conducting. Prince,” she admits. Henry and I let out a big Whoo! And I start singing “1999” as loud as I can, and Henry jumps up and we’re doing a bump and grind across the kitchen. Laura hears us and runs off to put the actual record on and just like that, it’s a dance party.

When a reporter asked Bobby Kennedy what he would do if Hoffa were acquitted, Bobby Kennedy, who said he had “never considered that possibility” with such an “air-tight case,” remarked, “I’ll jump off the Capitol.” In

Bobby Kennedy chose the members of the squad himself. He gave the squad a very limited job to do and gave the squad a very subtle name: “The Get Hoffa Squad.” Everything, and I mean everything, came as a result of that.

The crisis isn’t over. The prospect of nuclear war has never been greater. The United States is so close to invading Cuba that one bad joke in the nonstop series of ExComm meetings is that Bobby Kennedy will soon be mayor of Havana.

I went to work for the union around the time all this was going on, right after Jimmy got the president’s job. After the wiretap trial everybody was saying they didn’t make a parachute big enough to save Bobby Kennedy’s ass when he jumped off the Capitol.

Jimmy Hoffa once said to Frank Sheeran enthusiastically, “If you got it, Irish, a truck driver brought it to you. Don’t ever forget that. That’s the whole secret to what we do.” That “you got it” part covered food, clothing, medicine, building materials, fuel for home and industry, just about everything. Because a nationwide trucking strike could literally starve and shut down the nation, Bobby Kennedy called Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters “the most powerful institution in the country aside from the United States government.…

FIRST MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. in Memphis, then Bobby Kennedy in downtown Los Angeles.

The “means” was his second philosophy and can be summed up by a remark he made to Bobby Kennedy at a private party in which they found themselves together: “I do to others what they do to me, only worse.” Simply put, Jimmy Hoffa believed that the “ends” of improving the lot of working Americans, with his union leading the way, justified whatever “means” were used to accomplish it.

White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption—which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards—is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy’s assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals. It is the Negro, of course, who is presumed to have become equal—an achievement that not only proves the comforting fact that perseverance has no color but also overwhelmingly corroborates the white man’s sense of his own value.

Once when I testified before a Senate Committee about LSD, Bobby Kennedy asked me how many people I knew smoked marijuana. Brazenly I announced, “Everyone I know smokes marijuana except my grandmother.

Future presidential candidates Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts were members of the committee. The committee’s chief counsel and principal interrogator was the future president’s younger brother and the nation’s future attorney general, Bobby Kennedy. As a result of his aggressive work on the committee, Bobby Kennedy was to become Jimmy Hoffa’s mortal enemy. Johnny

After a long discussion of the country's woes, the interviewer asked Bobby, "But you are an optimist?" Kennedy nodded and smiled his weary-eyed smile. "Just because you can't live any other way, can you?" he replied.

On the other hand, in his book, The Enemy Within, Bobby Kennedy wrote about his experiences and observations as chief counsel for the McClellan Committee hearings on organized crime and labor unions, saying: “We saw and questioned some of the nation’s most notorious gangsters and racketeers. But there was no group that better fits the prototype of the old Al Capone syndicate than Jimmy Hoffa and some of his chief lieutenants in and out of the union.” Twentieth

Live for all America to see in black and white as no newspaper could convey it were tough mobsters wearing diamond pinkie rings conferring quietly with their mob lawyers, then shifting in their chairs to face the senators and their counsel, Bobby Kennedy, and in gruff voices taking the Fifth Amendment as to every single question. Most of these questions were loaded with accusations of murder, torture, and other major criminal activity. The litany became a part of the culture of the fifties: “Senator, on advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer that question on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me.” And, of course, the public took that answer as an admission of guilt. No

Now a married woman at the age of 25, Sharon was much more than a “scatterbrain.” Like most people her age, she was very interested in politics and was a big fan of Bobby Kennedy. On the evening of June 3, 1968, during what proved to be his final fundraising tour, she attended a dinner in his honor at the home of director John Frankenheimer. That evening, she had the thrill of getting to speak to Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, just two days before he was assassinated.

In The Enemy Within, Bobby Kennedy asserted that after the trial, Joe Louis, who was out of work and deeply in debt at the time, was immediately given a well-paying job with a record company that got a $2 million Teamsters pension fund loan. Joe Louis then married the female black lawyer from California whom he had met at the trial. When Bobby Kennedy’s right-hand and chief investigator, the future author Walter Sheridan, tried to interview Joe Louis for the McClellan Committee about the record company job, the ex-champ refused to cooperate and said about Bobby Kennedy: “Tell him to go take a jump off the Empire State Building.” Still, Bobby Kennedy expected to have the last laugh by the end of 1957. Hoffa

Sheridan wrote in his 1972 book, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa: “He went about this by arranging for one of Beck’s own attorneys to feed information to Kennedy about Beck.” That simple sentence is a courageous one by Mr. Sheridan. Although Hoffa was still alive when the book came out and had literally just walked out of jail, Bobby Kennedy had been dead for four years. Had Kennedy been alive, and had anyone picked up on the implications of that sentence, an ethics probe would have been fully warranted.

