So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (23 page)

Senator Kennedy has been returned to the intensive care room. His condition is described as extremely critical. The vital signs remain about as they were, except that he is now breathing on his own, which he was not prior to the surgery, although he now has the assistance of a resuscitator.

All but one fragment of the bullet have been removed from the head injury. There’s still one bullet apparently somewhere in the back of his neck, although this is not regarded as a major problem.

Senator Kennedy lost a considerable amount of blood as a result of the bullet which entered the—entered and passed through the mastoid bone on the right side of his head. And some of the fragments of the bullet and of the bone went toward the brain stem.

In addition to the damage done by the bullet, there may have been an impairment of blood supply to the midbrain, which the doctors explain as controlling, or at least governing, certain of the vital signs—pulse, heart, eye track, level of consciousness, although not directly the thinking process. And the doctors say that the next 12 to 36 hours will be a very critical period. And they list his condition as extremely critical.

5:30
P.M.
, June 5

A very short bulletin. The team of physicians attending Senator Robert Kennedy is concerned over his continuing failure to show improvement during the postoperative period. Now, as of 5
P.M.
, Senator Kennedy’s condition is still described as extremely critical as to life. There will be no further bulletins until early tomorrow morning.

Finally came the moment everyone dreaded:

1:59
A.M.
, June 6

I have a short announcement to read which I will read at this time. Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1:44
A.M.
today, June 6, 1968. With Senator Kennedy at the time of his death was his wife Ethel, his sisters, Mrs. Patricia Lawford, and Mrs. Stephen Smith, his brother-in-law, Stephen Smith, and his sister-in-law, Mrs. John F. Kennedy. He was 42 years old.

Construction of this moment was intentional. Pierre Salinger, who had been John Kennedy’s press secretary, and I had talked it over. We decided that for me to stay around to answer questions would take away from the import of the moment. Someone would ask where the funeral was going to be, and then would come questions about what hotel the press would be staying in. I wanted the moment to have more significance than that, so I just left after announcing the death and let Pierre come on about an hour later to answer logistical questions. The hesitation and the half step? I could see something was in my way behind the curtain just offstage, so I hesitated, thinking about how I’d have to change direction a little. At that exact moment, one of the reporters shouted at me, “What was the cause of death?” I wanted to say, “What do you think he died of? He was shot in the head.” But, of course, I didn’t even look over at the reporter. I just kept walking.

Midbrain. Brain stem. Brain-dead. Organ donation. Today we would think in such terms. Robert Kennedy was shot in the head, and the rest of his body was presumably unharmed. He was probably what experts now call brain-dead. Many, if not most, of his major organs could have been donated. Skin, bones, and eyes, too. The Catholic Church encourages donation. Someone would have received Robert Kennedy’s heart. That’s how we’d think it and talk about it now. But to look back that way seems morbid. What was morbid back then, what people seemed to be thinking about but not really saying out loud, was their fear Robert Kennedy would become a vegetable, that he would not die but would instead just linger, and live on and on as someone with no mental or cognitive functions.

*   *   *

A few days after the assassination, while I was still busy in the RFK office, helping out in finding jobs for now-unemployed staff people and fending off press inquiries, I got a phone call from a young man in Los Angeles, describing himself as a student at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (now, inevitably, Biola University). “I think I have your yellow notepad, Mr. Mankiewicz,” he told me, and after hearing him read off the notes I had written for RFK to deal with in his final victory speech in the ballroom at the Ambassador, I agreed he had found the pad I’d tossed aside as I rushed to the kitchen when we heard those terrible shots. I thanked him and asked him to mail the pad to me at the Senate Office Building in Washington. He replied, “I’d be happy to mail it to you, Mr. Mankiewicz, for twenty-five thousand dollars; don’t you think it’s worth that?” I was stunned into silence for a moment, and then, probably remembering a technique I’d seen on a TV show, I lowered my voice and pretended to be talking to a standby policeman. “Officer, you’ve heard this conversation?” I asked. “Good,” I said after an interval, “stand by.” I then went back to the phone call, firmly, “Young man, you can take that pad now to the nearest post office and mail it to me, or you will face an arrest within an hour for blackmail, extortion, and theft. If I receive the package, I’ll drop the charges—do you understand?” I had never better played a prosecutor, and the young Bible student quickly backed down and assured me he would send me the pad at once. I have treasured it since. RFK’s writing appears on the final sheet a few times, including where he added a few names of campaigners he wanted to thank.

