Jack Newfield Talks About R.F.K

...And there really was a personal chemistry...

...He did have residual faith in people like Sorenson, Arthur Schlesinger...

...I think he was surprised when I brought up his civil rights record...

...No matter what situation he was in, he was reacting as a guy, and never as a plastic politician trying to calculate everything he said...

...He felt that he could no longer help Johnson become nominated by remaining neutral, that he had to run now because the collapse of the antipoverty efforts in the country and the war in Vietnam were more important than his political career...

...Most of the lunch was taken with a heated argument about Kennedy's role as Attorney General...

...That was the official rationale...

...I criticized his appointing racist judges in the South and not supporting civil rights legislation, and especially his indictment of nine civil rights leaders in Albany, Georgia, since I had written a pamphlet for sncc on that particular case...

...But I think Adam, Peter and Jeff were a goad on him to do the right thing, although it was experience which finally changed Kennedy much more than Adam, or Peter or Jeff or myself or Pete Hamil...

...Newfield: He made the general defense that I was judging him from the narrow perspective of black militancy, while his actions as Attorney General, in the light of his brother's concerns, had broader implications...

...I also think the Kennedys were concerned about carrying Georgia in the 1964 Presidential election...

...Isn't it...

...And all of this was less significant than his own emotional reactions to concrete experiences...

...senator from New York, especially if the senator is a Kennedy, and to be talked to in an uncon-descending way...

...But I do think there was a significant political development in a guy who in '61 could push for the founding of the Green Berets and push for keeping the commitment in Vietnam, and in '68 run for President on a platform of no more Viet-nams...

...I never wrote a whole speech, and I made no secret of much preferring Kennedy to McCarthy, despite the overwhelming sentiment in the liberal intellectual community for McCarthy...

...The day he ran for President he told me that he didn't think he had much of a chance to win the nomination...

...I don't think so...

...It is very flattering for a young Village Voice reporter to be invited for lunch with a U.S...

...The qualities of loyalty, candor and integrity were probably always there...

...Navasky: I gather that despite this argument you both parted with heightened mutual respect...

...It was only those experiences on Indian reservations that could turn him on, make him a believer...

...He halfheartedly defended the legalisms of the indictment and admitted that he should have perhaps done more to indict those who were burning down churches and intimidating civil rights workers and Negroes...

...Newfield: I think part of this was that the liberals always had a stereotype of Kennedy, and Kennedy had a stereotype of what liberals were—Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson...

...Newfield: I think there's going to be historical resistance to that point...

...Navasky: If I tried to map out the impact Kennedy and you and his younger staff had on each other's ideologies . . . Newfield: I think that politically and culturally Adam, Peter and myself are at midpoint between New Politics liberalism and New Left...

...My peers —Mary McGrory, Murray Kempton, Jimmy Wechsler —were all hot for McCarthy...

...Again, I can name people like Camus, or Orwell or I. F. Stone who are close to my politics, but there is no institution between Tom Hayden and Teddy Kennedy...

...Newfield: Well it had its good aspects and its bad aspects...

...He knew the entire primary effort was like a big trapeze act, and that he could not afford to fall anywhere...

...Navasky: Yes, you met with Gorman and tried to convince him to defect from McCarthy...

...Navasky: How did you first meet Kennedy...

...I was so convinced that I was right that I permitted myself to get out on a limb, and stopped trying to understate or disguise my feelings about Kennedy...

...Navasky: We had a discussion once about his ada speech, and when I said I thought I detected your prose you asked me, 'Who told you?' And in your book you state at one point that you and Jeff Greenfield of Kennedy's staff met with a McCarthy speech-writer . . . Newfield: Paul Gorman...

...Kennedy was a figure in transition, and the transition was never completed...

...But in his own mind, he was starting to run by March 5. The meetings he had were about how to run rather than whether to run...

...Newfield: A metaphor...

...I think that was the major reason McCarthy did so well in New Hampshire, and the major reason Kennedy began to think about running...

...Navasky: Was this in the nature of a command or was it simply, 'Would you like to come to lunch?' Newfield: Well, six months before I had put in a formal request for an interview, and I am sure it was placed at the bottom of some list with Junior High School 39...

...He never made it to where Walinsky was...

...They don't see any enormous transition...

...Navasky: What did he say about Albany...