Later that same year John F. Kennedy was elected president by a thin margin. The first thing he did was appoint his brother attorney general of the United States. This put Bobby in charge of the Justice Department, all of the United States attorneys, and of the FBI and the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. And the first thing Bobby Kennedy did was turn against the very men who helped elect his brother. For the first time in American history an attorney general committed his office to the eradication of organized crime. Toward

Bobby Kennedy gave Cheasty a job with the committee at a salary of $5,000 a year. The FBI planted microphones and set up cameras. Cheasty notified Hoffa that he had an envelope with sensitive committee documents and wanted another cash installment in exchange for the envelope. The two men met near DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C. Cheasty handed the envelope to Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa handed Cheasty $2,000 in cash. The exchange was photographed. The FBI moved in, catching Jimmy Hoffa red-handed with the documents. They arrested Jimmy Hoffa on the spot. When

Our great stumbling block, in our stride toward freedom, is not the White Citizens’ Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner. It’s the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who constantly says, like Bobby Kennedy: ‘I agree with the goal you seek, but I cannot condone your methods.

as tools of persuasion. He would

Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. -Marilyn Monroe, 1958

Jimmy Hoffa had two philosophies that guided his actions. One way or another he expressed them daily and often through word or deed. The first of these philosophies was “the ends,” the second was “the means.” The “ends” was his labor philosophy. Hoffa often said that his labor philosophy was simple: “The working man in America is being shortchanged every day in America.” The “means” was his second philosophy and can be summed up by a remark he made to Bobby Kennedy at a private party in which they found themselves together: “I do to others what they do to me, only worse.” Simply put, Jimmy Hoffa believed that the “ends” of improving the lot of working Americans, with his union leading the way, justified whatever “means” were used to accomplish it. His

Twentieth Century Fox commissioned a screenplay of Bobby Kennedy’s book. Budd Schulberg, the celebrated writer of On the Waterfront, wrote the screenplay, but the project was abandoned by the studio. Columbia Pictures then expressed interest in picking up the project but abandoned it as well. In an introduction he wrote to a 1972 book written about Hoffa by Bobby Kennedy’s chief aide, Walter Sheridan, Budd Schulberg explained why the two studios abandoned the project: “A labor tough walked right into the office of the new head of [Twentieth Century Fox] to warn him that if the picture was ever made [Teamster] drivers would refuse to deliver the prints to the theaters. And if they got there by any other means, stink bombs would drive out the audiences.” This

Jimmy had a loyal supporter in Puerto Rico named Frank Chavez. But however, Frank Chavez was a definite troublemaker. He was very hotheaded. He’s the one who sent Bobby Kennedy a letter from his local in Puerto Rico the day John F. Kennedy got assassinated. He told Bobby that in honor of all the bad things Bobby Kennedy had done to Jimmy Hoffa, his Puerto Rican local was going to put flowers on the grave of Lee Harvey Oswald and maintain them and keep them fresh. That still has to make you cringe a little. Let the dead rest in peace. You honor the dead, especially that man. He was a war hero who saved his own men in that PT boat incident. Bobby was a son of a bitch, but the man had just lost his brother and he must have known it was all connected with him and that it was his own fault, besides. Frank

The jury hung at eleven to one. Promptly a new jury was impaneled. During the second trial a member of the jury came forward to report a bribe attempt. He was excused and replaced by an alternate. This jury found Jimmy Hoffa not guilty. A crushed Bobby Kennedy still had the perjury charge against Hoffa to fall back on. But not for long. The perjury indictment relied on wiretapped conversations between Johnny Dio and Jimmy Hoffa. The wiretap had been authorized pursuant to New York State law and was a valid search and seizure of the telephone conversation under existing New York law. Unfortunately for Bobby, this was the beginning of the age of the Warren Court’s expansion of its control over state and local police procedures. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such state-sanctioned wiretaps were unconstitutional and that any evidence obtained by the wiretaps or derived from them was “fruit of the poisonous tree.

BOBBY KENNEDY recently made me the soul-stirring promise that one day—thirty years, if I’m lucky—I can be President too. It never entered this boy’s mind, I suppose—it has not entered the country’s mind yet—that perhaps I wouldn’t want to be. And in any case, what really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro “first” will become the first Negro President. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of.

Giancana said he was going to fix the election in Illinois so Kennedy would win that state. Jimmy couldn’t believe his ears. Jimmy tried to talk him out of it. Jimmy told him nobody could control Bobby because he was mental. Jimmy said people went to the old man during the McClellan Committee hearings and he couldn’t do anything about either one of his millionaire kids. Giancana told Jimmy that Kennedy was going to help them get Castro out of Cuba so they could get their casinos back. Jimmy said that they were crazy to trust those Kennedy boys

Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. . . . And it’s not sufficient just being against, just saying, ‘Well, I don’t think I like the way things are going.’ We have a responsibility to offer an alternative.

the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who saw Bobby Kennedy’s constellation of contradictions not as old versus new but as good versus bad. He called his schizophrenic senator the “Bobby twins,” explaining that “the Good Bobby is a courageous reformer. The Bad Bobby makes deals. The Good Bobby sent federal troops down south to enforce civil rights. The Bad Bobby appointed racist judges down South to enforce civil rights. The Good Bobby is a fervent civil libertarian. The Bad Bobby is a fervent wire tapper. The Good Bobby is ill at ease with liberals. The Bad Bobby is ill at ease with grownups.

Robert Kennedy, on his own, left no great legislative legacy, founded no great institution, led no great movement. His most extraordinary accomplishment - and it was extraordinary - was to embody in himself, and create in others, a kind of transcendent yearning for the possibility of redemptive change.

Time would never cure it. Almost half a century later, when she was the only one of the nine Kennedy siblings still living, the author would ask Jean Kennedy Smith about her brother Bobby and his depression over Jack’s death. “When did he come out of that?” she repeated, and then said, “I don’t think he ever came out of that.

One of the very hot topics between Jimmy and Sam Giancana was Senator John F. Kennedy’s upcoming campaign for president. This was very controversial between them. Giancana had been promised by Kennedy’s old man that he could control Bobby and nobody had to worry about Bobby if Jack got in. The Kennedy old man had made his money alongside the Italians as a bootlegger during Prohibition. He brought in whiskey through Canada and distributed it to the Italians. The old man kept his contacts with the Italians over the years as he branched out into more legitimate things, like financing movie stars like Gloria Swanson who he was having affairs with. Sam Giancana was going to help John F. Kennedy against Nixon and so were Giancana’s buddy Frank Sinatra and practically all of Hollywood.