*   *   *

My home telephone used to ring around seven every morning, including Saturdays and Sundays. It was my new boss, Robert Kennedy, and it took me a few days to fully understand what he wanted. Waiting until seven, which he considered a reasonable hour, RFK wanted to discuss what news, commentary, and editorial opinions were in the morning newspapers (
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,
and
The Washington Post
) and how we might expect to react to them. He had, of course, already read the papers and expected that I, too, had done so before I answered the telephone. Neither he nor anyone else had told me that such telephone calls were among my responsibilities. With rarely a cursory greeting, he would be speaking as though in mid-thought or mid-sentence. “Bombing pause in Vietnam. Looks like Johnson’s about to end it. Should I call now for continuance?” Or, “Possibility of new unrest like Watts last summer.”

Sometimes, when the call was over, I’d jot down ideas he’d expressed or phrases he’d used so I could pass them on to the speechwriters or other staff members. One morning, for example, playing off LBJ’s almost automatic opposition to whatever RFK would propose, I suggested Kennedy call for resumption of “intensive bombing, beginning with heavily populated civilian areas.” That line gave us more than a year of good laughs that highlighted the growing irrationality of Johnson’s war policies.

*   *   *

One day in 1966, we were driving home from the airport, and RFK asked me to turn in to Arlington National Cemetery. “I want to see the construction at the president’s grave,” he said.

“It’s almost dark, and the cemetery has probably closed,” I said. “Fences, guards, we probably can’t get there.”

He did not respond. A few cars, probably on their way home to the Virginia suburbs, passed us going in the opposite direction; their bright lights momentarily blinded me, and I almost missed the turnoff to Arlington. A few hundred yards to our right was the totally lit Lincoln Memorial, but the cemetery entrance, which had several huge “Closed at Sundown” signs, was unguarded. Reflexively, I began to park in one of the close-in “Reserved VIP” spaces but stopped the car under a lamppost in the empty lot.

RFK said nothing as we walked uphill along the paved path toward his brother’s grave. Long, parallel rows of crosses stretched out on both sides. Expecting an armed military or police guard to challenge us at any moment, I stayed close to him. His easily recognizable face, I figured, was our permission slip to be in the cemetery after hours.

Pausing for a few minutes when we encountered mounds of dirt and equipment—the gravesite was being transformed from the simplicity immediately after JFK’s funeral into the elaborate plaza so familiar today—we encountered a chain-link construction fence, about seven feet high. Kennedy looked over at me, seemed to smile, and, still saying nothing, began to climb the fence. I followed, imagining warning shots and a huge spotlight suddenly focused on us.

We dropped down and began to walk across the freshly paved plaza. First we hit the low-rising stone on which words from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address were being engraved. After we had stood at the “eternal flame,” which mounds of cobblestones made difficult to find, Kennedy asked, “What do you think?”

“I really don’t like it,” I replied. “It seems so overpowering and remote. It also doesn’t tell us anything about how John Kennedy died—how he was suddenly ripped from life while still in his prime, long before his time. It could be the grave of some respectable nineteenth-century president who died of, let’s say, pleurisy. It’s too opulent. It doesn’t shriek of tragedy.”

Kennedy said nothing, so I continued: “I prefer the early, makeshift grave—that simple headstone on the grass and the berets left by the Special Forces guys.”

RFK shook his head, seeming to agree. “There’s nothing I can do about it,” he said. “Someone else made the decisions. Anyway, it’s too late now.”

*   *   *

Robert Kennedy was very much a man of the moment. He did not like to look back. He wanted to focus on what was needed, what had to be done. And he didn’t seem to worry much about the backgrounds of people like me who were close to him. He’d know, and double-check, key things about us, but what would matter most to him was chemistry. It existed, or it did not.

