Memories of A Historic Ride

By Hays Gorey Senior Correspondent Hays Gorey covered the 1968 Kennedy campaign for TIME. Here he remembers the passion and tragedy of those 80 days.

In retrospect, the crusade is what it was in prospect: the most exciting, intimate and high-stakes presidential campaign of modern times. In 1968 the nation was hopelessly fractious. Besieged by opposition to a war not wanted and not understood, Lyndon Johnson was more a prisoner than a President, hostage to his Texas-macho aversion to becoming the "first American President to lose a war." The brother of his martyred predecessor, whose policies had mired the nation in the mess in the first place, wanted Johnson's job and an end to the war. So did Clean Gene McCarthy, who had demonstrated in New Hampshire that L.B.J. could be had. Bobby Kennedy at last agreed that Johnson might be unseated, but he decided it would be by him, if anyone.

So Bobby began to blaze a trail of righteousness. Or he simply elevated his vaunted ruthlessness to new heights, depending on whom you asked. Either way, history was being shaped. No journalist could resist going along for the ride. . It was to be a short one, just long enough for a candidate to grow and change before the nation's eyes. And then an assassin took history into his own hands. Just as the world was beginning to know him, Bobby Kennedy left it.

For months, in private, off-the-record talks in his Senate office, Kennedy had told me he would not, could not challenge Lyndon Johnson. The bosses who then controlled the Democratic Party would destroy him, for now and the future. Yes, the war was all wrong and Johnson was a disaster. But no, Bobby would not run.

Now, suddenly he was running. "After all the times we talked," he said ruefully, throwing his slight yet muscular arm around my shoulder. Already Eugene McCarthy, with much less to risk, had had the courage to risk it. He had exposed Johnson's soft underbelly, and now Kennedy was motioning to him to stand aside. Kennedy, who had refused to fracture the party, had split the antiwar movement. There was grumbling across the land and throughout the hastily chartered campaign plane.

Whether we thought him ruthless or saintly (yes, the pendulum swung that widely) didn't really matter. Once in the race, Bobby Kennedy was the story. We launched what was to become a blur of flights, motorcades, voters pawing candidate, and motels for five, occasionally six, hours a night. First it was in Kansas, where Alf Landon gave him a surprisingly warm introduction. Then on to Tennessee. Crowds were huge, no surprise considering Bobby's celebrity. But they were also friendly. We even went to Alabama, George Wallace country, then to Indiana, where, just before the deadline, Kennedy officially entered the Indiana primary.

It was hectic. The driven candidate campaigned 15 hours a day, sometimes more. No one could send out laundry. We weren't in one place long enough for it to come back. The men bought wash-and-wear shirts and charged them to their expense accounts. Access to the candidate was total. There was no Secret Service. Staff and press, candidate and wife -- and dog -- intermingled.

The lack of security was appalling, but we had no time to think about that at first. On the ground, Bobby rode in a white convertible with only Bill Barry, a gentle giant, to protect him. Everywhere the young and not-so-young tried to touch him. He lost a pair of cufflinks a day; occasionally a shoe. One night I returned late to the "Mother Inn" in Indianapolis, so called because we stayed in it so often. Bobby, Ethel, several aides and a few reporters were in the lobby. "Had your dinner yet?" Bobby asked. "At 1 o'clock in the morning?" I gasped. "Hasn't everybody?" "Join us," the candidate suggested, and for two hours we ate and drank and talked, mainly talked. Loudon Wainwright, the LIFE columnist, was there, fully prepared to hate Bobby. But when Kennedy spoke movingly of the hurt that creeps into black children's eyes when they reach twelve or 13 years of age and sense that they are trapped, Wainwright wilted.