FIRST MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. in Memphis, then Bobby Kennedy in downtown Los Angeles. Soon it felt like you couldn’t open a paper without seeing the bleeding body of an important man. Stella started switching off the news when her daughter came bounding into the kitchen for breakfast. Loretta said that, a couple months ago, Cindy asked her what assassination meant. She told her the truth, of course—that an assassination is when someone kills you to make a point. Which was correct enough, Stella supposed, but only if you were an important man. Important men became martyrs, unimportant ones victims. The important men were given televised funerals, public days of mourning. Their deaths inspired the creation of art and the destruction of cities. But unimportant men were killed to make the point that they were unimportant—that they were not even men—and the world continued on.

Maybe it was because the Corcorans were Irish, maybe it was that Mr. Corcoran was born in Boston, but the whole family seemed to feel, somehow, that it had a mysterious affinity with the Kennedys. It was a resemblance they tried to cultivate—especially Mrs. Corcoran, with her hairdo and faux-Jackie glasses—but it also had some slight physical basis: in Brady and Patrick’s toothy, too-tanned gauntness there was a shadow of Bobby Kennedy while the other brothers, Bunny among them, were built on the Ted Kennedy model, much heavier, with little round features bunched in the middle of their faces. It would not have been difficult to mistake any of them for minor clan members, cousins perhaps. Francis had told me of walking into a fashionable, very crowded restaurant in Boston once, with Bunny. There was a long wait, and the waiter had asked for a name: “Kennedy,” Bun said briskly, rocking back on his heels, and the next instant half the staff was scrambling to clear a table.

In 1968, at fifteen, she turned on the television and watched chaos flaring up across the country like brush fires. Martin Luther King, Jr., then Bobby Kennedy. Students in revolt at Columbia. Riots in Chicago, Memphis, Baltimore, D.C.—everywhere, everywhere, things were falling apart. Deep inside her a spark kindled, a spark that would flare in Izzy years later. Of course she understood why this was happening: they were fighting to right injustices. But part of her shuddered at the scenes on the television screen. Grainy scenes, but no less terrifying: grocery stores ablaze, smoke billowing from their rooftops, walls gnawed to studs by flame. The jagged edges of smashed windows like fangs in the night. Soldiers marching with rifles past drugstores and Laundromats. Jeeps blocking intersections under dead traffic lights. Did you have to burn down the old to make way for the new? The carpet at her feet was soft. The sofa beneath her was patterned with roses. Outside, a mourning dove cooed from the bird feeder and a Cadillac glided to a dignified stop at the corner. She wondered which was the real world.

Billy Sol Estes, who died on May 14, 2013, rebuffed my many attempts to interview him. He had long stopped speaking publicly about the strange deaths or his knowledge of them, praying as he got older in years for a more spiritual solution to the murders. “I think there’s still a God in heaven, and I think that God will straighten history out,” Estes said. “I’ve decided that none of us can do it down here.”69 I did have access and the full cooperation of Billy Sol Estes’s personal attorney Douglas Caddy, who supplied interviews, source materials, and remembrances for this book. I can understand Estes’s reluctance to give interviews in his later years. By the time I asked him in 2012, he had already identified Lyndon Johnson as the ultimate perpetrator in the murder of President Kennedy and had implicated him in seven other murders on record, in interviews and with many credible media outlets. Both Bobby Baker and Billy Sol Estes were self-described wheeler dealers, operators, hustlers; both were in deep with Johnson, made money from his political influence, and eventually paid for it. Both overreached for personal gain, possibly believing that their leader could exonerate them. Johnson used them for his own wealth until they became a liability. Then, they were promptly cut off the tree and left to rot.

American DEWAR FAMILY Cameron Dewar Ursula “Beep” Dewar, his sister Woody Dewar, his father Bella Dewar, his mother PESHKOV-JAKES FAMILY George Jakes Jacky Jakes, his mother Greg Peshkov, his father Lev Peshkov, his grandfather Marga, his grandmother MARQUAND FAMILY Verena Marquand Percy Marquand, her father Babe Lee, her mother CIA Florence Geary Tony Savino Tim Tedder, semiretired Keith Dorset OTHERS Maria Summers Joseph Hugo, FBI Larry Mawhinney, Pentagon Nelly Fordham, old flame of Greg Peshkov Dennis Wilson, aide to Bobby Kennedy Skip Dickerson, aide to Lyndon Johnson Leopold “Lee” Montgomery, reporter Herb Gould, television journalist on This Day Suzy Cannon, gossip reporter Frank Lindeman, television network owner REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth U.S. president Jackie, his wife Bobby Kennedy, his brother Dave Powers, assistant to President Kennedy Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press officer Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Lyndon B. Johnson, thirty-sixth U.S. president Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh U.S. president Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth U.S. president Ronald Reagan, fortieth U.S. president George H. W. Bush, forty-first U.S. president British LECKWITH-WILLIAMS FAMILY Dave Williams Evie Williams, his sister Daisy Williams, his mother Lloyd Williams, M.P., his father Eth Leckwith, Dave’s grandmother MURRAY FAMILY Jasper Murray Anna Murray, his sister Eva Murray, his mother MUSICIANS IN THE GUARDSMEN AND PLUM NELLIE Lenny, Dave Williams’s cousin Lew, drummer Buzz, bass player Geoffrey, lead guitarist OTHERS Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz Sam Cakebread, friend of Jasper Murray Byron Chesterfield (real name Brian Chesnowitz), music agent Hank Remington (real name Harry Riley), pop star Eric Chapman, record company executive German FRANCK FAMILY Rebecca Hoffmann Carla Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive mother Werner Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive father Walli Franck, son of Carla Lili Franck, daughter of Werner and Carla Maud von Ulrich, née Fitzherbert, Carla’s mother Hans Hoffmann, Rebecca’s husband OTHERS Bernd Held, schoolteacher Karolin Koontz, folksinger Odo Vossler, clergyman REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (Communist) Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor Egon Krenz, successor to Honecker Polish Stanislaw “Staz” Pawlak, army officer Lidka, girlfriend of Cam Dewar Danuta Gorski, Solidarity activist REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver Lech Wałesa, leader of the trade union Solidarity General Jaruzelski, prime minister Russian DVORKIN-PESHKOV FAMILY Tanya Dvorkin, journalist Dimka Dvorkin, Kremlin aide, Tanya’s twin brother Anya Dvorkin, their mother Grigori Peshkov, their grandfather Katerina Peshkov, their grandmother Vladimir, always called Volodya, their uncle Zoya, Volodya’s wife Nina, Dimka’s girlfriend OTHERS Daniil Antonov, features editor at TASS Pyotr Opotkin, features editor in chief Vasili Yenkov, dissident Natalya Smotrov, official in the Foreign Ministry

