Chapter Three - Sympathy For The Devil
With the entry of Bobby Kennedy into the Democratic primaries, the anti-war vote was split between two camps. Kennedy faced a harsh initial backlash, resurrecting accusations of political ruthlessness that had haunted him since the 1950s. However, his decision to finally enter the race prompted many of the few professional political operators that McCarthy had to defect, leaving his already disorganized campaign in even further disarray. Most notably, Allard Lowenstein, the driving force behind the Dump Johnson Movement, drifted into Kennedy's orbit as a political advisor, despite officially still supporting McCarthy. On top of that, McCarthy dropped like a stone in the polls, as Kennedy began absorbing his default support with anti-war voters. But, while Kennedy had the reputation of being Johnson's nemesis, McCarthy was the one who was better positioned to challenge him in the primaries; due to Kennedy's late entry and Johnson's Rose Garden strategy, McCarthy would be the only candidate to appear on the ballot in the Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts primaries. For the first time in his campaign, McCarthy explicitly stated that he was running to be the Democratic nominee, to unseat Johnson at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago, and become President of the United States.
Sensing the danger of two anti-war candidates running against each other, Richard Goodwin and Blair Clark tried to unify the two camps. Kennedy’s entry had been a double-edged sword in that it had split the base, but that it brought significantly more people over to an anti-war position by virtue of the Kennedy mystique alone. A plan was drawn up where the two anti-war candidates would run in half of the primaries each, with the other’s support. They would then hold a winner-take-all competition in the California primary, where the loser would drop out and endorse the winner. There was also talk of sweetening the pot for McCarthy by promising him the position of Secretary of State if Kennedy were to win. Ted Kennedy was recruited by the collaborators to rendezvous in Wisconsin with McCarthy at the Green Bay, Wisconsin hotel in which he was staying. Those in McCarthy’s closest circle – his family and Senate aide Jerry Eller – were outraged that Goodwin and Clark (as well as other collaborators, such as campaign coordinator Curtis Gans, assistant campaign manager Jessica Tuchman, and youth coordinator Sam Brown) would be working with the Kennedys on anything, and initially blocked them from meeting with McCarthy, despite him having previously agreed to it. Losing his patience with Abigail, Clark barged past her into the hotel. McCarthy’s daughter Mary stopped him, while also convincing her father to go through with the meeting with Ted. After some chilly small talk, Ted began to push forward, but before he could even open the suitcase with the details of the plan, McCarthy waved him off. Instead, he suggested that Bobby go into the primaries he had not yet entered in Florida, West Virginia, and Louisiana [1], and that after he had successfully toppled Johnson and was elected president, Bobby could run in 1972. “I only want one term. Then Bobby can take over.” Otherwise, “we need no help.” As the disappointed Ted Kennedy left to be harassed by the press outside, McCarthy bitterly remarked, despite refusing to listen to the plan, “That’s the way they are. When it comes down to it they never offer anything real. [2]”
Meanwhile, various factions of the New Left were making their own plans for the Democratic Convention. Broader plans to hold protests in Chicago were frustrated by more moderate anti-war activists, were concerned that a protest would hurt the political chances of McCarthy and Kennedy at the convention. This left only the more radical groups willing to organize a protest in Chicago. Meeting over the weekend of March 23-24 in Lake Villa, Illinois, the revolutionary Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the absurdist Youth International Party (the Yippies), revolutionary pacifist activists from the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the Mobe), and various Black Power and smaller New Left groups came together, with the meeting presided over by Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, and Dave Dellinger, the former two of SDS, and the latter of the Mobe. Hayden and Davis were cagey on whether they were calling for violent protest or not, and while officially denouncing political violence, they described the protests in Chicago as being a, “massive confrontation with our government” and an “attack on the Democratic convention” signalling “the final days of militancy.” The convention voted in favour of a motion to express their opposition to both McCarthy and Kennedy as being part of the bourgeois liberal establishment, before deliberating on their course of action for Chicago [3], with the convention ultimately voting to organize local political action rather than a march on the Windy City. Refusing to accept the results, Hayden waited for those in disagreement to leave, before putting it to a vote again and having the motion rescinded. Those remaining at the convention dispersed without making a plan for Chicago; the Black Power groups decided that protesting in Chicago would not be in their interest, while the Yippies decided they would organize their own protest in Chicago titled the Festival of Life. The Yippies' leaders, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, declared that their main program in Chicago would be a protest to eliminate pay toilets.
Of all the Kennedys, McCarthy got along best with Ted, which was not saying much. The most notable confrontations between the two were over McCarthy's conduct during the vote on the Kennedy Amendment of the Voting Rights Act, and their brief, failed meeting to discuss a possible coalition between McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy during the 1968 Democratic primaries.
Having moved on to Wisconsin, McCarthy began the next step in his campaign.
Always more opposed to the Vietnam War than New Hampshire and neighbouring his home state of Minnesota, Wisconsin had clear advantages in McCarthy's favour. Midge Miller, the third highest ranking member of the CCD after Lowenstein and Gans, had been serving as the state campaign manager for McCarthy, and had prepared everything for his arrival. Goodwin and new recruit Jeremy Larner devised a speechwriting system where they would write a Kennedy-style speech describing a problem followed by three solutions before sending it off to McCarthy, who would then cut it down to a skeletal version and incorporate it into his usual, dry lecture-speeches which would then be mimeographed and sent off to Wisconsin's newspapers [4]. Thirteen thousand canvassers had been assembled – most of whom were students – each with their own regional captain who had broken down the state into canvassing districts. Due to Republicans being over to cross over in the Wisconsin primary, every residence in the state would be able to be canvassed. McCarthy’s efforts were also bolstered by the supporter of Midwest women’s and Catholic groups who he had grown familiar with, frequently through Abigail [5].
Running nearly the same campaign as he had in New Hampshire, McCarthy began to canvass the state with a growing entourage of academics, pundits, journalists, and hangers-on. The most notable of these was the famous poet Robert Lowell, who became his closest confidante on the campaign trail. Appealing to rural farmers, college students, liberal intellectuals, suburban moderates, and business executives concerned with the morality and cost of the war, McCarthy had assembled an unbeatable coalition (at least for Wisconsin); not only was he polling at over sixty percent over Johnson, but pro-McCarthy, anti-war candidates were practically guaranteed to win a spot on the delegation slate with an outright majority of the popular vote, unlike in New Hampshire, where the McCarthy slate only won because of poor planning on the part of the Johnson team.