We’d often have fascinating conversations because I had not known him before his Senate years. We’d be talking about something else, and I’d say, “Of course, that all goes back to the time you had the FBI get those reporters out of bed in the middle of the night,” and he’d laugh and say, “Is that what you think really happened?” And I’d tell him what someone would think from just reading the papers at the time, say about his apparent sympathy with McCarthyism, and he’d laugh again, and he might say, as he did when I asked about his pursuit of Jimmy Hoffa, “You’re right. That’s what really did happen.”

With regard to a more pressing remnant from the past, conversations with him about Martin Luther King Jr. provided an ongoing tutorial on the differences between wiretapping and electronic bugs. Someone—we figured it was the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, or LBJ himself—was leaking stories about RFK’s actions as attorney general, and Kennedy kept emphasizing to me that the actions he approved, while they did not always look attractive in retrospect, were always legal.

Such conversations would please me because Kennedy wouldn’t try to hide anything, even as we got into discussions of why people thought or acted the way they did. I’d tell him some kinds of people would never change their minds about him because of his earlier attitudes and actions, and we’d start talking about the personalities of people who are liberal and how they’d grown up with certain stories and how difficult it was to challenge or abandon such stories. He saw that in himself because I’d challenge him every time a magazine or someone would ask him to cite “the greatest people” and he’d persist in putting Herbert Hoover on the list. And I’d say, “God, Herbert Hoover? Are you sure?” Then we’d have arguments about how much someone’s personal qualities should be placed ahead of the consequences of his or her public actions, and things would get philosophical. He was, like all of us, the product of his upbringing.

Robert Kennedy loved to read and to discuss ideas. He really did carry Greek poetry and Camus and Sartre in his pocket and read them when he could—for example, on an airplane. He not only read them; he loved to reread them. And he seemed to read American history as long as it was far enough back—the Revolutionary War. But current books often did not interest him. He would come to my desk before he was to leave for somewhere and say, “What are three good books I should take with me?” And I’d tell him, and he might say, “No, I need something a little lighter than that.” He really did not keep up on current writing beyond what he might hear at a dinner table.

*   *   *

On January 31, 1968, about half a dozen of the nation’s leading political reporters wanted to hear, for the third, or tenth, time, why Senator Kennedy had changed the word “conceivable” to “foreseeable.”

This impromptu meeting was only a few hours after Kennedy had told reporters at an off-the-record breakfast that he would not run for president against Lyndon Johnson under any “conceivable circumstances.” His statement had surprised me. We had planned nothing definitive like that to come out of the breakfast. Indeed, for months, beginning in the fall of 1967, I had been urging him to run. Then, literally while he was speaking to the reporters, I read wire service reports of surprise Vietcong attacks in downtown Saigon. Even the American embassy was taking direct rocket and rifle fire. The American command seemingly caught off guard. Fear of panic among South Vietnam’s civilian population. What would within hours be known as the Tet Offensive was under way.

Realizing how unusual the circumstances were, I had interrupted, suggesting he change “conceivable” to “foreseeable.”

The meeting in the senator’s office would, we had hoped, clarify his position. But the same questions kept on coming, and the reporters, who presumably had to cover more legitimate and substantive stories elsewhere, showed no sign of leaving. Then a few more reporters crowded in, carrying the latest news just ripped from their wire service machines. “What do you think of this?” “Had your contacts at the Pentagon told you anything like this might be happening?” “How serious is this?” “What does it show about Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the war?” And yes, seemingly shouted in concert with every other question, “Will this affect your decision on whether to challenge LBJ in the primaries?”

“I’m learning about this event right now, exactly when you’re learning about this,” RFK said. He and I could not exchange glances, because the reporters would have read into whatever he did and made
that
part of the story. “Give us time,” I said, feeling a tug on my elbow. It was my assistant reminding me we were late for our long-scheduled visit to the Italian embassy to celebrate U.S. contributions to relief efforts after the 1966 flood in Florence. She gave me keys to the senator’s car. I was driving.