Jack, however, was persuaded by an aide to telephone King's wife, Coretta, to express his sympathy. At the same time, Bobby (unbeknownst to Jack) telegraphed the judge and requested King's release. The judge relented, and King got out of prison on bail. King then gave Jack full credit for what had happened. King Sr. came around, announcing, "I've got a suitcase full of votes, and I'm going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap.

She probably called to see if you’re still alive,” Hoffa deadpanned. In a voice meant for everyone to hear, Kennedy said, “I’m still alive, dear. If you hear a big explosion, I probably won’t be.

It took this tragic moment in America's racial history to forge the bond that Robert Kennedy had been seeking. The recognition of shared victimhood played a part. His reference to a "member of my family" was the sole public mention he was ever to make regarding his own relationship to what he would call "the events of November 1963.

There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the mountains of Peru. People starve in the streets of India, a former prime minister (Patrice Lumumba) is summarily executed in the Congo, intellectuals go to jail in Russia, and thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia: wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere in the world. They are differing evils; but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfections of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the defectiveness of our sensibility toward the suffering of our fellows; they mark the limit of our ability to use knowledge for the well-being of our fellow human beings around the world. And therefore they call upon common qualities of conscience and indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world.

Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, it was commonly known as MOBE. The key words were mobilization and end. MOBE was not going to listen to a three-point plan like Bobby Kennedy’s. Nothing less than a definitive and absolute end to the war in Vietnam was acceptable. David Dellinger was MOBE’s main coordinator. Dellinger was not one of the kids. He was Gene McCarthy’s age, fifty-two, a lifelong pacifist. During World War II, when nothing like the antiwar fervor of the 1960s could have been imagined, David Dellinger refused to serve in the military and was imprisoned. He had a history in radical pacifism like no one else in the anti-Vietnam movement. By 1967, Dave Dellinger’s time had finally come. Dellinger coordinated the October 21 march with a man of a totally different stripe, twenty-nine-year-old Jerry Rubin, whose activism was born in the Berkeley Free Speech movement of 1964. Rubin dropped out of Berkeley then and had been making trouble for establishments ever since. Rubin’s radical style seemed frivolous compared to Dellinger’s. Jerry Rubin mixed stunts, costumes, nudity, drugs, music, and jokes. Rubin concocted a theatrical potion intended

Many Americans wonder why Robert Kennedy took no action against Lyndon Johnson if he suspected the vice president’s complicity in the murder of his brother. In fact, we now know that Johnson was concerned that Robert Kennedy would object to his immediate ascendancy to the presidency. The very fact that Johnson would worry about something so constitutionally preordained virtually proved Johnson’s fear that Kennedy would see through his role in the murder. I now believe that Johnson’s call to Robert Kennedy to obtain the wording of the presidential oath was an act of obsequiousness to test Kennedy as well as an opportunity to twist the knife in Johnson’s bitter rival. We now know that the “oath” aboard Air Force One was purely symbolic; the US Constitution elevates the vice president to the presidency automatically upon the death of the president. Johnson’s carefully arranged ceremony in which he insisted that Jackie Kennedy be present was to put his imprimatur and that of the Kennedys, on his presidency. Additionally, Judge Sarah T. Hughes, who administered the oath, had recently been blocked from elevation on the federal bench by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. This impediment would be removed under President Lyndon Johnson. Robert Kennedy knew his brother was murdered by a domestic conspiracy and, at a minimum, suspected that Lyndon Johnson was complicit. Kennedy would tell his aide Richard Goodwin, “there’s nothing I can do about it. Not now.”86 In essence, Kennedy understood that with both the FBI and the Justice Department under the control of Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy nemesis J. Edgar Hoover, there was, indeed, nothing he could do immediately. While numerous biographers describe RFK as being shattered by the murder of his brother, Robert Kennedy was not so bereaved that it prevented him from seeking to maneuver his way onto the 1964 ticket as vice president. Indeed, RFK had Jackie Kennedy call Johnson to lobby for Bobby’s selection. Johnson declined, far too cunning to put Bobby in the exact position that he had maneuvered John Kennedy into three years previous. Robert Kennedy knew that only by becoming president could he avenge his brother’s death. After lukewarm endorsements of the Warren Commission’s conclusions between 1963 and 1968, while campaigning in the California primary, RFK would be asked about his brother’s murder. In the morning, he mumbled half-hearted support for the Warren Commission conclusions but asked the same question that afternoon he would tell a student audience in Northern California that if elected he would reopen the investigation into his brother’s murder. Kennedy’s highly regarded press secretary Frank Mankiewicz would say he was “shocked” by RFK’s comment because he had never said anything like it publicly before. Mankiewicz and Robert Kennedy aide Adam Walinsky would ultimately conclude that JFK had been murdered by a conspiracy, but to my knowledge, neither understood the full involvement of LBJ. Only days after Robert Kennedy said he would release all the records of the Kennedy assassination, the New York Senator would be killed in an assassination eerily similar to his brother’s, in which there are disputes, even today, about the number of shooters and the number of shots. The morning after Robert Kennedy was murdered a distraught Jacqueline Kennedy called close friend New York socialite Carter Burden, and said “They got Bobby, too,” leaving little doubt that she recognized that the same people who killed her husband also killed her brother in law.87

A person, Bobby would tell his oldest daughter Kathleen, could be judged by the enemies he made.

