Saint Patrick's, may light eternal shine upon him, O Lord, be merciful to the soul of your faithful servant, Robert.
For the past 12 hours, the people of New York carried that prayer with them as they passed by, sent to touch the casket of Robert F. Kennedy.
They came by the thousands, 6,000 an hour, in the greatest outpouring of grief in this city's history.
The brief five seconds that each could spend at the coffin seemed a privileged moment for those who knew him so distantly.
But there were many who knew the Senator intimately and devotedly, and this evening we have brought together five of those friends.
For the next hour, they shall recall the mind and heart of Robert F. Kennedy.
This is a CBS News special, Some Friends of Robert F. Kennedy.
Here is CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd.
With us this evening are some of the friends of Robert F. Kennedy. First, William Walton, a former newspaper man, an artist, a dear friend of the Kennedy family who until Wednesday headed Citizens for Kennedy in New York.
C. Douglas Dillon, a banker and a public servant, President Kennedy's Secretary of the Treasury, and one of the men Robert Kennedy most admired.
Peter Oetelman, one of the Senator's legislative assistants, a specialist in civil rights and urban problems, and one of Robert Kennedy's traveling campaign staff.
Charles Evers of Mississippi, who just recently took a leave of absence as a field secretary for the NAACP to campaign for the Senator.
And Frank Makowicz, Robert Kennedy's press secretary, not a former newspaper man, but an ex-lawyer in whom the Senator had a deep trust.
Gentlemen, I've brought you together to engage in some public analysis. I know that's hard to do.
But one of my observations was that the Senator himself was never able to engage in self-analysis.
I think he found it unknowingly, and I never heard in any public appearances that he ever dwelled upon himself.
I wonder if you found that to be true, any one of you.
Yes, I certainly think it was true. You're right. He always looked upon himself very modestly.
He always had a sort of a sense of humor, and he turned jokes against himself and was very humble before the world.
At the same time, having this tremendous force and willingness to go ahead and try to conquer the unconquerable.
I think it's probably true, Roger, although I'm not so sure that it was because he felt it was unmanly,
but perhaps he felt it may have been a little bit of a waste of time.
I think Peter probably can bear this out more than any of the others here,
but I can't recall in the two years that I was closely associated with him that we ever spent any time at all dwelling on anything that had happened or anybody who may have been involved in it.
I mean, they'd just never seen time, and he was always extremely impatient with postmortems and,
well, what went wrong here and why did it go wrong? And the emphasis was always, well, let's not talk about that because it's done and there's nothing we can do about it. Let's move on and see what can be done now.
I think self-analysis is a part of that. I mean, I think he felt that if you spent a lot of time wondering about who you were, you'd never get anything done.
He never said, why did I do this or why did I do that. I think that's right, Frank.
I suppose it's perhaps of the nature of public life and Senate and all the things that Robert Kennedy was interested in.
He wasn't a justice senator going over there and voting. He was always had things like Bedford Stuyvesant.
He was up here in New York City in the evening to do something with Bedford Stuyvesant, as Ambassador Dillon knows so well, worked so hard on that.
There were so many different things. I guess partly just there wasn't time to do this.
But I think also there was some skepticism about the learning which had been brought to us from Dr. Freud on down.
I don't know whether he didn't trust it or just what, but there always seemed to be a kind of a skepticism about what you gained from trying to analyze your motives
or trying to figure out why you had done something or trying to see what it was that made you nice to somebody or not nice to somebody.
I think there was just a skepticism. I never quite really understood why, except that he was so much a man of action,
so much a man of just getting ahead and getting the job done, whatever it was, and that was all to the good.
On the other hand, when he was considering a problem, he would sometimes take a great deal of time and he would ask and think and turn the thing over on his mind backward and forward maybe for many days.
But once a decision was taken, the action was done, well then it was quite right. It was a waste of time to go back and have to move ahead.
He was very analytical of ideas and of thoughts, maybe not the conventional analysis of motivations, everything like that.
But when he would ask you an opinion, he would often say, why did you think so? He required some analysis from you, whether he indulged in any of it himself or not.
He often required things of us that sometimes he didn't require of himself. It was one of his characteristics.
Also, one of the ways that he made us behave better than we were.
I think that's probably, I think it's also a part of that, that he would maybe duck a question. I think Roger would probably know that.
If you ask him something and you get an answer, it's sometimes a short answer. But he never saw him duck anything and he was handicapped always in that because he had none of the politicians' small talk.
He could never, and I think you can look back over your film for as long as you want and I don't think you'll ever see him beginning an answer the way so many politicians do by saying,
well that's a very interesting question and of course it depends.
And then suddenly you realize a man has said 60 or 70 words and he hasn't begun to answer the question.
He never did that. He would always start right out and say yes or no. And sometimes that would be the only answer.
But he never had any of that sort of oil that lubricates political conversation.
The result was that he got a sort of a reputation for bluntness and directness which may have been not much more than a kind of an insistence to get on with it.
And it worked both ways I guess.
He also had a very deep feeling for the truth. He would not ever leave even an inch from what he felt were the basic facts about a given situation or what his opinion was of it.
He wouldn't cover it up because he thought it was maybe politically a wise thing to do. He'd say the truth.