At some point it sank in on most of us that there was something real and good and decent about the candidate. Yet we had to regard his every move as suspect or we weren't being good reporters. We zeroed in on his every lapse into what we called the bad Bobby. In Los Angeles, Kennedy delivered an uncharacteristically bitter personal attack on Lyndon Johnson, accusing the President of "calling upon the darker impulses of the American spirit." On the plane it was whispered that Adam Walinsky had written the offending passage and that the candidate was furious. This simply triggered another round of "bad Bobby" stories: the campaign was never that eager to credit Walinsky when he wrote beautiful prose for the candidate, which he did more often than not. Besides, what did it matter who wrote it? Kennedy said it. Dick Harwood wrote a tough story for the Washington Post, and Ethel, walking down the aisle of the plane, hit him on the head with a rolled-up newspaper. Playfully. Sort of.

The "good Bobby" was more often in evidence. At Purdue University, unable to move the pro-McCarthy crowd, he tossed away his text and spoke eloquently of the senseless war and why it had to end; of all there was to do if the blacks, Hispanics, farm workers, Indians and blue-collar workers were to share more fully in the bounties that Purdue students were taking for granted. The student body rose as one and roared its approval.

His wit, hidden while he played the heavy for his brother and then buried under his grief after J.F.K.'s death, emerged in the campaign. He had been sick, he would say, and his Senate colleagues adopted a resolution wishing him a speedy recovery. "The vote," he would add dryly, "was 43 to 40." This father of ten would ask dairy farmers if any other candidate had contributed more to their well-being. In Nebraska, wind blew a tiny sheet of yellow paper off the rostrum. Kennedy lunged for it, crying "That's my entire farm program."

He did not pander. He could not dissemble. You knew what he liked and didn't like. He got to the bottom line quickly. At Ball State, in Indiana, a burly student said that if he had been in charge, the U.S. would have sent ships and troops to rescue a Navy vessel seized by North Koreans. "It's not too late to enlist," Bobby noted, bringing down the house. To poor whites in Appalachia who said they had nothing to do: "You could remove those wrecked cars from the sides of the road." To black audiences he could speak of law-and-order. When Richard Nixon used the phrase, it was regarded as code for racism.

No one could be indifferent to him. The people who came to support him saw him as a way to escape the frustrations of their lives. They wanted a fighter, someone willing to take a swing, to challenge old assumptions. These people were often at odds with one another: black against poor white, steel-mill hand against welfare recipient. Bobby Kennedy was all they had in common.

Johnson wisely withdrew from the race. Vice President Hubert Humphrey became his surrogate. Martin Luther King was slain, and American cities, including the nation's capital, went up in smoke. The war was nowhere near its end, but the hope and promise -- and hatred -- that Bobby Kennedy engendered were.

His fatalism hastened his undoing. We talked to him about how exposed he was -- the open car, people grasping for him. He was aware. But he knew no other way to campaign. He had to go to the people. "If someone out there wants to get me badly enough, he will," Bobby mused one night on the plane.

In San Francisco's Chinatown the day before the California primary, someone set off some firecrackers. Ethel froze. They could have been bullets. That night Bobby campaigned in San Diego, waving and being grabbed, as usual. It was an eerie scene -- all blackness except for Bobby's convertible, swathed in floodlight. "This is madness," someone said. "Some nut with a gun could climb one of these trees and it would be all over."

June 4, primary day, was dismal in Los Angeles. The air was dank and oppressive, the sky cloudy. Gloom was pervasive. That night, though, Bobby was cheerful. Early returns from California were heartening. George McGovern kept calling to report that Kennedy was sweeping South Dakota, a nearly all-white, heavily Protestant state the experts said was Humphrey country. The candidate's suite was a madhouse -- kids, relatives, hangers-on, aides, $ politicians, a few reporters. About 11:30, Bobby went down to claim victory in the California primary. The contest was far from over, but this triumph would propel him powerfully toward the nomination. Dick Drayne, a press aide, circled the room, rounding up the traveling reporters Bobby wanted to talk to immediately following the speech. He would pass through the hotel kitchen to a makeshift pressroom.

He was about 20 feet behind us when we heard the sound. It was the same pop- pop-pop we had heard in San Francisco. But this time it wasn't firecrackers.