Robert F. Kennedy: the Making of an Electorate

...In appeals in behalf of local candidates, he has learned to gild the lily with the best of them...

...You have been lifted onto a tiny, sunlit island while all around you lies a dark ocean of human misery, injustice, violence, and fear...

...Do you know how Indiana's Republicans voted...

...Robert Kennedy's fondness this fall for the Shaw quote—"I dream things that never were and say, why not"— recalls an account of how John Kennedy is supposed to have decided to run for President...

...Bobby Kennedy is becoming an estimable entertainer on the stump...

...The Senator is not, of course, without his flaws...

...At times there were so many non-voters in the crowds that the campaign seemed almost like a lecture tour with extraneous hoopla...

...There are children present...

...As a workout for a Presidential effort of the future, the Kennedy team gained added experience from the fall campaign shakedown...

...a long pause] . . . and that's my younger brother...

...The important thing was that he tried to help, and that in so doing he demonstrated—to the professional politicians as well as to the enrapt young audiences—that he, personally, is the hottest thing on the boards...

...Bobby and Teddy need not persuade an old PT-109 tie clasp man to run in this or that state and plant the flag...

...I think that one cannot plan that far in advance...

...The Ky remark was largely ignored and relatively few outside the entourage and those at Berkeley made much of it...

...And what better way can this be done than through superior educational facilities...

...At the University of Seattle, where Kennedy polled the students on their position on Vietnam and on the draft, he discovered somewhat surprisingly that they favored escalation but wanted to keep draft deferments...

...The observation was picked up by some newsmen and given priority in their stories, inasmuch as Ky, after all, was about to meet with Mr...

...The teenagers—the voters of 1972 —also provided an entree for Kennedy to the middle generation...

...No, but I touched his rib-cage," was the thrilled and graphic reply...

...On the longest trip, the California-Pacific Northwest-Midwest swing in late October, eight staff aides were aboard the chartered Boeing 727 jet...

...Saul Alinsky, the Chicago organizer-of-the-poor and master phrasemaker, likes to point out that the secret of most great men's success—including, of course, his own—is knowing how to make maximum use of what is available...

...Even what Kennedy said about the candidate in his own district did not save him...

...Richard Goodwin, the former special assistant to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, went along on the California segment of the campaign and helped prepare Kennedy's Berkeley civil rights speech, which called for the channeling of dissent into constructive social action...

...This Kennedy strategy was so simple and transparent as to be hardly worth dwelling on if it were not for the fact that the Kennedy family magic has been so widely accepted as the totality of his appeal that it obscures the potency of Robert Kennedy himself as a campaigner in his own right...

...The stairway was lowered and bounding onto the plane came the recently praised candidate...

...It was a message that hit the young idealist where he felt it most, and when it came from an almost-member of his generation, it could be taken more as a rallying cry than as another Big Daddy sermon that the kids cannot abide...

...In California, this issue dovetailed nicely with Kennedy's overall theme...

...What must be done, he says, is to channel this sentiment into constructive and self-satisfying paths...

...In a Presidential campaign it would have been considered a major effort...

...In New Albany, Indiana, at a rally for Representative Winfield K. Denton (at seventy certainly one of the oldest New Frontiersmen), it went like this: Kennedy: "Are you for Medicare...

...At the next stop, Everett, he found less emphatic support for escalation, but majority support for it nonetheless, and the same opposition to replacing the draft with a lottery...

...At Berkeley, Kennedy told the students they were "the most privileged citizens of [the most] privileged nation" because they had been given the opportunity "to take your place among the tiny minority of the world's educated men and women...

...The Republicans voted against Medicare...

...to convince young America that there is much to turn its restless energy toward and that, in the stock Kennedy phrase, "one person can make a difference"—particularly if he is educated...

...On the campuses, Kennedy was able to serve up the theme of youth's obligation to serve, undiluted by excessive partisan electioneering...

...This, certainly, is a good part of the Kennedy "plot to take over...