And that was sometimes for some people a problem because the truth isn't always palatable.
I remember coming to an impromptu press conference once in one of the corridors of the Senate office building.
I think it was when he was introducing one of his pieces of legislation last summer to offer some tax advantages to businesses to bring industry to our general areas.
And he was standing out in the corridor talking with Senator Smathers and some cameramen were there and they finished talking and then they were packing up their gear.
And I heard one of the electricians say to the other, he said, Don't, he really means that stuff doesn't he?
And the other one looked at him and said, Well that's what I like about Bob Kennedy. He says he has a perpetual sense of outrage.
And I think that communicated itself and it's because he didn't waste time thinking about why he was saying things or why he was doing things or getting into it.
He just went right ahead.
I was about to add, I remember with the first encounter he and I had, it was back in, we were six or three.
I called him up one day and I said, I asked the attorney general and the lady was giving me a hard time in office.
And I said, Well I just want to speak to the attorney general and no one else. So I found out he was there.
And he picked up the phone and he says, Yes, child, what's wrong now?
And I said, Well, something, pardon me, I said, Well, Mr. Attorney General, we still don't have any Negroes in any response position.
He said, Well, what do you want? You go right back, Bob, what do you want then?
I said, We want some in response position. He said, Well, I tell you, you come to watch, let's talk about it.
And a few weeks later a few of us came to watch him and he said, Well, now I know what you're here for, what do you want?
You got your program? I said, Yes, we have it. He said, What do you want? I said, First of all, we need some Negroes there in positive positions, not just boss in office.
I said, We'd like to have some United States Marshals. Do you have any names?
I said, One, two, three. I said, Well, I don't have any names. He said, Well, can you get some?
I said, Well, yes, I guess I can. He said, Well, you get some. And he said, Matt called him, Matt Shane. He said, Matt, come with me.
And he said, Now, Charles got some and he wanted this. And he said, We have no marshals. Is that true?
And he knew all the time that we had, you know, but he's just that kind of a guy. And he said, Well, see what you can do with them.
And immediately, you know, this is just the kind of guy he was. And within six months we had a Negro United States Marshals in Mississippi. Just like that.
You mentioned Mr. Walton, his analytical approach to ideas. And I'd always noticed that he was one of the best mind pickers, if I may use that phrase, on Temple Hill.
When someone would come to his office to call on him and talk to him, they wound up answering his questions and not the other way around.
That would be true. I can remember going through sort of a short course on architecture, which I'm a known amateur student, but we were all engaged in choosing designs for the Kennedy Library, the memorial to his brother in Cambridge.
And there were many designs and many different architectural principles engaged in the different designs. And he, each person was expressing his own opinion about them.
And he would quietly answer, Why, on every one of them, he was analyzing why was this architectural expression of a principle better than this one.
And he needed a very sharp critic of architecture in the best sense. He knew what he was talking about. You know, some of those designs, Peter, in what we were going through, was out of his field, but he ended up a minor expert in it.
It was always the sense that any piece of complicated legislation, of course that was his business as opposed to the architecture, but always the sense of learning without any kind of pretension about it. That was the thing that was there and you just learned about it.
He's a collector of knowledge, one thing.
But all was to a use. I liked what Frank said about the perpetual sense of outrage and the thing that, and putting that together with what you said about the analysis, he wasn't just an analytical man.
I like to think of him as kind of an episodic learner, a learner from experience, getting turned around to things in the present vernacular. One experience that sticks in my mind is when we went out in 1966, the first time that he ever met Cesar Chavez.
We went out to the Senate Migratory Labor Subcommittee to Lamo to have hearings on the grape strike at that time out there. And people had been very high on his drawing.
Jack Conroy, who was associated with Walter Luther, had urged him to go. Paul Schrade, who was injured the other night, had urged him to go.
And on the plane on the way out, he said, why am I going here? Why am I going across the country for what am I going to accomplish? You know, it's a struggle that's going on. It's useful, but what am I going to accomplish?
So I went through what the conditions were and how low the wages were and the difficulties in trying to get a better wage when there was no federal law protecting collective bargaining and the other issues associated with it.
And he sort of looked at me skeptically and didn't say much more. And then we got there. And the minute he sort of saw the farmworkers testify and went out and took a look at the housing and went out to the field of Schinley,
which was the grower being struck at the time, and looked at the picket lines. And as the thing sort of built up, you could sense that he was being turned on by this process.
And finally, one of the, it's a legend in the history of the farmworker story, the local sheriff had testified that they were making preventive arrests because they were afraid that there was going to be some kind of violence on the part of the pickets,
or perhaps even dealing with the local people who would attack the pickets. And the sheriff testified very benignly about this, as well as the fact that they were taking pictures of these people.
And just before lunch, the senator finally said to him, I just want to ask you one thing. He said, have you ever read the Constitution of the United States?
And of course the place was just broke up. But he came back from that with the great interest and the great involvement in the problems of the farmworkers and the fact that here was this most excluded group among all the workers in our society.
And everywhere after that he was very deeply involved. And the same thing happened really time after time as we went out on field hearings.
He would get in, there would be this kind of experiential development of a very deep and very passionate commitment.