In late September 1955, on vacation in Denver, President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in the early hours of the morning. Speculation quickly arose over whether he’d be able to serve a second term. One man, betting against a full recovery, saw an opportunity opening for his son. Joseph Kennedy, believing Ike would have to forgo reelection, now offered a deal to Lyndon Johnson, the new Senate majority leader. If Johnson agreed to run for the 1956 Democratic nomination, Kennedy would pick up the bill. There was a single condition. If the Texan won the Democratic nomination, he was to name Senator John F. Kennedy his vice presidential running mate.

cautious, but it made Bobby more fatalistic. “Living every day is like Russian roulette,” he said. “There’s no way of protecting a country-stumping candidate. No way at all. You’ve just got to give yourself to the people and to trust them, and from then on it’s just that good old bitch, luck. Anyway, you have to have luck on your side to be elected President of the United States. Either it is with you or it isn’t. I am pretty sure there’ll be an attempt on my life sooner or later. Not so much for political reasons. I don’t believe that. Plain nuttiness, that’s all. There’s plenty of that around.” If he were elected, he added, he surely wouldn’t ride in the kind of bubble-topped, bulletproof limousine that LBJ used: “We can’t have that kind of country, where the President is afraid to go among the people.

Something about the movies lets you forget where you are and go into a whole different world. You just float, and time goes by without you hardly even knowing it. You forget. I forget about the boy and the girl next to us. I forget about Uncle Leone’s shooting and Bobby Kennedy’s killing. I forget about Kemper and his plan to flood our valley. I even forget about the war. Just for a while.

I daydreamed through the rest of the rally, daydreamed about Pearl with her head on my shoulder as we floated past the ancient cypress trees on the Black River. Daydreamed about sipping whiskey at Water Grill and asking the waiter to bring us a dozen honeymoon oysters. Daydreamed about sitting with Pearl’s dad on his porch, cranking the handle on the old freezer that would produce for us peach ice cream. Daydreamed through the final offerings from the choir and the photo op that had Miss Emmy pretending to be overwhelmed by the crush of the actors crowded into her path as she walked from the stage to the SUV. In the TV ad, she would look like Bobby Kennedy. Siler and I looped around the crowd and arrived at the truck ahead of her.

Bobby had been more than a brother-in-law to Jackie; before his assassination, in the wake of Jack’s death, the two of them destroyed and disconsolate, they became romantically involved.

ever. Today I saw our revolution more solid and invincible than ever.

One of the ladies asked about that awful Bobby Kennedy, and Goldwater responded by speaking about the attorney general with touching affection. (Mary) McGrory recalled how Jack Kennedy behaved at a similar stage in his campaign: spouting statistics, attacking carefully chosen enemies and puffing all the right friends, quoting dead Greeks, never cracking a joke lest he remind the voters how young he was.

The Kennedy brothers seemed neither as grand and omniscient as the “court histories” that sprang up after the president’s assassination portrayed them, nor as cunning and shameless as later books, such as Seymour Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot, argued. They were both self-creative and self-destructive.

Bobby noted in his journal.

American DEWAR FAMILY Cameron Dewar Ursula “Beep” Dewar, his sister Woody Dewar, his father Bella Dewar, his mother PESHKOV-JAKES FAMILY George Jakes Jacky Jakes, his mother Greg Peshkov, his father Lev Peshkov, his grandfather Marga, his grandmother MARQUAND FAMILY Verena Marquand Percy Marquand, her father Babe Lee, her mother CIA Florence Geary Tony Savino Tim Tedder, semiretired Keith Dorset OTHERS Maria Summers Joseph Hugo, FBI Larry Mawhinney, Pentagon Nelly Fordham, old flame of Greg Peshkov Dennis Wilson, aide to Bobby Kennedy Skip Dickerson, aide to Lyndon Johnson Leopold “Lee” Montgomery, reporter Herb Gould, television journalist on This Day Suzy Cannon, gossip reporter Frank Lindeman, television network owner REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth U.S. president Jackie, his wife Bobby Kennedy, his brother Dave Powers, assistant to President Kennedy Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press officer Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Lyndon B. Johnson, thirty-sixth U.S. president Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh U.S. president Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth U.S. president Ronald Reagan, fortieth U.S. president George H. W. Bush, forty-first U.S. president British LECKWITH-WILLIAMS FAMILY Dave Williams Evie Williams, his sister Daisy Williams, his mother Lloyd Williams, M.P., his father Eth Leckwith, Dave’s grandmother MURRAY FAMILY Jasper Murray Anna Murray, his sister Eva Murray, his mother MUSICIANS IN THE GUARDSMEN AND PLUM NELLIE Lenny, Dave Williams’s cousin Lew, drummer Buzz, bass player Geoffrey, lead guitarist OTHERS Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz Sam Cakebread, friend of Jasper Murray Byron Chesterfield (real name Brian Chesnowitz), music agent Hank Remington (real name Harry Riley), pop star Eric Chapman, record company executive German FRANCK FAMILY Rebecca Hoffmann Carla Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive mother Werner Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive father Walli Franck, son of Carla Lili Franck, daughter of Werner and Carla Maud von Ulrich, née Fitzherbert, Carla’s mother Hans Hoffmann, Rebecca’s husband OTHERS Bernd Held, schoolteacher Karolin Koontz, folksinger Odo Vossler, clergyman REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (Communist) Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor Egon Krenz, successor to Honecker Polish Stanislaw “Staz” Pawlak, army officer Lidka, girlfriend of Cam Dewar Danuta Gorski, Solidarity activist REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver Lech Wałesa, leader of the trade union Solidarity General Jaruzelski, prime minister Russian DVORKIN-PESHKOV FAMILY Tanya Dvorkin, journalist Dimka Dvorkin, Kremlin aide, Tanya’s twin brother Anya Dvorkin, their mother Grigori Peshkov, their grandfather Katerina Peshkov, their grandmother Vladimir, always called Volodya, their uncle Zoya, Volodya’s wife Nina, Dimka’s girlfriend OTHERS Daniil Antonov, features editor at TASS Pyotr Opotkin, features editor in chief Vasili Yenkov, dissident Natalya Smotrov, official in the Foreign Ministry Nik Smotrov, Natalya’s husband Yevgeny Filipov, aide to Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky Vera Pletner, Dimka’s secretary Valentin, Dimka’s friend Marshal Mikhail Pushnoy REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS Nikita Sergeyevitch Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Andrei Gromyko, foreign minister under Khrushchev Rodion Malinovsky, defense minister under Khrushchev Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor Yuri Andropov, successor to Brezhnev Konstantin Chernenko, successor to Andropov Mikhail Gorbachev, successor to Chernenko Other Nations Paz Oliva, Cuban general Frederik Bíró, Hungarian politician Enok Andersen, Danish accountant