However, a schism emerged in the McCarthy staff over an incredibly sensitive issue: McCarthy had been intentionally avoiding the ghettos. Despite his staunch support for desegregation and the implementation of the findings of the Kerner Commission to improve the well-being of the black community, McCarthy’s liberalism was steeped in a tradition of individualism that made him reluctant to address racial politics directly. McCarthy considered it demagogic, distasteful, and overly-generalizing to address an entire racial or ethnic group as one voting bloc, and mocked Kennedy’s efforts to appeal to, as McCarthy put it, “twenty-six separate communities to deal with twenty-six varieties of Americans – like twenty-six types of ice cream.” Instead, McCarthy said, he would “address all Americans as individuals.” In practice, this meant that McCarthy frequented black political groups, but avoided black ghettos, in part because of his beliefs, but also for more cynical reasons: McCarthy felt that publicly identifying himself with black voters would hurt him with his white middle class base, and wrote off all black voters as unwinnable due to their loyalty to the Kennedys that he felt was beyond any reason. This resulted in an ultimatum from a faction of his staff with his press secretary, Seymour Hersh, as their spokesman. They demanded that McCarthy canvass the Milwaukee ghetto, or they would leave the campaign. McCarthy refused, and Hersh, along with assistant press secretary, Mary Lou Oates, resigned, along with around two dozens members of his staff. As a tardy reaction, McCarthy made a speech firmly in favour of civil rights shortly after, and went on a walking tour of the Milwaukee ghetto, but only on a winter day when nobody was outside and at a pace that left the press winded.
But, for all that, the Wisconsin primary would be an anti-climax. On March 31, two days before voting day, President Johnson made a public address announcing a bombing halt, imploring North Vietnam to negotiate a peace, and, most importantly of all, that he would not be running for re-election in 1968.
To Johnson’s dismay, the news was received with widespread celebration.
In the aftermath, Wisconsin’s turnout was depressed with many not feeling a need to come out to vote against Johnson after he had already left the race. McCarthy would still win fifty-six percent of the vote, against thirty-five percent for Johnson, and six percent in Kennedy write-ins. Leaving the national press waiting, McCarthy instead did a meandering, long-form interview with a local news channel, limiting his personal coverage, but delighting the Badger State, with a boost in Midwestern polls carrying him to the next primary in Indiana.
However, the primaries were interrupted when the country was rocked by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., sparking a wave of race riots across the country. A rare exception had been in Indianapolis, where Kennedy’s calls for peace while on the campaign trail in the city had soothed tensions that would have turned violent without him. McCarthy had been an acquaintance of King’s, and their wives had been friends, but McCarthy was reluctant to go to King’s funeral. He felt that it would be a political theatre where he would be forced to compete with Kennedy, and he had to be convinced that to not attend would be political suicide. In the end, McCarthy went, but left early, while Kennedy stayed for a march after the funeral to extemporize on stage about King’s legacy. Not wishing to politicize their friendship, Abigail declined offers by Coretta Scott King to be on the airport tarmac as they brought down Dr. King’s body, and further declined to go to the funeral home with her. Instead, she went to the King residence to help prepare dinner for the hundreds of visitors passing through. Among those in the packed house were two Kennedy staffers who did not recognize Abigail, discussing how to best destroy her husband’s campaign.
The relationship between the Kings and the McCarthys was never revealed to the public.
McCarthy at the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. McCarthy believed it was morally reprehensible to take advantage of King's death for political gain; he never discussed the close relationship between their wives, never publicized the fact that King had supported him in the New Hampshire primary, and had to be convinced to attend King's public funeral.
The rest of April represented a transitional phase in the election. Running unopposed, McCarthy won the April 23 primary in Pennsylvania, but the delegate slate remained under the control of the pro-Johnson Pennsylvania Democratic Party leadership. Four days later, Vice President Hubert Humphrey announced his candidacy for president. Having entered too late to submit his name into the primaries, Humphrey would instead be forced to rely on the majority of the states that had delegate slates controlled by the party bosses, rather than appointed through a primary election or a caucus. Running as a ‘safe’ candidate who would continue President Johnson’s policies, Humphrey remained vocally supportive of the Vietnam War, despite his private reservations. Considering Kennedy the greater threat, Humphrey began to surreptitiously fund the McCarthy campaign, and kept a low profile as the primaries continued [7]. This left McCarthy and Kennedy as the two clear challengers for the Democratic nomination, but, with Johnson not running, a bombing halt implemented, and negotiations in progress, the fight between them would become a contest of personalities. With it all said and done, Goodwin finally made his long-expected return to the Kennedy campaign, but tore himself away telling McCarthy that he was the frontrunner; Goodwin was mesmerized by the possibilities of McCarthy as a candidate, and feared that Kennedy’s intensity would scare off voters compared to his coolness, in an election year where the public was demanding stability.
Meanwhile, Richard Nixon continued to sweep the Republican primaries, virtually unchallenged, and virtually unnoticed.
Kennedy and McCarthy were to have their first head-to-head contest in Indiana. Going into the state, things seemed to be in McCarthy’s favour. Kennedy was considered too liberal, too young, and too close to black people, while McCarthy’s non-existent reputation allowed people to project on to him, and he had months more ground game. Likewise, Eugene Pulliam, the owner of several major newspapers in the state, had a personal vendetta against Kennedy, and vilified him in the press. On top of all that, Indiana’s governor, Roger Branigin, was running as a favourite son and stand-in for Humphrey, and the tightly controlled state party was firmly behind him. Changing tactics, Kennedy became running a law and order campaign in the state, emphasizing his past as the country’s chief law enforcement officer, and dressing, speaking, and generally behaving in a more conservative style. While he kept the same policy positions, his presentation and the policies he spoke most about became dramatically different. For Indiana, Bobby turned himself into Robert.