And then the use of these great analytical powers to begin to do something about it, whether the pressure or the freedom to get food to hungry people in Mississippi,
or to black conversation or work with people in Bedford-Stuyvesant, whatever it was.
Once there was a sense of the experience of having been out there, then you got this outpouring of the intellectual capacity.
And I want to add to that, I remember he did some of this in Mississippi where it was more extreme.
Just before the Senate investigated for me on hunger, one day he was in the office in the farm room and he said, I'm coming to Mississippi.
I said, you're coming to Mississippi for what? He said, well I'm coming down with the committee to investigate the hunger.
I said, because I just can't believe that this type of thing really exists and I want to see it.
I said, well if you come, your son will show it to you.
And he came down and surely enough when he got into the meeting that night, he sat with many of us.
And we talked about it and he just sat there, you could see him just sinking on the testimony that people were telling him.
And then the next couple of days he said, well I want to go see.
You remember how he said, I want to go see. And I remember he got a group of people together and they began to tour this area.
And the most understruck most of us is when he really saw this, he almost broke down.
And he was running around these houses, it was really just a shack, it wasn't fit for anyone to live in.
Something like Tenth City down here at Washington now.
This is why he's so close to us, he knew that it really existed.
He sat down on that bed, a little child came, he must be about four or five years old.
And his stomach was sticking way out and half dressed, clothes and little hair was just,
hadn't had a haircut since he was born.
And the son had took him and put him on his knee and began to rub the little child's stomach.
And somehow or other you could just see it in the man.
He just shook his head, he said, it's unbelievable that a country as rich as ours could allow this to happen.
And he said, I'm going back to Washington to do something about this.
And that really went home to us because no other man had done this.
No other man in his position had ever come and sat there with us and watched the riches on the floor and over his feet.
And the lights went on in the house.
And seeing people living like this, and the wounds as to it made it.
And I want to go back to Washington and try to do something about poverty in this country.
He was really almost transported in the presence of children, wasn't he?
Yes, he was.
Almost a different man.
But you know we say that he lacked sound talk.
We were already talking just about the clichés of political talk, but with children you have the most beautiful small talk in the world.
And a part of this was his ability apparently to project himself into other people and to feel how they would feel.
This to me was one of his extraordinary capacities.
He seemed to understand what it felt like to be an old woman.
And he certainly understood how it was to be a child and he could talk to them in just this very little casual small talk you should have.
Children are the only people I've ever seen who commence a conversation with.
Conversationally I think he was basically a counter puncher.
A tacitive.
I've heard stories, and I believe them, of people who don't themselves commence conversations easily sitting with Robert Kennedy for perhaps as long as 15 or 20 minutes without your being spoken on the other side.
North Nationals.
I believe that story and I don't think there's any doubt of it.
And yet with children he always began the dialogue and seemed to know.
He didn't have children either. They could be 14, 15.
And they never, you know children are I think our best judges of phonies.
Particularly I think with politicians.
You watch very closely and they always turn away or they make funny faces and they indicate in a lot of ways that they know they're being put on.
And yet they always went right to him and talked to him and I think understood him.
Well, difference you never talk down to a child. You talk to them on their lap or whatever it was.
But they felt he was part of them and they understood him.
You know that campaign show and I've seen not 10 minutes of it goes by that you see his hand come out and touch some child from his car.
And very gently.
Well just on last Monday we were touring the California area.
We were in the Watts area and also in Compton area.
A little girl must have been about 6 or 7 years old.
Stunning by the, with all the homeless people there, a little girl.
He just reached out of the car, a real man came and picked her up and put her in the car and Miss Candy looked at him.
And said what is he going to do with her?
And her mother was there and he sort of did this and she said yes.
And you know he carried her I guess around 100 miles with us.
Just kept her in the car with him and just kept, you know he played with her little cheeks and he would pull her hair and she would just carry her.
Just a child that he had never seen before.
And when we got to the airport, the airport and he summoned somebody, put someone with him and they drove all the way back to this 100 miles to her mother.
This is the kind of man he was. This is how passionate he was.
This is on Monday afternoon.
I would just like to emphasize what fits in with the story too about his gentleness.
Because generally many people that didn't know him or hadn't been close to him didn't understand this part of him.
It was a very deep part. I've never known anyone who with children, with young people, with people who could not take care of themselves,
who was more gentle and had a deeper feeling of personal identification and compassion with people of that nature.
It was a great characteristic which he had at the same time being completely practical about what had to be done and so forth.
But the thing with the children was not only a beautiful thing in itself, it motivated a lot of what he did.
I was thinking of the first story, just something that I witnessed, I guess we've all got many stories of the times that we saw him in a way with children that was touching and tender.
He was campaigning in Oregon at a whistle-stop train as he did in each state.
And at one of the stops suddenly a little face appeared over the back of the platform and obviously boosted up.
And he said, what's this? And the face, an arm came up with a package. Maybe a five-year-old little face.
And he said, you got something for me? And the child shook his head very solemnly, yes.
Should we open it? The boy shook his head yes. And opened it up with some chocolate-covered cherries.
I said, should we have one? He had one, yes. He gave it to the child and it all went in.
He said, all in one bite. The child nodded very solemnly and so he had one eye on one bite.
Would you like another one? Should we give one to the, this fell out in the crowd, he looks a little mad and he gave them a nod.
