R.F.K., The Statesman

I first met bob Kennedy eight years ago, through an unlikely intermediary--the late, irrepressible Hollywood producer Jerry Wald. Wald called me at my home in Mexico City to ask me if I would be interested in writing the screenplay of Kennedy's then-recent best seller, The Enemy Within. He told me that the Attorney General had chosen me from a list of five likely screenwriters Jerry had sent him. I said that was interesting. I was curious to know why.

"Bobby"--Jerry began, being the kind of bubbly character who would, on first meeting, have called De Gaulle "Charley" and Einstein "Al"--"Bobby says he loved On the Waterfront and he's read quite a few of your pieces in magazines and he feels you haven't lost your zing for social causes." So I'd like you to fly up right away--I'll meet you in Washington tomorrow and then, if Bobby likes you personally, we can fly right back to Hollywood and work out the terms; so call me back and let me know what time you're coming in--I'll meet you at the airport or send the limo for you--what hotel do you like--Hay Adams? The Carlton?--I'll reserve a suite for you and----"

"Jerry--wait a minute! I'm glad he likes Waterfront and the other stuff, but I need time to think. I have to reread the book in terms of how I feel it could work as a picture----"

"You can be doing that on the plane," Jerry broke in.

"Hold it, Jerry--I need time. And then-this thing about personally liking me goes both ways. You say he has to have screenplay approval----"

"Budd, it's his book, and he is the Attorney General and----"

"Jerry, I need the kind of creative freedom I've had with Kazan, like a playwright in the theater. It could be that the Attorney General is too----"

I didn't use the word "arrogant," but of course it was on my mind. All those news The Man stories about the hard-nosed, ruthless younger brother of the wise and sophisticated President. Instead, I said something like, "If he turns out to be difficult, or if he wants to tell me how to write it, or if it turns out I just plain don't like him .... "

"Don't like him! You're talking about the number-two man in the whole United States! Do you realize when this picture comes out, it will be the biggest thing in America, we'll open it in Washington, we'll invite the entire Senate, the whole Cabinet, we'll probably have dinner with the President in the White House and----"

"For God's sake! Jerry, let me call you after I've had a chance to think it over."

Naturally, Jerry called me every day during that week, more often twice than once. On the last day, he called at eight o'clock in the morning, saying it was becoming increasingly embarrassing for him to find ways of explaining to the Attorney General why we would not rush to Washington as soon as we heard that he was willing to meet with us.

"Tell him I can't come until I'm ready." I held my ground, but I was beginning to feel as if I were clinging to a mast in a hurricane.

It was in that mood that I finally met Bob Kennedy, not exactly with a chip on my shoulder but neither like the endearingly frenetic Wald, ready to salaam to "the number-two man in America."

About a week later, Jerry and I were having dinner at the big, lived-in white farmhouse called Hickory Hill. The Attorney General could not have looked younger or more unlike an Attorney General of the United States if he had been played by Paul Newman or Warren Beatty. There were quite a few of us at that dinner table. Mrs. Kennedy, and Pierre Salinger and a number of Kennedy aides, some of them members of the Justice Department, like Walter Sheridan, later a key figure in the Hoffa case. Others were members of his "kitchen" cabinet, or one might more accurately describe it as "touch football" cabinet--bright and well-informed young journalists. Nothing much was said in the first ten minutes of our dinner. Small talk. Jerry being both anxious and amusing. Pierre entertaining. Ethel Kennedy open and friendly. Young Mr. Kennedy seemed extremely pleasant, if far more reserved and shy than I had imagined. I had expected to get through dinner in an atmosphere that might be described as defensive congeniality and that we would not get down to the business of the book until the coffee and the cognac. But we barely had begun on the main course when I heard a reedy, rather wistful voice, challenging me with a quiet directness for which I was not prepared. "Well, Mr. Schulberg, of course we are all waiting to hear what you think of the book. Did you like it?"

All those eyes around the table turned from the Attorney General (continued on page 246)The Man(continued from page 178) to me. I wasn't ready for public discussion. I felt uneasy under the steady gaze of my host and this roomful of important strangers. So, hesitatingly, rather arrogantly, and perhaps even ruthlessly, I plunged in. "I told Jerry--it's a long flight from Mexico City--I wouldn't have come if I hadn't liked the book."

I could see Kennedy's eyes taking this in. We were still strangers. But there was something in his silence that made me wonder if he wasn't the only one in the room who did not object to the tone or content of the answer.

The next question--as I was to learn in time--was typically R. F. K.: "Well, was there anything about the book that you didn't like?"