As for McCarthy, he was failing to adapt to a campaign where he was not the only candidate on the ballot; a new press secretary, Philip Murphy, had been chosen, by the press team was in disarray after Hersh and Oates’ departure; the Indiana campaign manager, Jim Bogle, felt marginalized by Gans, who was trying to wrest total control of the state operation away from the locals and into the national headquarters; no one could agree on whether to use McCarthy’s old Minnesota ad firm or the campaign firm from New York, and tapes were frequently lost in the shuffle, leaving dead air in time slots the campaign had bought; the encounter in Green Bay had created a rivalry in the national headquarters between those willing and unwilling to work with the Kennedys, and, despite the pleas of his advisors and staff, it was nearly impossible to get McCarthy to sit down for a meeting and approve of a campaign strategy. Because of the national headquarters rivalry, Eller became increasingly protective of McCarthy’s schedule, leaving campaign stops dysfunctional and poorly attended, with McCarthy once giving a full stump speech to three Hoosiers in a shed – the same stump speech he had been using since before New Hampshire. Failing to tailor his presentation to a crowd that was more hawkish and conservative than even New Hampshire, McCarthy continued to target the Vietnam War despite Johnson no longer being in the race, called for the firing of the popular Director of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover without explaining why, and raised eyebrows by saying he would pay the ransom of the
USS Pueblo without a fuss. McCarthy’s voting record came back to haunt him, with Kennedy sending out attack ads criticizing his vote against the poll tax amendment of the Civil Rights Act and presenting other positions of his mean to shake his young liberal core supporters. McCarthy’s volunteers, the majority of whom remained college students, became convinced that any and all attacks against their man were smears, once McCarthy revealed the context of his vote against the poll tax amendment, but the ad stayed in circulation. By the time of the primary on May 14, Kennedy had pulled from behind to win the primary with forty-two percent of the vote, as well as winning nearly all of Indiana's delegates . Branigan had placed second with a little under thirty-one percent, while McCarthy placed third with twenty-seven percent. While McCarthy had won the suburbs and college towns, Kennedy won every major city with the help of a crushing eighty-five percent of the black vote [8]. The same night, Kennedy won in the Washington D.C. primary, which McCarthy had not entered. In Ohio, favourite son Stephen Young, an anti-war moderate who was nonetheless supporting Humphrey, won unopposed. When McCarthy declared in a televised speech that winning was not everything. Kennedy, watching from his hotel room, scoffed at the sentiment: “that’s not what they taught me growing up.”
However, despite his clear victory, there was a feeling still nagging at Kennedy, that McCarthy’s volunteers were more informed, more politically active, and more dedicated than his volunteers. As he headed to the Indianapolis airport diner (the only restaurant open after 1:00AM), he bumped into two McCarthy student volunteers who had missed their flights, Pat Sylvester and Taylor Branch. Asking them to join him for a meal, Kennedy tried to understand why anyone would support a lazy, uninspiring, political dilettante like McCarthy who barely wanted to be president, with Sylvester shooting back against Kennedy’s spotty record on the Vietnam War and his belated entry into the race. The more he tried to convince them, the more they dug in. After talking for over an hour, the three parted ways on good terms, but his failure to convince them to abandon McCarthy was something Kennedy would keep in the back of his mind for the rest of his life.
McCarthy’s campaign was in equal disarray in the next primary in Nebraska. While the state’s demographics were even more in his favour, being more rural, less black, and closer to Minnesota, his amateur operation buckled under Kennedy’s well-organized efforts. The small but enthusiastic efforts of McCarthy’s Nebraska manager, Andrew Robinson, were hopelessly overwhelmed. Kennedy won an outright majority with close to fifty-two percent of the vote, next to thirty-one for McCarthy, with write-ins for Humphrey and Johnson making up the rest. On the same night, in West Virginia, no candidate had entered, and unpledged delegates won the entirety of the vote.
It was becoming more and more clear that McCarthy was not running out of an overwhelming desire to be president, or out of a passion for the issues. Rather, he felt that he had a solemn, moral duty to oppose the Vietnam War, and had been reluctantly pressganged into the leadership of the anti-war movement, rather than left to his hopeless one-man crusade against injustice. But, while McCarthy would rather lose and be right than win and be wrong, he would rather win and be wrong than lose to Bobby Kennedy.
McCarthy campaigns in Indiana. While McCarthy drew large audiences in college towns, poor planning resulted in a hectic schedule and small crowds.
Heading for disaster on the West Coast in the Oregon and California primaries, a shake-up occurred in the McCarthy campaign to bring in some of the professionalism it had long lacked. A group of McCarthy’s long-time friends involved in liberal lobbying held an intervention to force him to define the roles and responsibilities in the campaign. The group consisted of Tom Finney, a member of Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford’s law firm and a former CIA agent, Maurice Rosenblatt, a lobbyist for the Committee for a More Effective Congress, Larry Merthan, another lobbyist, John Safer, a real estate executive and the campaign’s one-time finance chairman, and Thomas McCoy, another former CIA agent. Finney was chosen to replace Gans as the national coordinator, resulting in him quitting from the campaign in protest, only to return after being offered co-chairmanship of the California campaign along with its current chair, Gerry Hill. Despite being well-equipped to oversee the Oregon and California primaries, Finney’s appointment sparked a civil war in the national headquarters in Washington D.C., which McCarthy had still yet to set foot in. The title of Chief of Staff constantly alternated between Clark, Finney, and Eller, in office coup and counter-coup, with Clark remaking that the office had more leadership changes than South Vietnam. The majority of the finances from the Wall Street Stevensonians was still unaccounted for, and the entire nationwide effort remained carried on the momentum of enthusiasm, goodwill, and competent state and local organization.
Fortunately for McCarthy, Oregon was well organized.
One of the first states to have a solid McCarthy infrastructure, the Oregon operation was run by Howard Morgan, the former chairman of the Oregon Democratic Party state committee. Morgan was considered an excellent campaign manager who was frequently credited with breaking the Republicans’ one-party status in the state, and was an expert at smoothing over intraparty conflict. Working alongside Blain Whipple and Arthur Herzog, the other Oregon co-managers, Morgan was able to maximize McCarthy’s synergy with his key demographic: middle class, well-educated, suburban white voters. Sensing the danger of total defeat if he lost Oregon, McCarthy barnstormed the college towns and suburbs and redefined his campaign from the vague, moralistic, intellectual, anti-Vietnam position of the early primaries. “New Politics” became the new catchphrase, defined by a rejection of
all Cold War foreign policy. He contented that Johnson was not the cause of the Vietnam War, but rather he had been adhering to an ideological orthodoxy stretching back to the Second World War that made it inevitable. McCarthy laid these problems at the feet of the Kennedys and their ‘counterinsurgency’ policy, that had been supported by both Jack and Bobby, where America, according to McCarthy, “still set for itself a moral mission in which we took upon ourselves the duty to judge the political systems of other nations and to alter them if we found them wanting.” Because both Democrats and Republicans had accepted this, it, “escaped any sustained and vigorous public judgement.” In Oregon, McCarthy asked the American people to, “pass harsh judgement on obsolete dogmas and irresponsible institutions” by electing him. Likewise, he linked systematic failure to urban poverty and segregation, and called for a policy of rapid desegregation through widespread affordable housing projects and expanding public transportation from the ghettos and inner cities out to the suburbs. Ironically, the candidate most philosophically committed to America’s institutions was calling for their complete overhaul. Further pressing the attack in his new populist style, McCarthy criticized Kennedy for his vacillation on his opposition to the war, his approval of FBI wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr., and mocking him as childish by joking he promised “to hold his breath unless the people of Oregon voted for him.” Unlike in the early primaries where he tried to be as non-descript as possible, in a campaign stop in the Cow Palace in San Francisco, McCarthy smiled and waved as he marched down the centre aisle up to the podium. Once up there, McCarthy dressed down both Kennedy and Humphrey; he tied them together by pointing out that Kennedy had yet to distance himself from Secretary of State Dean Rusk and former Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, both initially appointed to the cabinet by Jack Kennedy, and both instrumental in prosecuting the Vietnam War [9]. McCarthy also got additional support from the Teamsters, who had never forgiven Kennedy for going after their boss, Jimmy Hoffa, during his days as attorney general. Despite all this, McCarthy did not entirely abandon his old habits, and once left a reporter waiting on him for an interview while he wrote a poem about wolverines in the other room.