And finally, would you like another one? The child got up. But a marvelous kind of violin.
The point I was going to make was that when Charles was talking about those children in Mississippi,
that sense of outrage that you were talking about before, Frank,
the outrage that in this country that we don't feed children, somehow that older people wouldn't have enough to eat,
that's something to be upset about and that's something to do something about, but that we don't feed children.
That their children are going to be hungry, that they're rats biting children.
And we would talk about that and we went to see Orville Freeman about it
and try to get him to spend some of that $200 million that he gives back to the Treasury every year under Section 32 that he could be spending.
It was always in relation to the children. And the same thing with the schools.
He would talk about the schools in a very personal way. That child who loses ten points on his IQ between the third and sixth grade.
It was never in some impersonal way. It was always that child, very personalized.
And you know, so I think that the love of children really was a motivating force in his public.
It was a deep part of his, interesting what you mentioned, this Bedford Stuyvesant project,
which he talked to me about from the very beginning,
which he just couldn't understand how there could be a situation like that in a city that was as wealthy as this.
If the people in the city knew about it and could be brought to understand it, one most of them don't and didn't.
If you'd go out and see the thing, as you say, he had many other things to do.
And this was something that was deeply on his mind and he would keep coming back to it.
And one of his basic insistences was that this was done for the people.
It was not done as a Robert Kennedy project. It was a project of the city, a totally unpolitical project.
One of his first things he did was when he got this idea, which was his idea basically,
was to get a hold of Senator Jabot and bring him into the things that could be a joint thing.
He was really interested in helping those people.
That, rather than any benefit that might flow out to him, I think it came from more just the way they lived and from the children.
You know, it wasn't all recent either.
I can remember traveling with him in a very casual way in the West Virginia primary of 1960 when he was Brother's manager.
And we didn't have a big juggernaut in those days.
And often just he and I would be in a car going through the mining sections of Southern West Virginia.
And it was mainly both of us. It was sort of a noise that poverty was that great there.
And we would stop at the tip of a mine when the shifts were changing,
and he would shake hands with the miners and just say, I hope you'll vote for my brother.
But soon as he had gotten through that, he would start asking them about how much they made
and the conditions of the mine.
And it was certainly a big thing long ago. It didn't have anything to do with running for office himself.
It was a compassionate and deep interest.
And probably people that know more would trace it farther back in his life.
That's what sort of hurts me when I hear the thing that he's done these things for political gain.
And it disaffirmings me when I hear that because I know that any man in this country
who speaks out for the poor and who fights for the underprivileged,
there's certainly no political gain for him there.
And I know people who didn't know him, naturally they couldn't feel the way that we feel about him.
But the man was sincere. He was honest. And he really meant that.
And he just didn't want to see our country keep going in a way to deny the majority of its people
the right to just live and exist and to enjoy the thing that God has in for us.
And he didn't want to talk it. He didn't work for it.
I remember, I forget, we were in 64 when he was running for the Senate here in New York.
We were coming up in Buffalo and we had a little run in there.
I won't bring that in, but on our way back he said,
Charlie, they're like me, I've got you in trouble.
And he said, but I hope I haven't.
I said, well, don't you worry about me.
As you worry about getting elected to the Senate, when you get out in there,
you do such a good job, whatever you've done to mean that it will come up for it.
He said, I'll do just that.
I mean, he really meant that.
When we were going to the ghettos and we'd find all these things, he was concerned about it.
You could see this. Not some guy go through for the Negro vote or go through for this,
because it wasn't that. And I wish America really knew this.
And when they say he's ruthless and this, that burns me because he was ruthless, yes.
But he was ruthless against those who were wrong and those who were not willing to go out and do what's fair.
Sure, he was ruthless against evil, but he certainly wasn't ruthless against what's right
and what to make this country a better place to live.
And as I said again, it really hurts to know that people would classify a man like that.
And only because he cared about the little people and the little people are in the masses.
And I don't mean little black people, I mean little people, those who are not represented.
He wouldn't be that man. He was the man to do it.
He would have been the man to represent all of us, whether we like it or not.
But right now, I mean, the young people here, and he was the only man that I know in this country right now,
white man, may I say, that could walk into any area, I believe, into any ghetto, into any section,
into any harvest-tricking area and be heard and be recognized.
And it's because the man cared. He was no found here because the expression on his face
and because of the way in which he would call certain people and tell them,
look, you got to do something here, you got to do something there.
That's why we all loved him and that's why the masses loved him.
But it seems as though America's gotten to the point that they don't want anybody to care for the little man.
Why am I getting too wrapped up in my own personal feeling about it? So let's let somebody talk.
One thing that amazed me after we'd been in the 12th Street in Detroit,
and there was a long notarcade, we got back on the plane,
and he was being pulled and jostled and bumped over, and he said, did you see her eyes?
And I could not understand how he had time to look at anybody's eyes.
He was so concerned with his own balance.
But is it inaccurate to say, Mr. Mankiewicz, that he went into some of those ghetto areas just to show,
to run in as a symbol of reconciliation?
To show that a white man would go in and would not be afraid.
He didn't take much police with him, did he?
No, most of the time he didn't take any of them out.
And I think he felt that he was in no danger in those areas, and indeed he was not.
