Bobby Kennedy

Author:Larry Tye
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

Had he ended on this emotional high point it would have been enough. It also would have had the world speculating—as many did anyway—whether, if JFK was the dead hero who lit up the heavens, Lyndon Johnson must be the garish sun. But Bobby was at his generous best that night, intending not to demean but to honor, and not just his brother but his brother’s chosen number two. So, in lines that the history books have forgotten, he went on to implore the delegates and the nation that “the same efforts and the same energy and the same dedication that was given to President John F. Kennedy must be given to President Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey.” Afterward, he begged off talking to the press and sat for fifteen minutes on a fire escape outside the convention hall, quietly weeping.

—

JOURNALISTS TRUMPETED THAT Democratic National Convention appearance as the moment when Bobby began to arise from his post-assassination despair and despondency, and they were right. “He had, in a way, become his own man in the sunshine of Atlantic City,” wrote Stan Opotowsky in the New York Post. “Bobby Kennedy seemed to be trying to talk himself out of the trance of grief that has held him since November,” agreed McGrory, who was herself shaken enough by the murder to declare that, with JFK gone, “we will never laugh again.” His raucous embrace by the delegates surely registered, and helped him dry his wounded tears. Yet misery that crushing couldn’t vanish that fast. Anyone who followed Bobby during those blackest months of his life observed many such moments that together pointed a way out.

The first turning point had come the previous March, when he reluctantly agreed to speak at a Friendly Sons of St. Patrick dinner at the Hotel Casey in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He hadn’t delivered a talk before a large domestic audience since Jack’s death and he wasn’t sure he was ready. But the ten thousand women, men, and children who lined his route were, and proved it by standing in place for an hour despite the wet snowfall. Bobby had planned to address his brother’s legacy, closing with a poem written when Ireland was in comparable mourning over the death of its patriot Owen Roe O’Neill in 1649. The ballad ended,

We’re sheep without a shepherd

When the snow shuts up the sky –

Oh! Why did you leave us, Owen?

Why did you die?

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