Jack and Bobby Kennedy were too young, too attached to real family to transfer affection and loyalty to those that of their blood or region or upbringing.

Bobby Kennedy was the president’s devoted partner, as well as the nation’s top lawman. It has long been a mystery why he apparently did nothing to investigate his brother’s shocking death on November 22, 1963.

Poverty was one of those concerns. In the last days of November 1963, Robert Kennedy found a sheet of paper on which his brother had repeatedly scrawled and circled the word “poverty” during the final cabinet meeting of his life. Bobby framed the paper and hung it in his office at the Justice Department. Poverty was on both Kennedys’ minds that fall; earlier in 1963 they had begun to consider an antipoverty program—not a war but an “offensive” of uncertain magnitude. At the time of the assassination, Walter Heller, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, was preparing a comprehensive picture of the poverty problem. By the time Heller placed the memo on President Johnson’s desk the morning of November 23, the fight against poverty had attained the solemnity of a dead man’s last wish.

Lyndon Johnson immediately saw its importance—both symbolic and material. “Push ahead full-tilt,” Johnson told Heller that evening without a moment’s reflection. “That’s my kind of program. It will help people.” On January 8, 1964, in his first State of the Union Address, Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty in America.” It was a characteristically bold claim—especially bold at a time when 83 percent of Americans believed poverty would never be eradicated. It was bolder still given that Johnson’s kind of program was not really a program at all, yet—it was only a loose collection of ideas, and most of them belonged to Bobby Kennedy.

In 1961, at Robert Kennedy’s first press conference as attorney general, he spoke of an “alarming increase” in juvenile delinquency. Juvenile delinquents intrigued Kennedy; he identified with outsiders, “young toughs,” underdogs. Bobby once said that if he had not been born a Kennedy he would have become “perhaps a juvenile delinquent or a revolutionary.” The issue of juvenile delinquency was something of a vogue among social scientists in the early 1960s, though on its face delinquency was a law enforcement issue. In May 1961, John Kennedy installed his attorney general as chairman of the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency (PCJD); Bobby appointed a lifelong friend, David Hackett, as director. The square-jawed Hackett was a former Olympic hockey player and, though not exactly the administration’s best or brightest, possessed a shrewd intelligence. He knew nothing, however, about juvenile delinquency.

Still, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich are no Johnson and Kennedy. The rivalry between LBJ and RFK was of a different magnitude—and of greater importance—than any of the postwar era. Their antagonism spawned political turf battles across the United States. It divided constituencies the two men once shared and weakened their party by forcing its members to choose between them. It captivated the newly powerful media that portrayed every disagreement between Johnson and Kennedy as part of a prolonged battle for the presidency or a claim on the legacy of the fallen JFK. It helped propel one man to the Senate and drive the other from the White House. Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy were a study in contrast—so dissimilar in background, character, and even appearance that they seemed natural antagonists. It was as if one were designed to confound the other.

Here at the new frontier of urban policy the chairman and his committee were in harmony: PCJD staff members were not timid bureaucrats but lively, self-styled “guerrillas.” Bobby matched their social science credentials with his zeal. Together they developed contrarian, almost radical, views. Two, as it turned out, were crucial: first, that insufficient opportunity was the root cause of poverty; and second, that the problem required “community action”—a vague notion but clearly something other than bureaucratic, top-down, federal largess. “We felt that you could spend $30 million in one city and not have any impact whatsoever,” Hackett explained later. The committee held that government must not impose solutions but empower the poor to develop their own. The PCJD financed and coordinated a dozen local initiatives on an experimental basis in cities like Cleveland, New Haven, and New York. The programs provided comprehensive services (education, employment, and job training) that encouraged self-sufficiency.

Kennedy’s influence was cut short by the assassination, but he weighed in with a memo to LBJ. The problem, Kennedy explained on January 16, was that “most federal programs are directed at only a single aspect of the problem. They are sometimes competitive and frequently aimed at only a temporary solution or provide for only a minimum level of subsistence. These programs are always planned for the poor—not with the poor.” Kennedy’s solution was a new cabinet-level committee to coordinate comprehensive, local programs that “[involve] the cooperation of the poor” Kennedy listed six cities where local “coordinating mechanisms” were strong enough that pilot programs might be operational by fall. “In my judgment,” he added prophetically, “the anti-poverty program could actually retard the solution of these problems, unless we use the basic approach outlined above.” If there was such a thing as a “classical” vision of community action, Kennedy’s memo was its epitaph. On February 1, while Kennedy was in East Asia, Johnson appointed Sargent Shriver to head the war on poverty. It was an important signal that the president would be running the program his way, not Bobby’s. It was also a canny personal slap at RFK—who, according to Ted Sorensen, had “seriously consider[ed] heading” the antipoverty effort. Viewed in this light, Johnson’s choice of Shriver was particularly shrewd. Not only was Shriver hardworking and dynamic—a great salesman—but he was a Kennedy in-law, married to Bobby’s sister Eunice. In Kennedy family photos Shriver stood barrel-chested and beaming, a member of the inner circle, every bit as vigorous, handsome, Catholic, and aristocratic as the rest. By placing Shriver at the helm of the war on poverty, Johnson demonstrated his fealty to the dead president. But LBJ and Bobby both understood that Shriver was very much his own man. After the assassination Shriver signaled his independence from the Kennedys by slipping the new president a note card delineating “What Bobby Thinks.” In 1964, Shriver’s status as a quasi-Kennedy made him Bobby’s rival for the vice presidency, but even before then their relationship was hardly fraternal. Within the Kennedy family Shriver was gently mocked. His liberalism on civil rights earned him the monikers “Boy Scout,” “house Communist,” and “too-liberal in-law.” Bobby’s unease was returned in kind. “Believe me,” RFK’s Senate aide Adam Walinsky observed, “Sarge was no close pal brother-in-law and he wasn’t giving Robert Kennedy any extra breaks.” If Shriver’s loyalty was divided, it was split between Johnson and himself, not Johnson and Kennedy.