The danger, as we saw, came quite on the quarters.
I think that's right. I think many times he did do that,
in a sense, as Charles Elmer says, to demonstrate that even these days,
there was at least one white politician who cared and with whom this dialogue could go on.
I often thought that people misconceived the reason that in these primary elections
he piled up such an enormous vote in Negro areas.
It wasn't so much the things he was saying as the things they were hearing.
I mean, all the candidates were pretty much saying the same kinds of things.
But it was obvious it was being listened to.
And the reason was because something other than the words came through.
I mean, there was a sense that he meant it and that he understood.
Certainly that was the reason he went into the ghetto in Indianapolis
an hour after we had been told that Martin Luther King had been killed that night back in April.
He arrived at the Indianapolis airport and a fairly routine speech had been scheduled.
It wasn't intended to be much. I think it was the opening of the headquarters in the Negro section in Indianapolis.
And there was the news and the press. I can't remember if you were there,
but everyone was rather apprehensive as to what might happen.
And he decided immediately that he had to go there.
It was extremely important that night particularly to not to seal off a whole portion of society.
And he went in and spoke extemporaneously.
And I think it was the weather, the temperature must have been well below freezing.
It was about 10 o'clock at night. It was an outdoor rally.
He stood on the back of a truck in the presence of five or six hundred people who had waited three or four hours in the cold.
And he talked to the very moving room. He quoted Greek poetry to them.
Which I must say.
He said my favorite poet was Aeschylus.
That's right. And remarkable speech.
And delivered I think just for that reason.
Because he felt he had to do it. Someone had to do it.
And that was the time and place. And he was the man who happened to be there.
So he went and did it.
I think he was a good speaker.
I think he was a much better speaker extemporaneously than he was in giving a set speech.
He tended to sort of chop up a set speech a little bit.
Although over the years he got much, much better at it.
And as he got more and more familiar with some of his themes and some of the things that he liked to say in a set speech,
he would have to be very good with that as well.
The discussion of the Gross National Product, which was so much to the point that it counts the locks on our doors, but not the quality of our lives.
But when on an occasion like after the death of Dr. King,
when he thought through what he was going to say, and he did this often, but this was a special time,
he was as eloquent as I've ever heard anybody. Terribly moving.
And I would, Frank, disagree a little bit. I don't think you really meant this.
But he didn't go in to get away as to show that he cared. I don't think you meant that.
It was more a sense of because it was right. Because this is what had to happen in this country.
And I think he saw himself as a kind of a vehicle.
As a kind of a person who had this ability to communicate with both sides, to try and bring this together.
And I think he felt that he had a responsibility and an obligation.
One example that comes into my mind is the Sunday after Dr. King was killed.
He said that he'd like to go to church over in the area of Washington, which had been severely torn by civil disorder.
And we just went. And afterwards I thought we would leave, and he said, let's go for a walk.
And we just walked. And some police came around, but we'd never talked to any of them.
And there certainly wasn't any need. Everybody was very friendly.
And here this was in the middle or just at the end. I mean there had still been serious burning and looting the night before.
He was a man who could do this. And he didn't go in there to prove any point, at least I don't think consciously,
but merely because it was the right thing to do and it was very important to him.
I want to agree with you. I think that Sunder felt that he knew that if you just do what's right,
I think what he was trying to get the rest of America to understand, that you have nothing to fear if you do what's right,
if you are fair, represent the people and treat them as human beings.
And his record has spoken for that as far as we were concerned. And he knew that no one would harm him if he walked in there
because he knew he had done no injustice. And this is what those who are afraid of us,
those who have somehow done something to minority people, to make people afraid of them.
And Sunder Kinnon had never done anything, to my knowledge, really personally or collectively, to hurt any group of people.
And that's why he's so well loved and so well accepted. And as I said before, he could walk any place without any...
The thing that happened to him was one of those unfortunate things.
But it goes back again into the system which has projected this type of thing.
Have we made too much of Robert Kennedy's fatalism? Did he have a great deal?
Well, he had a great... In one sense, he had a great sense of courage.
He just was fearless. It wasn't, in a way, conscious courage.
I'm thinking of a totally different aspect of his life.
One from which he drew, I think, a great deal of strength,
which enabled him to carry out these other activities of his.
His periods of relaxation, which were primarily with nature.
And he had this totally fearless quality where he would go on a kayak down a river
that nobody had ever been down before, or climb a new mountain that had never been climbed before,
when he hadn't ever climbed a mountain before himself.
Where I know in particular was Sailing at Sea, on the coast of Maine.
And he would came up and we sailed there often.
Again, there he didn't seem to care much about fog or various very real dangers that exist up there.
But everything always did come out all right.
Of course, he was very resourceful, very capable, very skilled physically this way.
But he had a great sense of sort of a therapeutic thing for him,
except for him when he went and exercised and went out and faced nature by himself usually,
and drew the strength from the earth and the sky into him,
enabling him to come back and attack these human problems that were so deep.
The only time I ever heard him complain at all about that was that last 500 feet up Mount Kennedy.
He wasn't so sure that was.
And we do make him sound a little bit pompous too, I'm afraid, a bit,
because now he was a great sailor, but I have seen him sail straight into the dark.