I felt he was the kind of man who could accept nothing less than the flat-out truth. So I said, Yes, there were a few things in it that had disturbed me. I could feel a gentle pressure on my foot from the shoe of my friend Jerry Wald. "I think we'd all be interested in what you have to say," Kennedy said. With a nervous glance at Jerry and the watchful faces around the table, I went on:

"There is one chapter about how hard everybody worked. How the aides stayed in their offices until after midnight--how they caught planes at three in the morning--how they arrived in other cities and went right to work on their cases without any sleep .... "

"Yes?" Bob Kennedy said in a completely noncommittal tone. I couldn't tell if I was getting through or arousing his "arrogance." And I could feel Wald's continuing pressure on my foot.

"Well--what struck me was, why shouldn't you all work hard? A lot of people in this country, when they get deeply involved in what they're doing, happily work around the clock. I thought there was something slightly self-righteous about that chapter. And we taxpayers could react, 'Aside from the fact that your staff obviously is dedicated to fighting corruption and your book does make that awfully clear--we pay them to work hard.'"

By this time, Jerry was deftly kicking me in the shin. There was some self-defense from aides around the table and reproachful glances from members of the touch-football cabinet. But Bob Kennedy cut in: "You may have a point. The reason I wanted to write that chapter was to give credit to a lot of people who really did a lot of the tough, uphill, day-and-night investigation for which I, as chief counsel (the Senate racket committee), got most of the credit. But"--and he smiled in a way that was more wistful than ruthless--"maybe you and Jerry know more about this than we do. Maybe we should say, 'Go ahead, and call on us for any questions or technical material.'"

The meal was over and we were in the den. Bob poured a cognac for me. We had a chance to talk alone for a little while. This time, we discussed what I did like about the book. I said I was struck by the fact that it made so clear that every labor racketeer needs a capitalist as a coconspirator and that both of them are joined in a plot to undermine honest labor unionism and to subvert union contracts. And beyond that, what really attracted me was the theme--I had tried to point it out in my own books and films--there was something at the core of our society that was beginning to rot. From big businessmen cheating on or finding loopholes in their income tax to stealing millions from union treasuries, to preaching but not practicing true democracy .... I felt the book was much more than a vivid account of the extended hearings of the Senate racket committee. He had struck on a big theme--we are hardly in a position to preach or dictate to other countries and other systems until, as Kennedy had written, we defeat "the enemy within."

"Good, I'm glad you agree," he said. "I wrote those last pages very carefully--I didn't want the book to seem to be aimed against a single man or a single union. It is the society that produces a Beck or a Hoffa or a Johnny Dio. I don't know how you are able to bring that out in a picture, but that seems to me the only real reason for making the picture. If it comes off as well as Waterfront, it could help shake people out of their apathy. I think we agree about the creeping corruption--it is something the President hopes to check, to give the people a new sense of idealism, a sense of destiny that isn't just money-making and pleasure-seeking."

Since this writer has a good second-class ear but not the built-in tape recorder of an O'Hara, I cannot say that those were the exact words. But I do remember that they were said with quiet fervor and without pomposity. He cared about it. He felt it. Sometime in the future, he said, he would like to write more about the things in which he believed. He said he thought the next ten years would produce the turning point in our history--either an America infected with corruption or the rebirth of a spirit and idealism with which we had begun. He sounded very much like the conclusion of The Enemy Within, but he had a way of putting it simply and modestly; in fact, diffidently. He seemed almost boyishly pleased that I admired the book, both its content and its theme. For a man with a reputation for being dogmatic, he was surprisingly easy to talk to. He talked without any "side" and he listened well. But naturally, he had some of the habits of an executive and he could not resist asking, "How long do you think it will take you to write the script?"

"I haven't the slightest idea," I said. "I haven't even read the material yet."

"But you said you read and then reread the book."

"I mean all the racket-committee hearings."

"I'm not sure you realize-they fill forty volumes."

"I wish you'd send them to me," I said. Bob asked an aide to get all the material together and send it to Mexico. I promised to read it all as fast as I could and to call him when Jerry and I were ready for the next meeting.

Bob Kennedy and Ethel walked us to the door, where we had to step over a black monster of a Newfoundland by the name of Brumus. "I don't know why Brumus picks this as his favorite place to sleep," Ethel said.

"And you have to step over him carefully," Bob said. "If you kick him by mistake, he may wake up in a bad mood and bite you."

"But he's wonderful with the children," Ethel came to Brumus' defense.

"Now, Ethel, he even bites them once in a while," Bob reminded her.

"Not really hard," said Ethel.

Bob walked us out to the car. "If you really read those hearings from cover to cover, I may have to write a chapter in my next book about how hard you work."