...Interestingly, Adam wanted Kennedy to meet Tom because of Vietnam, and I wanted Kennedy to meet Tom because of his antipoverty work in Newark...

...Conditions changed...

...Newfield: That's true...

...and that the President had been misleading the country...

...Also at the same time, Adam and I decided that Johnson could be beaten and Kennedy should run for President...

...I think Adam, Peter and I ran against his stereotype of liberals...

...There was a panel discussion on "Wither Robert Kennedy," and my position that night was quite ambivalent...

...In the course of the program I summarized my theories about Kennedy having existential dimension...

...He was really impressed by my having grown up in Bedford Stuyvesant...

...This was before McCarthy's victory in New Hampshire...

...I would use as precedents James Agee in Alabama or Orwell in Spain...

...Navasky: How did your relationship affect your life as a journalist, and what kinds of responses did you get...

...Newfield: Even if he did make a decision that he wanted Jack Newfield of the Village Voice, I think the quality of perception not to go after somebody on the New York Times or the New York Post or the Wall Street Journal . . . Navasky: He went after them too, although he was less successful with the Times—at least its editorial writers...

...Like F.D.R.'s "Fellow immigrants" address to the dar...

...I was interested in that...

...Almost alone, he organized the political preconditions for an anti-Johnson candidacy...

...But ultimately, of course, it comes down to your assessment of what you call his existential quality...

...Much of the stuff in the media became exaggerated, like Evans and Novak did a column that I had written a speech for Kennedy and that I was advising him...

...Newfield: He understood what the Voice was about and what the Voice constituency was about, and he understood that I was a person of the Left, and he understood that there would be times when I would attack him in the Voice in the same way that there were black militants who denounced him...

...It was that organizing, rather than his conversations with Kennedy, that earned Al his place in history...

...So many people like Sid Zion [a reporter for the Times], for reasons of envy or paranoia, really got upset about the relationship...

...Navasky: Not necessarily...

...In addition, obviously, you were useful as an ambassador to your New Left friends...

...There were nuances of our relationship that I couldn't adequately explain to people, I couldn't go around always explaining where I differed with him...

...I think by participating directly you gain experience and insight which are richer than being an observer...

...I felt the liberal intellectual community had made a colossal blunder in supporting McCarthy, and I was sufficiently confident that Kennedy was the better man to be willing to jeopardize my credibility and my reputation and publicly affirm my friendship and support...

...He stood between the old and new in politics, between Sorenson and Walinsky, but was moving toward the new...

...It was the Tet offensive that convinced a new layer of the society that the Vietnam war was unwinnable...

...He went through almost the entire campaign thinking it was unlikely that he was going to be nominated...

...You see, Kennedy had not yet come out against the Vietnam war and I had not voted for him in 1964 in his campaign against Kenneth Keating...

...Anyway, Kennedy heard part of the program, and the next morning Polly Feingold, a friend of mine who worked in his New York office, called me and said the Senator heard the program and wanted to have lunch with me...

...Newfield: I liked him enormously because he was not mechanical or programmed...

...Newfield: Right...

...Navasky: It seems to me this is an important kind of communication that was going on here, and that it is relevant to the reason he reached out to you...

...Navasky: Well, I want to ask you whether you think he was still in the process of making up his mind...

...It was only winning in California and South Dakota on the last day that gave him hope he could actually win in Chicago...

...We went through Bedford Stuyvesant...

...Navasky: What do you think actually made him change his mind about running...

...Newfield: I think that by that point he had made a decision that he wanted to establish contacts and rapport with the young Left...

...Second...

...I was arguing that he was inadequate...

...Newfield: No, we discovered Camus independently...

...Navasky: Do you really think he saw these events and his career in opposition, or that for the first time he saw them coming together...

...The bad part was that a large number of people could only define me and see me in terms of Kennedy, and it was like Robert Kennedy was a tail I carried around and people recognized me by the tail, although I was hardly aware of it...

...Navasky: Okay...

...I have reviewed Newfield's book elsewhere (and recommend it), but it seemed to me worth asking what it was that got Village Voice reporter Newfield, whose self-image is (or was) anti-Establishment militant, so sympathetically enmeshed in the Kennedy apparatus...

...Newfield: I think one of the best things about him was that he would go out of his way to attack an audience...