Meanwhile in the Kennedy camp, they were the ones crippled by internal conflict for once. Representative Edith Green had offered to serve as Kennedy’s campaign manager in the state, but she was combative against efforts by Kennedy’s national team to take control of her operation. McCarthy lampooned the power struggle in the press by comparing Kennedy’s senior advisors to the cigar smoking, backroom dealers that he said he was fighting. Campaigning through the state, Kennedy failed to gain traction, lamenting that, “This state is like one giant suburb. Let’s face it, I appeal best to people who have problems.” The death blow for Kennedy’s efforts in Oregon came when he happened to be on tour at a park near Portland when McCarthy coincidentally arrived at the same time with a bus full of press. Kennedy had been dodging any encounter with McCarthy, and refused to answer the calls for a debate. Looking to avoid a confrontation, Kennedy ran for his car while McCarthy’s speechwriter Jeremy Larner chased after him. The press arrived just in time to get pictures of Kennedy driving off with a cloud of dust behind him.
On May 28th, McCarthy won his first contested primary, and Bobby became the first Kennedy to lose an election, ever. Oregon delivered forty-four percent of the vote for the man from Minnesota, while Kennedy trailed at thirty-eight. A stunned Kennedy acknowledged his loss in a congratulatory telegram to McCarthy (a courtesy he had never received from the other candidate) and by saying publicly it was, “a serious blow… I’ve lost. I’m not one of those who think that coming in second or third is winning.” When asked what he meant for his campaign, Kennedy replied, “I would say it is not helpful.”
Few noticed that, on the same night, McCarthy lost in Florida to favourite son George Smathers.
Making waves: By winning the Oregon primary, McCarthy caused the first loss for a Kennedy in any election ever, destroying the legendary Kennedy invincibility.
Ironically, the primaries had come down to a final confrontation in California, though with the intense animosity that Goodwin and Clark had been looking to avoid. Looking to raise the stakes and trusting his political instincts, Kennedy declared that he would withdraw his candidacy if he lost the California primary, and that he would be participating in the long-avoided debate with McCarthy. Kennedy’s advisors were nervous. Even with the loss in Oregon, Kennedy was in the lead in California, and McCarthy had much more to gain in exposure than Kennedy if a debate were held. Not only that, but Bobby never came off as well on television as Jack; the energy he gave off was well-received by a crowd or in person, but he seemed fidgety and nervous on television. McCarthy seemed a composed, cool professional on television, making steady, frequent eye contact with the camera, and had grown comfortable with the medium after making more frequent use of it as the primaries went on. Before the deal could be finalized, Kennedy’s team stipulated specific conditions for Kennedy’s participation, including that there would be no live audience, and would instead take a more round-table discussion format moderated by a panel of reporters.
Adapting to McCarthy’s New Politics, Kennedy began to emphasize his own themes of restoration, moderation, and technocratic realism. He accepted America’s institutions as being sound as they were, and blamed Johnson and only Johnson for the nation’s problems. Rather than calling for a swift negotiation process followed by a prompt American withdrawal like McCarthy, Kennedy began talking of a more gradual withdrawal – but a withdrawal nonetheless – that would leave South Vietnam able to defend itself. Pointing to his work with the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, Kennedy believed the best way to go about racial integration would be through local community involvement and the investment of private capital into ghettos. Kennedy thought that once black Americans had greater economic power, integration would naturally follow, and he dismissed McCarthy’s proposed programs as being bloated, naïve, and overly reliant on the government. It was one of the paradoxes of 1968 that racial minorities and the lower class supported Kennedy’s program of gradual integration and private initiative, while the white middle class supported McCarthy’s program of rapid integration and broad government spending.
Instead of playing it safe like he had in Indiana, Nebraska, and Oregon, Bobby doubled down on his Bobby-ness: Campaign stops in Mexican American, black, and poor white communities were prioritized, while meetings with delegates, union bosses, and other power brokers were delayed or cancelled. Kennedy waved from the back of an open-topped convertible as it drove through city streets, seeming to tempt fate with memories of Dallas. Kennedy’s state team, led by Speaker of the California State Assembly Jesse Unruh, was put under the tight control of the national team; they did not want a repeat of Oregon, where internal disagreements had kneecapped their efficiency. The national team found the Unruh and his people had failed to mobilize or register to vote the black and Mexican American voters who could make all the difference in the election, and began a massive registration drive in the major cities, white working class neighbourhoods, and majority-Latino communities in the Central Valley region [10]. This strategy began to work almost too well, as Kennedy’s team started to worry that his association with racial minorities would start to put off white voters. Unruh reported that hawkish Democrats who would otherwise vote for Humphrey’s state surrogate, Attorney General of California Thomas Lynch, were drifting into the McCarthy camp in a white backlash against Kennedy’s minority supporters, nearly faster than the accelerating rate that McCarthy was losing his furthest left supporters to Kennedy.