Well, I have a story about this trip out there where he could be very dashing.
He'd sailed a little, he was on this cruise up from Portland,
and he had some non-sailors on the boat with him.
And it was early morning and he'd been navigating for a while and he'd had enough of it.
And he turned the helm over to another one of his friends and said,
where do I sail as a compass?
And he looked around and said, just keep her a little left of the sun.
And then he went off and went down to get a little rest.
And that certainly slightly disturbed some of those who were on board that they found their way in finally.
Did you know, Roger, as you know yourself, that he was a very witty man,
and he could relieve a tense situation often by just sort of a perceptive little joke,
not a quotable joke often, it was a play on words or it was self-deprecatory often,
often made himself the butt of his humor, don't you think?
Much more than he would other people.
Did that, this sense of humor develop recently or had you noticed it in him for some time?
He always had it, but in every category of his life he has expanded and matured,
grown sure of himself, and the last ten years it's been an amazing process of education, maturity,
that we've all participated in and seen it happen.
Yeah, I can agree. I mean, we were up in Northern New York in the state.
I remember he had made a speech, I believe it was at the University of Rochester,
and he was on his way to, he was on his way from one place to another.
He said, how'd I do, how'd I do? And he was very comfortable, how'd I do?
And it's the Ed Guffman, you know, it was always, he said, well, Bob, you can do better,
just get up and tell him like, get your shit up.
And he said, well, the next time I'm going to try it.
So I remember we got to, I believe it was Buffalo, I think we went on to Buffalo,
and he spoke there, he got up on the back of a truck, you know,
just started rapping away, you know, and he really sounded good.
He just went on, just telling just what he would do, what he wanted to do,
and why he was running for this particular office.
And when we got on our way, we got back on the Carolina, started back,
he looked at there, he said, how'd I do? He said, that's much better.
I mean, he's that kind of a guy. He wanted to know if he was going to do it, if he was, he asked.
And that thing, that would make him great, too.
Was his humor evident in the office down in Washington, Mr. Vanquish?
Yeah.
Don't sound so guarded.
Well, I think as Bill says, a lot of it was not,
not so much that it wasn't quotable,
it was always related to a particular situation.
I don't think I've ever, I was just trying to think, I don't think I've ever heard him tell a joke.
Neither have I, never.
Not a regular joke. Just a set joke about two people who are in a situation,
the kind of joke that you hear.
His humor always concerned the particular situation,
what he was doing, or it was a joke almost always on himself.
Or he'd say something about one of his colleagues in the Senate,
or some situation that had come up.
But I think he had no abstract humor at all.
But only as it related to what was going on.
And if you look at his political jokes,
the kinds of things he'd begin speeches with,
the sort of things he'd say at press conferences,
they were all directed at himself.
With one exception, he had a good thing going about Nixon's The One.
That's right.
The One was, well on the campaign this year,
you asked before about the speaking and I was going to say that one of the best parts of it was the humor.
And he would see people with these signs out in the crowd that said Nixon's The One.
And he'd say Nixon's The One what?
And then he'd say, and I see that poster you've got there, he's got a briefcase.
I've been wondering what's in that briefcase.
And then he'd say, is he a briefcase salesman?
And of course it was always marvelous.
He poked a couple good jabs at Governor Reagan, didn't he, about trying to find out who had voted for him.
I was going to make that exception.
He never really made jokes about anybody, but in California he did find time to say a few things about Governor Reagan,
who is not without his comic aspect, I suppose.
I like the one line he said,
Governor Reagan didn't raise any new taxes, he just tripled the old ones.
That's right. But he often, you know, sometimes we'd all kind of offer him bits of humor, which he might want to use.
And he would regularly reject anything that seemed rather barbed about anybody else.
And say, no, no, that's too tough, I don't want to talk like that.
And he also, I think, rejected lines of argument in political speeches that were directed at somebody else.
I don't think I've ever heard him attack anybody.
Because I say occasionally a joke or two about some rather prominent Republican.
But that's not really attacking anybody.
That's right. No, but quite seriously, except for one or two little exceptions, and very gentle they were,
he simply would not get into political argument on that kind of level.
And it always struck me as rather odd that he was the one who came out as ruthless and opportunistic.
I mean, there was a time when you'd pick up, you could hardly pick up a newspaper in New York
without reading some rather mean attack on Robert Kennedy
by Joe Resnick or a variety of people who might have found it profitable to do that.
But he never attacked back this widely heralded ruthless man.
He just didn't do it at all.
Not to gossip columnists or other candidates or politicians or any of these people,
some of whom have made rather profitable careers out of attacking Robert Kennedy.
Well, there was one, I'd just like to say one thing from my own knowledge,
and you say people who thought he did things like that,
that was at one time a story around that at the time of the steel price episode
that he had made use of the Justice Department
and made use of the tax facilities of the government and so forth
to try to go after people that were raising steel prices.
And there just was not a word of truth in any of that as I took part in that.
Well, the FBI did do some things they shouldn't have done at that time.
At that time, they were not at his direction.
He didn't know about it.
He was totally surprised when he found out what had happened in the middle of the night.
And he had absolutely nothing to do ever with any of the tax authorities,
which of course were under the supervision of the Treasury Department.