...For all the fall's frantic activity and personal idolatry, Kennedy's batting average as a vote-harvester for other Democrats was less than sensational, even by his own reckoning...

...They voted five to nothing against Medicare...

...By providing enough evidence of Kennedy action and movement, even if it is not in any particular direction or tied to any timetable, the juices of natural ambition do most of the rest...

...Beyond the ballyhooed magic, however, the New York Senator, over the course of 17,000 campaign miles, developed something extra for the faithful, and for the not-yet-faithful...

...Do you...

...But in the fall campaign he hitched his wagon to it...

...He lost by about two per cent of the vote...

...He thinks fast...

...But so conscious is everyone of the Kennedy-Johnson relationship that all Kennedy remarks are examined for signs of a new poke in the Johnson ribs...

...For personal friends like Representative Brock Adams, who won re-election in Washington, he pulled out all the stops...

...Kennedy: "Indiana's Democrats voted six to nothing for Medicare...

...He said, 'President Johnson is in Manila, Vice President Humphrey is campaigning up and down the East Coast, and you're out there...

...But history will judge you, and as the years pass you will ultimately judge yourself, on the extent to which you have used your gifts to lighten and enrich the lives of your fellow men...

...Somewhat overshadowed by a day of campaigning in California and in a minor way by the Ky flap, the speech was impressively written and impressively delivered...

...legislative aide and speechwriter Adam Walinsky...

...John F. Kennedy had touched the edges of this position and Robert Kennedy, with his Vietnam semi-dissent and his trip to South Africa, had moved toward it...

...After he had spoken for one such candidate in the Midwest, the Kennedy campaign plane was heading down the runway bound for another state when the pilot braked and went back for a tardy passenger...

...The kids themselves have an obligation to make things better, the Kennedy litany went, but so do their parents...

...Though he is not of the target generation, either chronologically or economically, that did not seem to matter...

...And everywhere, while President Johnson was in the Far East: "I received a telegram from my brother Teddy last night...

...I'm going to continue, as long as I'm around on this globe—I'm going to continue in public life in some way...

...Finding himself thus positioned, Kennedy made the most of it with a pitch that projected him not simply as the heir-apparent of the New Frontier Interrupted but as the one national figure who is plugged in to America Coming of Age...

...At East Los Angeles, when Pat Brown gave him a key to the city and state while hecklers held "Yorty Country" signs aloft, Kennedy quipped: "I understand the word got out that I was going to get the key to the city, so last night they changed all the locks...

...Did I see you hug him...

...When Kennedy learned about it, he came into the press room and insisted that what he said was not news, that he had said the same thing often before, and that Administration officials held the same view...

...A questioner called on him to "dissociate yourself" from Johnson on Vietnam, and Kennedy answered, curtly and emphatically: "No...

...Quipped Kennedy: "He thinks I say those things about him at every stop...

...he has developed some winning routines and the timing that must go with them...

...This kind of overdone politicking, while it draws groans and guffaws from the traveling press, is as much the ingredient of personal success as the fawning crowds...

...At feeding the growing saga of the Legend Unfulfilled, Kennedy has been equally adroit...

...They included Kennedy's administrative assistant, former assistant deputy Attorney General Joseph F. Dolan...

...I dream things that never were, and say, why not...

...Some were old JFK supporters or lieutenants rallying to the regrouping Kennedy ranks...

...I'm afraid to tell you...

...His staff claimed that sixty per cent of the candidates he helped won...

...Questioned moments later on his Vietnam views, Kennedy observed, without being asked, that personally he did not think the people of South Vietnam want Premier Ky...

...And when word got around later that one reporter's editor had been approached by the Kennedy party to knock down the story, the reaction was only compounded...

...He staked out a role as the spokesman for the shut-out generation of young Americans who feel the world is being run—ineffectively—for them, and as their liaison man with the young world abroad that is clamoring for change and recognition...

...Kennedy: "All right, you asked for it...

...Reagan denied it, saying only that minimal costs might have to be considered in conjunction with a stronger scholarship and student-loan program...