While McCarthy’s college corps of volunteers had originally swamped California with their sheer numbers, the tide had begun to turn with the tidal wave arrival of Kennedy press releases, policy statements, and, most of all, money, into the state. While McCarthy had Paul Newman and Dustin Hoffman, as well as folksy performers like Simon and Garfunkel, Kennedy benefited from a star-studded cast of celebrity endorsements. Likewise, Kennedy took advantage of the internal divisions in the campaign and discontent with Gans’ replacement with Finney, who many within the McCarthy campaign was too much of a political insider and too chummy with members of the Johnson Administration. Andrew Robinson, McCarthy’s Nebraska manager, defected to Kennedy, as did the executive director of his national finance committee, and one of his top committee leaders in northern California. Hoping to stop Kennedy from preventing his ascension to the presidential nomination, Humphrey upped his surreptitious support for McCarthy by having surrogates pay donate more to his campaign and cover the costs for his advertisements. While the full details were not clear to the public, what was clear was that McCarthy and the Humphrey-Lynch forces were tacitly cooperating in an informal Stop Kennedy operation, in what Kennedy’s team described in the media as the collapse of, “The moral basis of McCarthy’s candidacy… by an increasingly open and cynical coalition of McCarthy and Humphrey forces… especially deplorable coming from a candidate whose public posture has been ‘holier than thou.’” Despite this, McCarthy was greeted like a messiah in every college town; the honoured prophet who would no longer be denied. His preference towards local radio and television interviews over canvassing and glad-handing gave him nearly equal air time to Kennedy in the huge state, despite putting in much fewer hours and much less work, and his support from middle class suburbanites, independents, and cross-over Republicans continued to trend upward. Overall, Kennedy was receiving more coverage, but McCarthy was receiving more positive coverage.
As Kennedy engaged in an eye-bulging, heart-pounding, furious mad dash to the finish line, McCarthy was moseying his way there, shrugging off mass defections by his middle management like they were nothing.
Mere days away until the primary, and polls were inconclusive.
Both candidates headed to San Francisco for the June 1st debate. Both candidates were staying at the Fairmont Hotel.
Bobby prepared with the team that had prepped Jack Kennedy for his famous 1960 debate against Nixon, but he seemed distracted, frequently taking long pauses to look out the window. Cutting things short, he skipped a meeting with the local heads of the United Auto Workers that had been put together at great expense, in order to go shake hands down at Fisherman’s Wharf. Once back, rather than going over his notes again before the debate, he decided to take a nap instead.
Meanwhile, McCarthy was in his hotel room with Finney. He had barely looked at the booklet his speechwriters had put together on the likely lines of attack that Kennedy would use against him, and was instead waiting for his friend Robert Lowell so that they could do a poetry reading. Before Lowell could arrive, Finney convinced McCarthy to check out of the Fairmont, and instead they would move to the Hilton at Union Square, where he could focus.
Then, just as Tom Finney was about to step in the car with McCarthy, a synapse fired, a jolting thought occurred, a detail that could have been easily overlooked, was not overlooked: after the Fairmont, the Hilton was the second-most likely place to go. Some of the Fairmont staff – the concierge maybe – had probably heard them talking about it as they left the lobby. It would not take much snooping around for someone to figure out that McCarthy was at the Hilton.
Well, let them think he was at the Hilton. They would go to the Stanyan Park Hotel instead [11].
McCarthy and Kennedy sit down for their first and only debate.
The debate was held at Station KGO-TV, on ABC News
Issues and Answers, and moderated by Frank Reynolds, Robert Clark, and William H. Lawrence. McCarthy won the coin toss to determine who would go first. The first question was a simple one: “What would you do at this time that President Johnson is not doing to bring peace in Vietnam?” McCarthy responded with an allusion to the Gavin Plan that America should withdraw its troops to a position of strength, have South Vietnam form a new coalition government that would include the National Liberation Front, permanently halt bombing, and continue negotiations with the North. Leaning into his new populist messaging in his own academic way, he then digressed into French colonial history, before accusing Kennedy of, “playing a prominent role in formulating positions that resulted in disastrous adventures,” by, “taking up the cause of colonialism for the sake of political expediency [12].” Kennedy addressed the accusation, saying, “I was involved in many of the early decisions on Vietnam and I am willing to bear my share of the responsibility, but past error is no excuse for its own perpetuation.” Flipping the accusations back on McCarthy, he pointed out that he had not publicly come out against the war until 1966. He then said, unlike McCarthy, he would not force the South to accept communists into their government before the negotiations had even began, and instead proposed an anti-corruption and land reform push in the current government. He then went on to say that South Vietnamese troops should be stationed at the demilitarized zone instead of Americans, and that search and destroy missions should be ended. McCarthy shot back: “First of all, I did come out against the war in nineteen-hundred sixty-six, and voted to repeal the Tonkin Gulf Resolution – which gave the President the power to fight a war without congressional or constitutional approval – while you voted to allow him to continue to have that power in that same vote. Secondly, I didn’t say I was going to force a coalition government on South Vietnam. I said we should make it clear we are willing to accept that. Now, if the South Vietnamese want to continue to fight, and work out their negotiation that is well and good. But I don’t think there is much point in talking about reform in Saigon or land reform, because we have been asking for that for at least five years and it hasn’t happened [13].”
After that tense exchange, Kennedy was then asked the next question about Johnson’s statement that he would leave all options for bombing North Vietnam on the table. Kennedy cited that Robert McNamara had testified before Congress that the bombings were not dramatically effecting the North’s will to fight, and that the South would have to pick up the slack, but he seemed rattled by McCarthy’s strong start: “If they don’t have that will, no matter how many men we send over there, how many bombs we drop – we’re dropping more now than we dropped in the Second World War – no matter how much we do of that, if they don’t have the will, and the desires themselves, no matter what we do, we-uh, can’t instill that in them. And that’s why I want to m-make it clear if I was President of the United States – and why I was critical back in 1965 because I thought we were making it America’s war, we were militarizing the conflict – that we – that this is a South Vietnamese war, I am opposed to unilaterally with-withdrawing from there, but they have to carry the major burden of this conflict. It can’t be carried by American soldiers [14].” Moving back over to McCarthy, he more or less reiterated the ineffectiveness of the bombing in a much more cogent way, but called into question McNamara’s credibility, considering he had been instrumental in the persecution of the Vietnam War, and ventured that Kennedy’s continued close relationship with McNamara was emblematic of the fact that Kennedy had yet to reject the preconceptions that had led to the Vietnam War, unlike him; his long experience on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had allowed him to see the faults in American policy firsthand, and how to address, making him the candidate best qualified to guarantee, “no more Vietnams.” Kennedy shot back at McCarthy’s increasingly close cooperation with Humphrey, but McCarthy deflected it by pointing he had been the only candidate to have the courage to run against Johnson when no one else would, and, as for Humphrey, “I do not desire to control the actions of other candidates, and I cannot control whether they choose to enter the primaries at an opportunistic moment for them or not [15].”