They never even mentioned it to anyone in that organization at any time.
You know, Mr. Secretary, I think that raises an interesting question
that might be profitable to discuss for a minute or two
because there are lots of myths like that about Robert Kennedy
getting up to reporters in the middle of the night
and doing all kinds of things, terrible things to Jimmy Hoffa,
although no court has been able to figure out just what those were.
And a lot of other things, some of them getting down to some rather ugly charges
in the last few days of the California campaign.
And those can be disproved rather easily, and yet people persist in believing them.
There's widespread belief in all of these, and I think it's more than just perversity
that causes people to do that.
I think there was something in his personality in the public manner
in which he projected himself, and I think it comes down to...
because the fact of the matter is that the country was...
the country can be divided, not everyone of course,
but there are pro-Kennedy people and anti-Kennedy people,
and most of them are rather passionate on both sides.
And I don't think it's true of any other political figure now.
Certainly it's been true in the past about various people,
and I'm sure it'll be true again.
But I think the thing that came through and that probably caused all of this
strong feeling on both sides was a general agreement on both sides
that he meant what he said, which may very well have distinguished him
from almost every other current politician.
And knew he wasn't kidding.
That he meant to do the things that he said he was going to do,
and that is a crucial thing about a politician
and removes him from the sort of just any old politician
and makes him a central factor in people's lives.
I mean, people got up in the morning and went to bed at night
with the knowledge that Robert Kennedy was going to do A, B, or C if he was elected.
And if you liked that, you didn't just think of him as a politician
that one day you would vote for, you thought of him as a man,
you'd go out and dedicate a major portion of your life to, as many of us have.
And if you didn't like it, then you were by God going to spend a few extra hours
seeing that it didn't happen and would automatically mean
that you were prepared to believe almost any nasty story that came down the pike.
And I think that's the factor that made him such a controversial figure,
is that it was obvious to everybody that he wasn't putting anybody on.
I mean, when he said that this or that needed to be done with our policies
in underdeveloped areas of the world or in the underdeveloped areas of our own country,
that he meant that he was going to do everything he could to get it done.
And the President can do quite a bit to get a lot of those things done.
You know, I think to Andrew, he said he was a very, what we call, catapult.
You couldn't hardly him him up.
I remember one instance, he was just smart enough to know whether or not
he was back against the wall before you got there.
I remember in 64, you remember when the three civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi?
Well, our national convention, the NAACP convention was in Washington.
So Dr. Averin, who was our state president, and myself,
jumped on the floor of the convention and raised all kinds of, got them all worked up.
We're going to march on the Justice Department.
We're going to go down there and get Bobby Kennedy.
He got to do something down in Mississippi about this.
This terrible thing.
So we got them all worked up, and Mr. Wilkin and the rest of them got together,
the executive board, and finally got us quiet down.
Let's organize this thing so we can march on Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department.
So we got together and got all about 2,000 delegates.
And that was done when somebody had tipped him off that we were coming.
And he had somehow got all his fellows out there and had all the work cleared for us.
We marched down there with it all puffed up, you know.
I got to the Justice Department, and my sister-in-law, Mrs. Medgar, was with me.
She and Mr. Wilkin, myself, and Dr. Henry was in front of the line.
We got to the Justice Department to start, and guess who met us?
Bobby walked out, shaking his hand, how you do?
And he got betweens. He got between.
Mrs. Edwards was by the arm, and he led us around the Justice Department.
I mean, he's just that kind of a guy.
Instead of marching on, he marched with us.
He said, well, I know you got a problem, and I understand this.
He said, but let's work it out.
We wound up saying, now what can we really do?
Other than, I'm saying, he was able to prevent a lot of things by his quickness and his witness,
and being able to adjust to whatever the case may be, and try to understand other people's feelings.
I think that's what made him great.
I'd like to say something quite different about him before we come to an end,
because it hasn't been mentioned, and I think it should, because it's an important part of him.
And that is his judgment, calmness, and coolness in moments of great stress.
And what I refer to as the ten days that I had the honor, or what the right word is,
but to work with him and live with him during the ten days of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Of course, the final outcome there, the decision there, was President Kennedy's.
He made the final decision.
But in this working, and in developing the various possible alternatives
of what was probably the greatest crisis that maybe has faced the world to this day,
because it's the first really close call we've had with nuclear war,
of Robert Kennedy, of his analysis of what should be done, and what could be done.
It was absolutely outstanding.
And I recall just one thing from that, which I think shows his sense of history,
and was worthy of note.
There was a time when there was discussion of all possible alternatives.
The Soviet missiles were going up in Cuba, and we were asking them to stop, and they were not stopping.
And one of the possible alternatives that was discussed was to send airplanes in there,
and take the missiles out.
And at some point, if they hadn't taken them away, maybe we would have been forced to do that.
But when this was being discussed after a long period of silence,
Robert Kennedy said, I can't help remembering Pearl Harbor,
and we just cannot have a Pearl Harbor that is created by the United States.
And I think that everyone in the room, no matter what their feelings have been about that,
felt this was absolutely right, and the whole shift of thinking changed,
and we proceeded then on the course that turned out to be successful.
And I think we owe a great deal to him in that.
I think it's no accident that probably the word he used the most often was judgment,
not just his own, but others.