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why. Science fiction dreams of the things that never were and asks why not? The answer to which is often "Because it might not be very wise." But, as that has never stopped humans before...it could make a helluva good story!" [Riffing on Bobby Kennedy]

The first speech, at the all-white but liberal University of Cape Town, remains one of Bobby’s most memorable, beginning with one of his favorite devices of leading listeners in one direction and then taking them somewhere else entirely. “I came here,” he said, “because of my deep interest [in] and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier…a land which once imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.” His audience understood instinctively their speaker’s point: that he had not come as a pious missionary but as someone struggling with his own country’s racial shame.

Earlier that year, at the hundredth anniversary of his Harvard club, a member was talking about the spirit of Harvard College and saying how glad he was that the school had produced neither “a Joseph McCarthy or an Alger Hiss.” On hearing that coupling, Kennedy jumped from his chair. “How dare you compare the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” and left the room. As for his father, the very thought

It won a commitment from the Soviet leader to take no action that would influence the 1962 congressional elections. Both the White House and the Kremlin recognized that any instance of Soviet aggression could only play into the hands of the more hawkish Republicans.

the Senate in 1958. He was the

Then, with great relish, Lyndon Johnson spun a Texas tale. It was his pièce de résistance, the crescendo of an expansive, four-hour performance. “When I got [Kennedy] in the Oval Office,” Johnson began, “and told him it would be ‘inadvisable’ for him to be on the ticket as the Vice President-nominee, his face changed, and he started to swallow. He looked sick. His adam’s apple bounded up and down like a yo-yo.” For effect, the president gulped, audibly, at the reporters. He mimicked Bobby’s “funny voice” and proceeded to tell, in lavish detail and with evident delight, his version of the meeting. Finally, LBJ ran down a list of possible running mates and explained the ways each would hurt his chances. “In other words,” recalled Folliard, “he would do better in the November election if he had no running mate. This left Wicker, Kiker and me baffled—and that is just what the man evidently wanted us to be.” Within days Johnson’s story was the talk of Washington. His portrait of RFK as a “stunned semi-idiot” left columnist Joseph Alsop and other Washington insiders feeling rather stunned themselves. It was not long before the gossip found its way to Bobby Kennedy, who stormed back to the White House and accused the president of mistruths and a violation of trust. I knew the meeting was taped, he said, but I never expected this. Wasn’t our talk a matter of confidence? Aren’t we honorable men? LBJ was unrepentant: I’ve revealed nothing, he assured Kennedy, gesturing wanly at an empty page in his appointment book. He promised to check his notes for any conversations that might have slipped his mind. Bobby stalked out, seething, and caught a plane to Hyannis Port. “He tells so many lies,” Kennedy said of Johnson the next week, echoing the words of George Reedy, “that he convinces himself after a while he’s telling the truth. He just doesn’t recognize truth or falsehood.

But the words that lingered longest in the public imagination were those from Romeo and Juliet, “When I think of President Kennedy,” Bobby said, “I think of what Shakespeare said … “‘When he shall die Take him and cut him out in little stars And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night, And pay no worship to the garish sun.’” The hall burst again into applause. In a hotel room off the boardwalk, O’Brien, O’Donnell, Salinger, and Dave Powers watched the proceedings on television and wept. Elsewhere, Johnson men chafed at Bobby’s reference to the “garish sun.” An obvious, petty jab, they said. It was just like Bobby. After the twenty-minute film, as the lights in the hall were raised, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson entered the presidential box in which Bobby and Ethel had watched the tribute. Delegates began to cheer; the organ began a rousing reprise of “Hello, Lyndon!” The president shook Bobby’s hand. As Bobby and Ethel stepped to the back of the box, Johnson generously beckoned them forward. They sat at Lady Bird’s side while the president, moments later, gave his acceptance speech. “Let us now turn to our task!” Johnson charged the convention hall crowd in a fervent thirty-five-minute speech. “Let us be on our way!

There’ll be people better and smarter than you, Adam. There always are. Your strength must be to want it more, and let nothing get in the way. They called Robert Kennedy ruthless. But for a few months before he died, when I joined his campaign, I knew Bobby very well, and I can tell you he was most ruthless with himself. That’s how you should be.

Three years later, the civil rights lawyer vividly recalled that day: “In his straightforward way, Yablonski told me that he had decided to run for the presidency of the UMWA, that he would probably be killed before the fight was over, but that he had to do it.” Rauh knew Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy well, but he always said that Jock Yablonski’s decision to risk his life for the country’s coal miners was the greatest act of courage and moral fiber he ever saw.

If anyone bothered to ask her, back then, what she did want, she would have said: to listen to music, Zeppelin and the Dead most importantly, but also Procol Harum, and Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell; to see George McGovern elected someday (now that Bobby Kennedy was dead and gone); to go into a line of work that would make a difference in the world; to meet a good man who took her seriously; to travel the country and the world. But nobody asked her, and so she kept these wishes quiet, writing them only in journals, summoning them to the forefront of her mind whenever a birthday or a well or a star presented her with a formal opportunity to make them known to the universe.