McCarthy then had to justify an attack ad in the papers released by his campaign, saying that Kennedy had to be held responsible in his role in the Vietnam War and the intervention into the Dominican Republic. McCarthy was caught off guard for the first time, with Kennedy accurately pointing out that he was not even part of the Johnson Administration when it invaded the Dominican Republic. Backpedaling, McCarthy weakly brushed it off by saying that Kennedy was responsible for the “process.” Both candidates then had to address the charge that running an anti-war campaign encouraged the North to delay negotiations in hopes of getting a better deal if either of them were elected. Both candidates answered adequately: McCarthy argued that dissent was essential in a democratic society, and Kennedy argued that the reforms he proposed were necessary for South Vietnam to win the war. Both candidates reaffirmed that they would maintain America’s responsibilities to its allies and elaborated on the point. In particular, Kennedy voiced his support for sending fifty jets in military aide to Israel following the Six Days War of the previous year.
With McCarthy having clearly come off as the better of the two on Vietnam, Kennedy was visibly relieved when the topic shifted to domestic affairs. On the matter of law and order, he started shakily, but seemed to regain confidence as he went through his point-by-point plan: he would increase funds for police departments to deal with riots, but emphasized his relationship with the black and Mexican American communities; he declared that the best way to deal with these problems would be to make in clear that riots and disorder were unacceptable, but that people without hope who rioted out of despair would be provided with jobs and economic opportunity, proposing the government become the employer of last resort. McCarthy seemed less comfortable in domestic policy, and stumbled to his point that the country needed a massive new housing initiative to build a million houses a year in high-employment, new suburban areas across the country, in order to clear out the ghettos, and provide adequate housing and work to all Americans. Kennedy chimed in by talking about the loss of hope in the black community, emphasizing the success of his Bedford Stuyvesant program, and chastised the Johnson Administration for not abiding by the suggestions of the Kerner Commission to address to the root problems of urban rioting. McCarthy agreed that Johnson was not doing enough, and posited that the war was using up all the budget money that could otherwise be used to implement his policies and the recommendations of the Kerner Commission.
After a back in worth where the two candidates largely agreed on the dangers of budget cuts to social programs, McCarthy singled out the slashing cuts to the housing budget that Johnson had enacted. Kennedy then interjected to voice his disagreement with McCarthy’s housing program; Kennedy reiterated his position that improving the conditions in the ghettos through private investment was a better solution than replacing them, with McCarthy countering, “I would say we’ve got to get into the suburbs with this kind of housing. Some of the jobs are in the city and some jobs are being built there, but most of the employment is in the – in the beltline outside of the cities, and I don’t think we ought to perpetuate the ghetto if we can help it, even by putting better houses there for them, or low-cost houses… otherwise we’re adopting a kind of apartheid in this country, a practical apartheid… and it means funding, I think, five or six billion dollars a year, eventually, in the same that we funded, roughly four to five billion dollars a year for the interstate highway program… clearly funded, so as to carry over a period of five to ten years until the housing needs of this country are, in fact, met [16].”
Kennedy was waiting for a comment like that and jumped in hard: “Can I make just a comment on that? I’m all in favor of moving people out of the ghettos, but we have fourteen million Negros who are in the ghettos at the present time, we have here in the state of California a million Mexican Americans whose poverty is even greater than many of the black people… the children who go to these schools, only three out of ten graduate from high school, and the ones who graduate from high school have the equivalent of an eight grade education. So to take them out, where forty percent of them don’t have any jobs at all… to take those people out, put them in the suburbs, where they can’t afford the housing, where the children can’t keep up with schools, and where they don’t have the skills for the jobs, it’s just going to be catastrophic [17].”
Kennedy had hit back, but McCarthy had been prepared for some sort of attack like that, and struck back just as fiercely: “There you go again. I did not say that we would move ten thousand Negros to Orange County. We need to instead allow the Negro community to have a sense of their own personal freedoms with their own opportunities in dignified communities, rather than leaving them an economic colony, dependent on the government. Many of the beltline jobs do not need specialized training, and what a housing program like what I’m calling for would address would be your very concerns of affordability. Gilding the ghettos cannot possibly provide for all the unemployed there. What you’re representing is part of the problem, Bobby [18].”
Briefly losing his patience, political pundits watching from across the country collectively cringed as Kennedy whined in his most nasally, New England twang, “I’m naaawt part of the problem!”
Attempting to quickly recomposing himself, Kennedy then had to answer to recent allegations that he had approved the wiretapping of Martin Luther King while he had been attorney general. Refusing to discuss it further, Kennedy stated that discussing individual cases would be illegal [19]. Kennedy then tried to avoid the topic of cabinet appointments. McCarthy went after Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara for their incompetent handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Vietnam War. Trying to take the high ground, Kennedy remarked, “I think with all the problems that are affecting the United States, with the internal problems that we have and the problems around the rest of the world, to talk about it in terms of personality… I don’t want to be playing games with people’s reputations [20].” However, McCarthy retorted that one of the great problems of American politics had become the personalization of government positions, “up to and including the presidency,” and that, “cabinet members should not be immune to just criticism, nor left to turn our institutions meant to serve the people into their own fiefdoms.” Kennedy had unintentionally cornered himself into the position of defending the Johnson cabinet [21].
As the debate concluded, Kennedy landed with a thud; he had been unaware that they would have to make closing remarks, and quickly ad-libbed a closing statement discussing his political experience, while McCarthy repeated his prepared statement that his New Politics and its New Constituents were needed in order to revitalize America’s institutions and political process before discussing his own political career, which, while more distant from the flashpoints of world history, was nonetheless more extensive than Kennedy’s. McCarthy concluded, “And I think there’s something to be said for a president or a presidential candidate who can somehow anticipate what the country wants, especially when what they want is on the side of good and justice, and to provide not real leadership in the sense of ‘you’ve got to follow me,’ but who needs to be prepared to move out ahead somewhat, so that the people of the country can follow. And thirdly I think I sensed what the young people of this country needed – these young students were dropping out and saying ‘the Establishment is no good’ – we’ve had a genuine reconciliation of old and young in this country, and the significance of that is, I think, that through the whole country now there’s a new confidence in the future of America. It’s a projection of this country in trust, which has always been the character of this country, and it’s in that mood and that spirit that I would act as President of the United States [22].”