I mean, that was really the measure, I think, by which he sort of rated people.
You know, he'd talk about this person or that person, and he'd say he has awfully good judgment,
or he'd say he has the best political judgment of anyone I know.
And it was a question about Latin America or balance of payments or whatever it was.
He'd think instinctively of three or four people he knew whose judgment on those matters he respected,
and in many cases it was people who didn't particularly agree with him in terms of particular policies.
But he had this brain-picking quality, and he knew whose judgment and whose brain power he respected,
and he was quite willing to disregard the fact that on some other issue
they might be quite far apart politically.
I knew he liked Herman Talmadge, for one.
Sure.
And the way he'd say it, he'd say, is he good? Is he good?
He wanted to know what you thought of him. Was he with you or against you?
Well, I'm sure he shared a number of feelings like this about various senators,
many of whom probably never voted with him on a given issue at all,
but he did respect them politically or in terms of judgment about an economic issue
or whatever it might have been.
Or as human beings.
Particularly if they were honest, straightforward human beings, because that's what he treasured about Lowell.
And which is particularly interesting in view of another myth about him,
which was that he did line up guys as good guys and bad guys.
It just wasn't anywhere near that simple.
It was great respect for someone whose position was the opposite if the person was a person of integrity
and had some ability.
There was another phrase that you used, Secretary Dillon, about sense of history and perspective.
And I don't think that we can spend an hour discussing Robert Kennedy
if we don't discuss some of the other things that he was doing and put him in relation to this time.
One is the war in Vietnam. I think it's very important.
I don't want to make a political discussion out of this, Roger.
I don't think that would be right today.
But I think it is fair and fitting in remembering Robert Kennedy at this moment
to remember that he did speak out early in 1965 when he saw what the consequence was
of our putting masses of men into Asia, making it into a land war, making it into our war.
And that he did that at a time when not very many other people were.
And that if you look back to what he said in May of 1965, he called in an uncanny way
what would be the result of escalation and seeking military victory instead of a negotiated settlement.
I think that's very important to remember now.
Secondly, in talking about this year, 1968, which is a year of such great crisis in this country,
not only because of the war, which is still taking so many lives,
but also because of what we face in this country between black people and white people,
between young and old, as he said so many times.
And I think that in remembering Robert Kennedy again, perspective, sense of history,
sense of understanding that we just had to take a new direction, sense of what that new direction was.
All of that work in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which I hope we don't lose, which I pray that we can continue with,
a community corporation, community control over its own destiny,
these were new ideas, at least new for a major figure of national stature.
This kind of thing, working with the business community and people, the traditional liberals,
and again I suppose this is another thing that I would throw in,
labels didn't, liberal, conservative, that wasn't the point.
The point was whether you had a program that worked.
And the idea that is popular in some traditional liberal circles,
that we'll just forget business because business hasn't done anything.
Well, for one thing it's done some things, but beyond that you've got to try things.
And if tax incentives, which he talked about so much, haven't been tried, he thought that they should be.
It made sense that if the business has a responsibility to stockholders and so on,
and if you had to make it financially profitable to get involved in a major way,
in the kind of way that would create thousands and millions of jobs, then you should try it.
And this sense of community participation, of trying private business,
of trying to simplify the federal government so that people who are, after all,
very confused and dissatisfied around this country now, so that they could get some more control,
not just black people, not just poor people, but people in the suburbs, people all over, farmers,
could get some more sense of control over their destiny.
He talked about revenue sharing in this campaign, which no other major national figures talked about.
He talked about federal funds for community corporations like the Bedford-Sivus, an example.
He talked about getting around as a president to see people, all of these things,
which might have taken us in a new direction.
And I think if I could be permitted one final memory or one final observation,
having that sense of history, having that perspective, I think that I've heard some things
in the last two days about what would be a fitting memorial for Robert Kennedy
that have made me very, very angry.
One of them is people say, as a result of this, and you know, we all are grief-stricken at this point,
we should pass an adequate gun bill.
Well, now that's right. Of course we should pass an adequate gun bill.
But let's understand, if you'd permit me to say, Roger, let's understand,
and I'm obviously expressing a personal point of view, that the legislation which is going to the President
of the United States, which has got a provision in it covering only handguns and not long guns,
also contains measures that Robert Kennedy very, very deeply opposed,
which will cut apart the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court to deal with the review,
to deal with the protection of criminal defendants.
Those provisions are also in that bill.
It's got wiretapping legislation that he opposed, which is much too broad and interferes with individual liberties.
Let's not start to get gun legislation if it's going to be gun legislation in this kind of a context.
And let's understand that the problem is not just guns, but an end to violence in this country,
an end to the violence that is gripping this country and war abroad and all over the country.
And let's finally understand that the kind of memorial that we need for Robert Kennedy is social legislation,
getting people jobs, trying the kinds of new experiments that he was talking about.
Thank you. Thank you, gentlemen.
We've been talking with five of the friends of Robert Kennedy,
and we'd like to close their testament this evening with a few of the senators' own words,
spoken in 1964 at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.
When I think of President Kennedy, I think of what Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet,
when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars,
and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night
and pay no worship to the garish sun.
This has been a CBS News special, some friends of Robert F. Kennedy.