I was talking to a group of college students recently. One...posed the "what's the point?" question. I was born into an America where most couldn't sit in a classroom with someone of a different race and women could not attend many of our universities. When I was five I saw my mom crying in front of the TV because our president had been assassinated. I read newspapers every day with stories about Civil Rights protests and the Vietnam War, where 60,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were killed. When I was 10, I saw the TV news bulletin about Martin Luther King's assassination and then, two months later, the murder of Bobby Kennedy. Kids not much older than me were gunned down by the National Guard and law and law envorcement at Kent State and Jackson State. We accepted the possibility of nuclear war as a fact of life. When I was 16, a president resighned to avoid impeachment because of his corruption. I felt just like you do - that the adults had really screwed the world up. But I saw how young people marching helped bring about better civil rights laws, and how young people protesting helped end the Vietnam War. So when I turned eighteen, I registered to vote as fast as I could to make things better, in my state and in the country. And...I've seen a lot of things get better in my state and my country. Now you see things that make you angry. Good! They'll get better if you throw yourself into solving them in your own way.

Regardless, the simple fact that de Mohrenschildt knew Jackie and was the central figure in the life of the man believed to have assassinated Jackie’s husband surely deserved more attention. That the Kennedy marriage had never been as happy as the public was given to believe, that it had deteriorated badly in the last few years, and that Jackie had gone off, over White House objections, to spend time on the yacht of Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis—these did not necessarily add up to anything meaningful. That Onassis, who was seriously at odds with Bobby Kennedy, had nearly entered into a Haitian investment venture with George de Mohrenschildt may have been no more than coincidence.

In 1968, the Tet offensive in Vietnam took the lives of thousands of GIs and made it clear to a lot of Americans that we were fighting an unwinnable war.  Meanwhile the people of Prague, Czechoslovakia rose up against their Soviet oppressors and the United States did nothing to help them, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, there were riots in the streets of major cities, and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago featured the police beatings of peaceful anti-war demonstrators.  Oh! and yes, as if that wasn't enough, Richard Nixon was elected President.  Otherwise things were fine.

From all this we can extrapolate three outstanding facts that are almost synecdoches of our increasingly clandestine world. 1.–The cocaine money laundered by Archbishop Marcinkus helped finance the death squads that killed Archbishop Romeros, who served the same God and the same church as Marcinkus: we are all living in a Le Carre novel. 2.–In the symbiosis between the Mafia and the CIA the mob thinks it is using the spooks, and the spooks think they are using the mob and one of them is terribly deceived. 3.–Bobby Kennedy broke off his affair with Marilyn when he learned, from FBI wiretaps, that the Mafia was taping his boudoir adventures. Contemplate that: while the Justice Department wiretaps the Mafia, the Mafia wiretaps the head of the Justice Department. It is more than a synecdoche; it is a Joycean epiphany.

Watching the podium dance that night from the convention floor was Paul Corbin, a longtime Kennedy family retainer. Corbin had been working for the Kennedys ever since he first encountered Bobby Kennedy back in the mid-1950s. A former labor organizer and once a member of the Communist Party, Corbin was the kind of loyal political operative who harbored no ethical qualms about doing whatever was necessary to win. He was now seething with resentment against the Carter campaign. As he stormed out of the convention hall, a reporter from Reader´s Digest asked him what his plans were now that Kennedy was out of the race. Corbin yelled defiantly, ¨I´m going to go work for Reagan!¨

It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war. ~ U.S. President John F. Kennedy

He who learns must suffer. Even in our sleep, pain that 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.

John Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic; Robert Kennedy, a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist.” —ARTHUR SCHLESINGER

On the eve of the JFK assassination, the political future of Lyndon Baines Johnson was imperiled. Bobby Baker, LBJ’s protégé and bagman, was under investigation by the Kennedy Justice Department for myriad crimes including tax evasion, fraud, and the procuring of congressional votes through sexual favors.

John Kennedy was very good at not telling anybody what he was really thinking, including his brother Bobby Kennedy,

It’s 1968, and Aiken Day’s life is in chaos. Living in Windsor, Ontario, he suffers bleak visions and nightmares—flashbacks to the killing, the slaughter of the Essex Scottish Regiment on the shale beaches of Dieppe. His wife, the elegant former professor Paris Day, has run off with a civil rights group whose members have traded peaceful protests for violent bank heists, and their son Adam, a young black man in a white, white world, seems ready to follow in her footsteps. While Aiken sets off to discover the truth behind an FBI story about his wife, Bobby Kennedy and his team criss-cross the US on his run for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, campaigning to end racial discrimination and the Vietnam war. A sprawling, Pynchonesque novel that spans Canada and the US, Pushing Bobby’s Cadillac explores the hope and anguish spawned by the year 1968.

Jimmy and his activist friends were there to tell Bobby about the suffering that had scarred each black person in that room; that had scarred or killed people they loved; that had buried their communities in poverty; that had withheld their right to vote; that had lynched their grandfathers, raped their grandmothers, set the dogs on their children, called them “nigger” for daring to sit at a lunch counter; that had tried to deprive their children of education, their mothers of dignity in domestic labor, their fathers the dignity of being called “sir” and not “boy” at the age of 60. Bobby did not want the responsibility of bearing witness to their pain and their rage. Witness often exposes the unspoken claims of whiteness—its privilege to hide, its ability to deflect black suffering into comparatively sterile discussions of policy that take the heat off of “me” and put it on “that.

Dr. King’s fitting description of the good life, ‘a creative synthesis of opposites.’ 

You want to hear something ironic?” he said. “My last meeting with Bobby Kennedy was on November 22nd, 1963. He was running late for a luncheon appointment and had to hurry off. He said we’d finish up when he returned. He never returned. At lunch he got word of his brother’s death in Dallas.

Bobby Kennedy: no era tanto lo que hacía sino lo que te hacía sentir. Que todo era posible.