...Kennedy: "Do you know how the Republicans from Indiana voted on Medicare...

...Bobby Kennedy does not have to keep that question to himself...

...If somebody had passed out the ballots on the spot, it might have been a shutout...

...he asked the students...

...Finally, there is Kennedy himself, a politician who has rapidly become in public what he long had been in private—a professional...

...press secretary Frank Mankiewicz...

...The game went over well enough with the teen-agers, but it obviously was not the stuff of which dreams that never were are made...

...Some people see things as they are and say, why," he recited solemnly at the close of his speeches to young audiences from coast to coast...

...Crowd: "Boo...

...Johnson...

...he can milk a crowd and enlist its participation in his efforts to be either serious or funny...

...Crowd: "Yes...

...and personal secretary Angela Novello...

...How many of you who are in favor of escalating the war are in favor of college deferments...

...Do you want me to tell you...

...On later trips, Kennedy soft-pedaled this kind of stunt in favor of his message and heavy doses of the Kennedy wit...

...Others posed it for him at every turn along the campaign trail, and whether he has answered it conclusively for himself or not, the wheels are in motion for another Kennedy national candidacy...

...In other places, there was no such convenient bridge to the essentials of the Kennedy message, but there always were campuses to visit, and he did...

...Another New Frontier writer, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., is consulted, and brother-in-law Stephen Smith kept his campaign talents honed as coordinator of the futile Frank O'Connor exercise in New York...

...I don't know when that man way up there is going to take me, so I can't—that's not a very satisfactory answer, but it's the best I can do...

...he can handle the hecklers...

...only four of ten Senate candidates won, and only three of ten running for governor...

...Most of his big-name beneficiaries—Frank O'Connor in New York, Brown in California, G. Men-nen Williams in Michigan, Paul Douglas in Illinois, Patrick Lucey in Wisconsin—were beaten...

...Everywhere, local Democrats fell all over themselves trying to shake his hand or, better yet, pose for pictures with him...

...Say yes...

...Brown had been accusing Reagan of threatening to charge tuition at the state's free colleges...

...At Everett Junior College, in Washington, he struck the same theme, telling the students they had an obligation to make the world a better place for the generation after them...

...Crowd: "Yes...

...It does not really matter who is turning them...

...The remark indicated his willingness to prod as well as court the next generation...

...Though newsmen in the group had various opinions on the relative importance of the remark about Ky, they unanimously cringed at this characterization...

...Kennedy grabbed the controversy and rode it hard, praising California parents for giving their children a quality, free college education and painting Reagan as a man who would restrict college to rich kids...

...All those people were just sitting around anyway," says Alinsky...

...More important, it demonstrated a relatively new and formidable side of him that also is obscured by the Kennedy magic...

...Hands went up, and then many were sheepishly withdrawn as they caught on to the let's-escalate-with-non-students hook on which he was impaling them...

...He was aided not only by the fact that he is closer to the dissatisfied young in years and appearance than his brother was in 1960 but also by the empathy gap between American youth and President Johnson...

...All Gandhi did was say to them, 'Sit over here.'" Kennedy, seeing the dissatisfaction and restlessness of growing numbers of young Americans, is striving simply to harness it for the greater glory of the country, of mankind, and, certainly, of RFK...

...The line is a slightly modified quotation from Shaw's Back to Methuselah that President Kennedy used in addressing the Irish Parliament in 1963, but Bobby Kennedy built on it so that it came off as a kind of personal call to arms from him to the generation that before long will be swinging national elections...

...Almost always, he would comment or be asked about the draft, observing that he thought college deferment unfair to those young men who were not financially able to go to college but who also were trying to make a good start in life...

...When Kennedy went into California on behalf of Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, he eschewed the issues of extremism and inexperience that Brown had been emphasizing ineffectively against Republican Ronald Reagan and focused instead on education...

...in an electioneering situation he can lay it on unabashedly in a purely partisan speech for a troubled Democrat...

...But all this amounted to mere gossip for the Press Club bar...

...It is organization-building in its most natural, least pressurized form...

