The Worst Week

Speaking somberly, slowly, to a nationwide audience that night, Johnson recalled how the country had unified behind the presidency when JFK was shot in 1963. With the country now divided by distrust and suspicion, this was the wrong time, LBJ reasoned, for the president to plunge into partisan politics. "Accordingly," he concluded, "I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president."

"You're kidding," Robert Kennedy said when he heard the news as he landed at La Guardia Airport that night. On the way into Manhattan, he was silent, lost in thought. "I wonder if he would have done this if I hadn't come in," he finally said. At his apartment at the U.N. Plaza, he glared at his boisterous aides when their revelry drowned out the sound of the TV news. RFK said he didn't want to hear any champagne corks popping, so his wife, Ethel, brought out the Scotch instead. Ethel, at least, was in a buoyant mood about LBJ's decision not to run again. "Well, he didn't deserve to be president anyways," she remarked. Ethel Kennedy gave her anxious husband what he most craved, unquestioning loyalty and love. Her husband could be a stiff-necked moralist. But he was also a brooder, who kept tattered copies of the Greeks and Shakespeare in his pocket, and he was well acquainted with the darker shades of life.

Kennedy had anguished over the decision to run. He was afraid he might tear apart the Democratic Party and be seen as a political opportunist. As President Kennedy's top adviser and all-purpose hatchet man, he had gained a reputation, not undeserved, for "ruthlessness." He was sure to be criticized as a power-grabber vainly seeking to restore Camelot. More deeply, he wondered if he could ever live up to his brother Jack—and whether he might suffer the same fate. He had moped and sulked and hated those signs held up by students who wanted him to run: RFK: HAWK, DOVE—OR CHICKEN? read one. Robert Kennedy could not abide being called a coward.

His entry into the presidential race had loosed a riot of popular emotion. Traveling around the country in late March, he had been mobbed. KISS ME BOBBY read the student placards in Kansas. "The crowds were savage," recalled John Barlow Martin, an adviser. "They pulled his cuff links off, tore his clothes, tore ours. In bigger towns, with bigger crowds, it was frightening." In Michigan, a housewife leaned into Kennedy's car and calmly removed his shoe, which she displayed to the reporters as a trophy of war. Kennedy's bodyguard, Bill Barry, hung on to Kennedy as the motorcade inched through the tumult. "Not so tight," Kennedy cried out. "You're going to break my back." At the podium, Kennedy's hands shook; his voice was reedy and often mournful, or hot and petulant. But it didn't matter. Poor whites and poor blacks, rarely political allies, turned out for him. They could hear, beneath the high-flown rhetoric Kennedy's polished speechwriters handed him, his own vulnerability and pain and genuine empathy. It gave them—some of them, anyway—hope.

Kennedy was a practical politician. He asked to have a meeting with President Johnson—to thank him and praise him, but really to try to get a feel for how hard Johnson would work against him. LBJ's initial reaction was, "I won't bother answering that grandstanding little runt," but on April 3, the abdicating king and his dreaded usurper met at the White House. "I am no kingmaker," LBJ told Kennedy, "and I don't want to be." Kennedy said to Johnson, "You are a brave and dedicated man." Speaking in a near whisper, Kennedy seemed to choke on the words and had to awkwardly repeat them. Johnson was gracious, if noncommittal, but Kennedy was not fooled. Johnson did not immediately endorse his vice president, Hubert Humphrey. But the president lost no time working against RFK. A couple of hours after he had met with him, LBJ greeted Senator McCarthy, who had also stopped by the Oval Office to gauge the president's intentions. When Kennedy's name came up, Johnson said nothing. Then he drew the side of his hand across his throat, in a slashing motion.

While Robert Kennedy was meeting with Johnson at the White House, Martin Luther King Jr. was sitting on a plane at Atlanta's Hartsfield airport while dogs sniffed for a bomb. The threat was aimed at King. The civil-rights leader was on his way back to Memphis to rally striking sanitation workers. "Your airline brought Martin Luther King to Memphis, and when he comes again a bomb will go off, and he will be assassinated," was the message left by an anonymous caller to Eastern Airlines. The pilot of the flight to Memphis helpfully told those onboard they were being held up by a bomb threat to their fellow passenger, Dr. King.