...These were independent positions or ideas arrived at independently...

...Because if McCarthy had only gotten 10 per cent of the vote, would he still have run...

...How do you assess the influence of his younger staff on Kennedy...

...I finally decided that I was not going to disguise my feelings about Kennedy...

...Navasky: Did you give Kennedy a Camus course...

...Navasky: Although you have to admit it was an effective rhetorical device and he knew it...

...It haunted him in California...

...The machinery for running was put into motion on March 5, and he told me on March 6, 'I'm probably going to run.' Navasky: You attribute considerable importance to Al Lowenstein's role...

...He would go to the ada and tell them they were too anti-Communist...

...Newfield: I think to a variety of people—Fred Dut-ton and many others—he was always fatalistic about his chances of actually being nominated...

...that he was preoccupied by suffering and could only understand himself in action...

...Navasky: A lot of other people came from Bedford Stuyvesant backgrounds, who didn't write front-page stories for the Voice, and never got to go to Johnny Johnston's for lunch...

...He would go to business groups and tell them they would have to invest in the ghetto...

...But then, after he announced, I went through a very difficult period when I decided it was becoming detrimental to my credibility as a journalist to be so identified with Kennedy...

...And part of our relationship was the fact that I had a working-class background...

...We really wanted to win...

...There really is no organization, no leader, no party, and no country I fully identify with...

...I am not a viable candidate—which is a damaging piece of candor for a politician...

...He would go to the campuses and attack antiwar students for taking their student deferments...

...Newfield: I was invited on this tv show in February of 1966, the night of the special election in New York between Orin Lehman and Ted Kupferman for Lindsay's old Congressional seat...

...I even debated for him, I wrote articles, because I felt so embattled...

...He said himself that if I don't win in Oregon...

...Navasky: The week before Kennedy finally did announce, you called me—or I called you—because you had told somebody he was going to go and that you were taking bets...

...He was a person...

...Were they just bright and brilliant young men whom he used and used well, but essentially became less important after he had decided to run...

...Newfield: What is important is that whatever I was saying to him was independently reinforcing first his own instincts, and second, what Adam Walinsky and Peter Edelman [staff members] were telling him...

...But I think that at each specific crisis point in his career he was in fantastic conflict...

...He would accept that without blinking and he accepted that we were different, that he was the growing liberal inside the system and I was an alienated radical half outside the system...

...And I must say that to this day I have never found another national politician with his authenticity, his candor, his willingness to express emotions, and his unwillingness to behave in a conventional political manner, even in one to one situations...

...Navasky: You were almost driven to embracing him, as I recall the discussion on the air, because most of the panel was carrying on one of those conventional rather cynical talk-show analyses of Kennedy-as-ruthless calculator...

...Newfield: That is a difficult and complicated question...

...They are quite clear in their own minds that he was a great man, a great leader, a great boss, back in the late '50s...

...First, I never wrote a speech for Kennedy...

...Nothing that we said could ever make him obsessive about the cause of migrant farm workers, or Indians...

...When you wrote about the New Left you were marching around with signs, when you wrote about Kennedy you were writing his speeches and conspiring to recruit staff...

...On the other hand, I had been impressed by his opposition to the intervention in the Dominican Republic and his increased concern about poverty...

...Newfield: Lowenstein's real effectiveness was not what he said to Kennedy—but rather what he did in the country...

...Navasky: As I remember, you introduced him or arranged for him to meet, among others, Tom Hayden, Phil Ochs and Staughton Lynd...

...And that is where the three of us would act together...

...So four of us, myself, Kennedy, Tom Johnston, who also worked in the Senator's New York office, and Polly met for lunch in Johnny Johnston's...

...Navasky: Did you have any fear at this time that he was trying to co-opt you...

...He happened to be watching that program and caught, I think, that one minute where I explained him to himself...

...I felt that he was bright and that he saw the world from an angle I couldn't even imagine...

...Because the Tet offensive underlined and italicized the whole monumental inhumanity of the Vietnam war...

...Navasky: A kite you mean, and you were the tail...

...I think he had...

...We both suggested to him, without even knowing it until afterward, that he should meet Tom Hayden...

...Dick Goodwin, and Teddy Kennedy—in the people who had helped J.F.K...