...Gandhi, he says, did not so much inspire a profound political weapon with his passive resistance strategy as he made full use of what he had...

...Off the stump, he often observes that one-half of the country is under age twenty-five and forty per cent were born after World War II, and that in a world in which young people are striving for change abroad, it is only natural that there be dissatisfaction, dissent, and ferment among the young at home...

...Local politicians, as always, are concerned first of all with their own problems and ambitions, and Kennedy everywhere displayed the required awareness of this fact...

...Robert F. Kennedy: the Making of an Electorate by JULES WITCOVER A s Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, the new pied piper of politics, tripped through twenty-one states this fall ostensibly in behalf of Democratic candidates, the tune he used to lure the voters of today and tomorrow progressed from a simple Re-member-the-New-Frontier ditty to a full-blown siren song of a brave new, and, of course, young world to come...

...Nobody's here, so I've seized control...

...At Sacramento City College, when a fan greeted him with "Kennedy for President," he waited out the wild applause and cheers and then said: "Well, I'm pleased to come here and laccept your nomination...

...He was hissed for the response...

...At the same Sacramento rally, he was asked to give "some assurance that you will run for President in 1972...

...For most of the screaming, pushing crowds that turned out for him, the basic 1960 exhortation to get the country moving again, plus the opportunity to see a Kennedy in the flesh and maybe touch him, probably would have been enough...

...No one could understand why he would want to go along to a place where he was not running...

...somebody else, older and squarer, might not have...

...But most of the winners were in the House races (forty-two of sixty-two districts visited...

...they are turning, and much of the electorate, from every readable sign, regrets only that they are not spinning fast enough and that the train may have six years to run before it reaches the promised land...

...To the reporter, one of the most conscientious and level-headed in the Washington press corps, Kennedy replied: "None, unless you sensationalize it...

...he has the Kennedy self-deprecating wit...

...It is not necessary to have local leaders and candidates sign on the dotted line for RFK in 1972, or whenever...

...Crowd: "Yes...

...However, there's one person I want to make sure you don't tell...

...a reporter asked an ecstatic teen-age girl at the Portland, Oregon, airport...

...But in the context of his own ambitions and of national base-building, how his beneficiaries fared is almost beside the point...

...Democrats he hardly knew he painted as chief architects of the Great Society...

...A reporter at the impromptu press conference asked Kennedy what effect his observations on Ky would have on the Manila Conference...

...It might shock you...

...Others were not but wish they had been, and intend to be the next time around...

...The results obviously showed Kennedy to be no exception to the rule that political appeal seldom is broadly transferable...

...It was, to the crowd hanging on every word, plenty good enough...

...Kennedy: "Are you sure...

...A scriptwriter could have written the halting answer and Jimmy Stewart—or possibly even Ronald Reagan—could have delivered it: "Oh . . . Well, I . . . just quite frankly don't know what the future brings...

...His position, in favor of a lottery, got mixed reactions but he stuck to it, knowing enough about how the young think to realize he had more to lose by temporizing with them than in taking a flat position against them...

...Bobby's own cool relationship toward President Johnson, and his penchant for taking stands just enough outside the Johnson Administration orbit to suggest a challenge, is money in the bank with these kids...

...Crowd: "Boo...

...Others are on call...

...You can use your enormous privilege and opportunity to seek purely private pleasure and gain...

...But he got away with it...

...As the probably apocryphal story goes, the then Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts, strolled into the Senate one afternoon, looked around, saw Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Stuart Symington, and Barry Goldwater, reflected for a moment and observed to himself: "Why not me...

...Kennedy, in fact, had been given a golden opportunity earlier to knife the President and he had flatly refused...

...When he started his politicking this fall, Kennedy liked to engage in an exceedingly "cute," even childish guessing game with his young audiences...

...In a question-and-answer session before a more than usually docile student-faculty crowd at Berkeley, he got himself into a temporary flap by seeming to some reporters to be undercutting President Johnson on the eve of the Manila Conference...

...advance man Jerry Bruno...