Talking Heads: The media generally agreed that McCarthy won the debate with Kennedy. McCarthy is seen here on the Joey Bishop Show.
In the aftermath of the debate, it was clear that McCarthy had won it. The title of the conservative
Santa Monica Evening Outlook’s editorial was emblematic of the public perception: “McCarthy shines as Kennedy whines,” with ‘I’m naaawt part of the problem’ becoming the political joke of the week. McCarthy’s statement of ‘no new Vietnams’ became the simplest soundbite for the media to use in an otherwise policy-heavy and complex debate. In a San Francisco phone-in poll, voters gave the debate to McCarthy by a one and a half-to-one margin; in a statewide poll, fifty-five percent thought McCarthy had won the debate, while according to Kennedy’s internal polling numbers, McCarthy’s suburban base was swelling in size from Lynch-Humphrey voters who were switching over to the candidate more likely to beat him [23].
Fighting to make up lost ground, Kennedy intensified his already superhuman work hours, sending off his family on a trip to Disneyland without him as he barnstormed southern California, starting with Orange County and working his way up through the Central Valley. The day before the primary, he traveled twelve hundred miles, from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Long Beach, Watts, San Diego, then back again to Los Angeles, literally collapsing from exhaustion more than once. Meanwhile, McCarthy attended a writer’s forum with Robert Lowell and a few light radio interviews in commuter-heavy areas during rush hour. In reaction to McCarthy’s strong debate performance, Humphrey had Lynch take down as much as his advertising as possible, so as to not split the anti-Kennedy vote, with the exception of anti-Kennedy attack ads released so close to polling that it was illegal to do so.
Polls closed at 8:00PM. Results reported before the polls closed were inconclusive. As the first results came in from the cities, Kennedy took an early lead. The numbers were big enough that he could win. But, as results came in from the suburban counties, especially from the Central Valley, it was becoming more and more clear that despite gargantuan, record-breaking numbers in black and Latino areas, the feared white backlash was pushing McCarthy forward, with Lynch dramatically underperforming. There was a dead silence from the Kennedy headquarters, while, when asked by the press, McCarthy remarked that the results were looking “pretty good.”
As midnight approached, it became clear that McCarthy had the numbers in the north and Central Valley to make him the winner, possibly even with a majority of the vote. Kennedy’s only concession was that he was projected to win by a landslide in the South Dakota primary being held at the same time, with McCarthy in a dismal third behind the pro-Humphrey unpledged delegate slate. Kennedy, at his headquarters in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, abandoned a half-written congratulatory telegram to McCarthy, and instead went down to his waiting audience. Opening with some levity, he thanked his dog, Freckles, followed by his family and all his supporters, before announcing that he would be withdrawing his candidacy, as promised, but doing so in such a way as to imply that he would be available to be drafted at the convention. Kennedy then prepared for a second reception before going to a press conference, but plans were changed by his aide, Fred Dutton. Seeing that Kennedy was exhausted, and wanting to control the media narrative as much as possible, Dutton decided that they would go to the press conference first. The fastest way to get there would be back through how they entered; the back kitchen and pantry. Separated by his bodyguard in the crowd, Kennedy made his way through the kitchen, shaking hands, and led by maitre d’ Karl Uecker. Uecker, on edge from the emotional tension of Kennedy’s defeat, noticed a man charging up with a gun. Two shots were fired before Uecker, in a knee-jerk reaction, slapped the gun aside. Several more shots went wild before the shooter was restrained. Kennedy was obviously wounded, and barely retained consciousness until he was brought into an ambulance.
McCarthy was in his suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel when he heard the news. He grew pale. He lashed out at his long-time rival, bitterly remarking, “He brought it on himself, demagoguing to the last.”
And then, Eugene McCarthy wept.
McCarthy on his way to visit Bobby Kennedy at the hospital.
Out of concern that the shooting might be part of a wider plot, McCarthy told his celebrating staff what had happened, and asked them to vacate their Los Angeles headquarters at the Westwood, an old Sears Roebuck building. While it was not yet known to the public, the shooter was Sirhan Sirhan, a young Palestinian who had gone after Kennedy for his pro-Israel policies, including his support of sending jet fighters to Israel as military aide.
Meanwhile, Kennedy was received at Central Receiving Hospital where he was stabilized. He had been shot three times: one bullet had passed through his torso, causing internal bleeding, the second had lodged in his spine, while a third had grazed his neck. A fourth bullet had passed through his coat without hitting him [24]. He was transferred, half-conscience and on painkillers, to the Hospital of the Good Samaritan, where a team of surgeons were preparing to operate. A priest was brought in, and last rites were administered. Before the procedure began, Kennedy spoke to his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, telling him that he wanted to endorse McCarthy. Mankiewicz was shocked; his distaste for McCarthy was equal to, if not greater, than Kennedy’s, but Bobby was firm. “It’s not about a man, it’s about the movement,” he mumbled [25].
By the time McCarthy arrived at the hospital, Mankiewicz had already informed the press that Kennedy was entering surgery with uncertain prospects, and that before being put on anesthesia that he had endorsed Gene McCarthy. Mankiewicz later wisecracked that, “It’s too bad Gene didn’t meet Bobby before they put him in surgery. He probably would’ve changed his mind.”
In the long shadow of California, McCarthy had become the sole peace candidate in more ways than one. He had gotten just under a majority of the vote at forty-nine percent, next to a little under forty-three percent for Kennedy, and a little under seven percent for Lynch. Not only that, but he came away from California with a sense of moral absolution after the bitter primary battles of the past, having received Kennedy’s endorsement. And, while the news had been lost in the shuffle, he had also won a solid victory in the New Jersey primary. As he headed for the Democratic convention, Eugene McCarthy was feeling good about his chances.
Every other politician in America prepared for the inevitable nomination of Hubert Humphrey.
[1] Unlike Florida and West Virginia, Louisiana did not have a presidential candidate preference primary. They did have a delegate slate primary, which is what McCarthy was referring to. The Louisiana delegate primary would ultimately be won by those loyal to Governor John McKeithen, a Johnson/Humphrey surrogate.
[2] This is slightly out of chronological order in relation to the end of chapter two: this episode in the Kennedy-McCarthy relationship happened after the New Hampshire primary, after Bobby Kennedy unofficially announced his intention to run, but before Kennedy officially announced he was running. Jerry Eller never forgave Clark for his part in the plan, and frequently blocked his access to McCarthy – even more so than he was already doing – for the rest of the primaries.