...Newfield: Well, I believe the Tet offensive in February '68 was the single overwhelming event which changed the balance of American politics...

...I really thought about it a lot and I really believed that living with a Negro family in Mississippi or marching on the Pentagon gives you levels of insight that you don't get from the neutral, bloodless objectivity of the New York Times, which is just based on balancing quotes in inverted pyramids...

...You know, graduated from Boys High when it was already 90 per cent black...

...He had no idea of what my politics were—he expected me to attack him on the conventional liberal things like wiretapping and the treatment of Jimmy Hoffa...

...Navasky: But what do you make of Kennedy's old colleagues from the Justice Department or even his Rackets Committee days, who are very resentful of people like you who think that Kennedy found himself in the late '60s...

...Almost simultaneously Adam and I would feel that Kennedy was silent on the war for almost a year, we both would separately needle him about it...

...He had natural reactions, he would get angry at you, he would tell you you were full of shit, and I didn't feel he was trying to con me...

...By Victor S. Navasky Although Jack Newfield's Robert Kennedy: A Memoir is the occasion for this interview, what follows is less an exploration of the book than of New-field's relationship to Kennedy and his entourage...

...Your vocabulary and perceptions may have helped define him to himself, as you put it, but also his younger staff were lobbying with their boss for a point of view that you could articulate to them...

...The fact that I had been a founder of sds and had gone to Mississippi and had worked in various movements as an activist impressed Kennedy, that was part of our relationship...

...Newfield: I agree...

...Or serve as a collective campaign conscience...

...It became inflated after awhile and I think people were oblivious to the fact that we had serious disagreements...

...We weren't soft, for example, and we were activists and undogmatic...

...they see a consistent development...

...Newfield: I think my relationship with Walinsky, Edelman and Greenfield was largely independent of Kennedy...

...Beyond that, there were other related social factors—for example, that more and more money was going into Vietnam and away from antipoverty efforts...

...Newfield: No I disagree...

...Newfield: But had he changed politically...

...I can see in this a consistent pattern of "method" journalism, but also a dubious one...

...In a nonconspiratorial way, Adam, Peter, Jeff and I often exerted parallel pressures on Kennedy that were sympathetic with his feelings and intuition, but in conflict with the advice the older, more conventional advisers like Teddy Kennedy and Ted Sorenson were giving him...

...He did change between '60 and '68—even though the positions he adopted were unpopular...

...Or did they nag him into action...

...It was only in the last, I think probably the last two hours of his life that he finally saw a way he could actually be nominated...

...I wanted to pick up some of the money, and you said yes he had called you and told you that he was going to go...

...Newfield: I'm willing to agree that Kennedy always had certain appealing and perhaps heroic qualities of character, even when he worked for Joe McCarthy...

...Navasky: Do you think he told the old pros he called that day the same things he told you...

...The writers I most admire were all participatory journalists—Camus, in the Resistance, or Orwell in Spain, or Mailer at the Pentagon, or Fanon in Algeria...

...and that he had a very unique sense of the absurdity of life because of Dallas...

...Navasky: Do you think your friendship had any impact on Kennedy's pronouncements...

...Let me say first that in general Kennedy had a greater influence on his advisers, individually and collectively, than they did on him...

...You know, Wilbur Mills' whims, passing Medicaid, etc...

...The Vietnam war became as important to him as his own political career...

...I showed him the block I grew up on and that really made an impression on him...

...I think his basic instincts and emotions were always to go in the direction of Adam, Jeff and Peter in terms of boldness—in terms of ideas like decentralization, or that the union movement had gone over to the other side and was not a part of change now, that anti-Communism and the Cold War had grown more obsolete, that welfare as a liberal shibboleth had clearly failed...

...I believe in participatory, advocacy journalism...

...Navasky: Yet he wanted to run, and it wasn't as if the day after the primary he ruthlessly . . . Newfield: He did make up his mind on March 5, seven days before the New Hampshire primary, that he was going to run, barring any unforseen developments —which could have been the idea of a blue ribbon commission on Vietnam working out, or McCarthy either getting 10 per cent or 90 per cent in New Hampshire...

...For the ada speech he asked me to write down my thoughts about liberalism, which I did, and they were later incorporated into his speech...

...This actually wasn't an interview...

...And I think here, as in so many things Kennedy did, practicality and authenticity coincided...