[3] Despite being the left-most figure in mainstream American politics at the time, the New Left, and particularly the SDS, had a special disdain for McCarthy. They considered his calls to bring people back into the political process to be anathema to their ideology of direct political action and revolutionary incitement. Ironically, the more centrist Kennedy had greater respect in New Left circles for being a more professional and realistic anti-war candidate. As recalled by former SDS President Carl Oglesby, “McCarthy wouldn't have had anything to do with real power. That was pure symbolism. It was empty. McCarthy was not going to be the president of this country. Period. No way. No how. But Bobby Kennedy? Ah, ha, a very real chance to be the president of the United States. Very real, very practical.” The opposite was true of the Yippies; they preferred McCarthy because they thought he was going to lose (Abbie Hoffman once said that rooting for McCarthy is like rooting for the New York Mets: you know they’re going to lose but you do it anyway), while they thought Kennedy would ruin their fun, since he was the only candidate who could match them in “theatre in the streets,” with what Hoffman described as his “participation mystique.”
[4] Following the McCarthy campaign IOTL, Larner would go on to write the script for the political satire The Candidate, starring Robert Redford. The Candidate was in large part inspired by the McCarthy campaign, along with the 1970 Senate campaign of John V. Tunney, which the director, Michael Ritchie, participated in.
[5] McCarthy’s campaign had more women in leadership positions on the state and local level than any other campaign of the year, or perhaps even ever up to that point in American politics. The disorganized, decentralized structure allowed political amateurs and hobbyists to attain important local roles with little to no prior political experience. This allowed many women who were generally kept out of the political process to get involved, while they were stonewalled in more ‘professional’ campaigns such as Kennedy’s.
[6] Why did Lyndon Johnson drop out? There are a few different interpretations, but the one most agreed on was that he was in poor health, and did not know if he could survive a second term. It is also believed that his close friend John Connally's decision to not run for another term as Governor of Texas influenced his decision. Of course, there is also the obvious take that McCarthy’s strong showing in New Hampshire scared him away, along with Kennedy's entry into the race. That was the general belief of the public at the time, except for the cynics who believed he was dropping out in order to bypass the primaries and organize a draft at the convention. More on that next chapter.
[7] While legal at the time, Humphrey’s funding of McCarthy’s campaign was incredibly sneaky and had horrible optics, so it was kept a secret from the public. The money was most likely delivered to McCarthy, alone and in person, by Miles Lord, a district judge from Minnesota and a known Humphrey supporter who was observed occasionally visiting McCarthy every few primary elections.
[8] The only person in McCarthy's entire campaign structure who seemed able to make any sort of connection with black voters was the actor Paul Newman. When Newman met with local black community leaders Charles Hendricks and Ben Bell, Hendricks commented, "I tell you what, you sell him better than he sells himself. You've done more for McCarthy in these few minutes than he did for himself [in the entire campaign up to that point]."
[9] McCarthy’s address at the Cow Palace was considered one of his best by his speechwriters, but he had to be convinced to criticize Humphrey in it. Indeed, McCarthy’s campaign nearly collapsed when he said that he would consider endorsing Humphrey if he changed his position on the war, and he had to quickly claim he was misquoted. McCarthy still had a latent fondness for Humphrey, and would later admit that if it came down to Humphrey or Kennedy at the convention that he would have backed Humphrey, despite him being publicly opposed to nearly all of his major policies in 1968. Bobby Kennedy had independently arrived at the same conclusion, and intended to support Humphrey over McCarthy if he could not be the nominee, such was their mutual loathing by the time of the Oregon primary.
[10] Indeed, Kennedy had such strong Latino support that César Chávez, the leader of the largely Latino United Farm Workers (UFW), temporarily suspended their strike so that they could focus their attention on campaigning for him. McCarthy supporters in the Latino community were ostracized. According to Chávez, when he saw twenty Latinos marching with McCarthy signs in East Los Angeles, “There must have been about a thousand people ready to skin them… you don’t do that in East L.A. or any place where there’s blacks and browns.”
[11] This is our Point of Divergence. Historically, Finney did not cover his tracks, and Lowell and a group of mutual friends found McCarthy at the Hilton, where he ended up doing barely any debate prep. Instead, he spent most of his day singing Irish folk songs. ITTL, McCarthy and Finney go through the entire debate prep undisturbed, while Lowell and company waited around Union Square looking for McCarthy.
[12] IOTL, McCarthy did not go on the attack in his opening statement. His accusation of Kennedy, “playing a prominent role in formulating positions that resulted in disastrous adventures” is from one of his speeches during the Oregon primary.
[13] Their respective voting records did not come up in the Vietnam section of the debate IOTL, but the rest of what McCarthy said, following “Secondly…” is verbatim.
[14] Verbatim.
[15] IOTL, McCarthy ended this back-and-forth with his criticism of McNamara, without tying it to Kennedy or his experience in the Senate.
[16] Verbatim.
[17] Verbatim.
[18] IOTL, McCarthy did not rebut Kennedy’s assertion that he was going to move ten thousand black people into Orange County, one of the most white and conservative counties in California. His reply here is based off of what McCarthy’s speechwriter, Jeremy Larner, had prepared for him as a reply to such an assertion by Kennedy in the debate prep that McCarthy did not do.
[19] Kennedy did indeed approve the wiretapping of Martin Luther King. In an attempt to hurt Kennedy in the California primary, J. Edgar Hoover leaked this information to the press shortly before the debate.
[20] Verbatim.
[21] IOTL, McCarthy was unable to come out with an adequate response to Kennedy’s response about playing with people’s reputations. Instead he came off as petulant when he started talking about how the Johnson Administration had been rude to the Foreign Relations Committee, and that he thought that Jack Kennedy had been “too kind to a number of people after the Bay of Pigs…”
[22] Verbatim.
[23] IOTL, the media believed the debate was a tie, the San Francisco phone-in poll gave it to Kennedy by two and a half-to one, and the statewide poll gave forty-five percent to Kennedy, while in the internal polling, white middle class suburban voters shifted dramatically from McCarthy to Kennedy.
[24] IOTL, the third bullet lodged in his brain, and was the one most responsible for killing Kennedy. ITTL, Uecker’s quick reaction had the shot go wild.
[25] Kennedy, in his right mind, never would have endorsed McCarthy. He would be more likely to do so while hopped up on painkillers and having a religious revelation at death’s door. If Kennedy had left the California primary defeated but unharmed, he would have, in all likelihood, tried to deadlock the convention to get himself chosen as a compromise candidate, and, failing that, throw it to Humphrey.