"That will also be boring," I said.

Bob smiled. You could tease him. And as I was to discover in the years to come, he could dish it out with a quick humor that somehow failed to color his public image.

On the way back to the Carlton, Jerry said, "Whew, Budd, I almost thought you blew it when you started to criticize the book. But it worked out great. Terrific!"

"Frankly, he surprised me, Jerry. I liked him. He's got a nice, keen mind, but he doesn't want to push us and he doesn't want to be fawned on. I wonder why it is that we've read nothing about him that describes or even suggests the way he seemed tonight."

I spent the next six weeks reading and underlining those 40 volumes. Long hours but fascinating reading. Testimony from big-city gangsters, corrupt city officials, company executives who solved their labor problems by buying off union "leaders" banished from the A. F. L. C. I. O., honest rank-and-filers who fought to reform their unions and stood up to obscene punishment and sometimes death to defend their rights.

A few months later, I was back in Washington with an outline. This time, we met in a small den behind the office of the Attorney General. The spaciousness, the traditional paneling, the high ceiling, the flag, gave it grandeur. The many crayon drawings by the Kennedy children lovingly pinned along the walls and the presence of Brumus stretched like a great shaggy rug beneath the American standard turned this otherwise impressive office into an informal home away from home. The hour was late, after the business of a long day had been concluded. Bob sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, with his knees drawn up and his arms around them, as I would see him do often, as I was to see him in his suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles a few minutes before midnight on the fourth of June, 1968.

I read, in my usual stammering voice, the opening sentences of my outline. The film would not feature the chief counsel of the racket committee and his staff but, instead, a prototype of a powerful labor racketeer. And we would see him first not as a villain but as a tough, likable, rank-and-file union member who is captain of the local bowling team ....

"I don't like it," said the crisp and rather formidable ex-Harvard football captain and Presidential aide Kenny O'Donnell.

"You haven't heard it yet," I said.

Bob nodded. "He's right, Kenny. He's worked hard on this. Let's hear him out."

When I came to the end, Bob made me a drink and took me aside. "I like it," he said. "I don't think any of us saw it like that at all. But--that's why you're here. I think I see what you're trying to do--put a character in the middle, something like you've done before, only on a much larger stage."

"Exactly," I said. "If I make the investigators the heroes, the leading characters, it will come out like a bigger Untouchables. A cops-and-robbers television show."

Bob nodded. "Don't get sore at Kenny. His instinct is to protect me. And yours is to protect your own ideas. I think it's going to work out all right." Then he asked me, since I was planning to stay over another day for some additional research, if I would like to come out for supper the following evening. There would be just a few friends, strictly informal, don't bother to wear a tie, no shoptalk.

The following evening, I learned what informality meant at Hickory Hill. There was a barbecue on the terrace, with Bob handling the hamburgers. Amid children, pets, guests and a few college-girl secretaries who seemed part of the family, the atmosphere was one of happy confusion. The hamburgers were ready before the salad was out of the kitchen. Bob's style at the barbecue wagon was noisily criticized by his guests, a motley of White House lieutenants, Justice Department subordinates and Harvard classmates. I don't remember Bob's answers, only that they were funny. Over the years, I was to think many times how much wittier he was, and how much deeper, than people realized. With all that publicity, negative and positive, his true personality never seemed to come through to the nation as a whole--until it was too late.

If it seems as if I am seeing Bob Kennedy through the small end of the telescope in viewing him largely through his relationship to my dramatizing The Enemy Within, I think it is also true that Bob's behavior throughout that experience reveals many phases of his personality that were also brought to bear on the great issues that haunt us--bigotry and injustice, the sickening poverty of undeveloped nations, the alienation of the new generation. As I came to know Bob better with each meeting, phone call or exchange of letters, I felt I could relate his personal relations with me to his understanding of the social fault lines that threaten to shake and perhaps even bring down our civilization.

To jump from the sublime to the ridiculous, on one occasion he dropped me a short note to ask how I was coming with the script and then could not resist asking if I thought I could do "as great a job as you did with the Waterfront." Jerry Wald had planted the nerve-racking seed that this film would be greater than Waterfront, Citizen Kane, La Dolce Vita and The Grand Illusion combined. I was strung out from receiving Jerry's almost daily essays relating those films, not to mention Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, to what I was trying to write. So I answered Bob, rather testily, that asking me how I expected to do was not so different from asking Mickey Mantle if he thought he would hit a home run the next time he went to bat, or Johnny Unitas if he thought he would throw a touchdown pass on the next play from his own 20-yard line. In fact, I felt that was about where I was, on my own 20, and all I could tell him was what Johnny would tell him, "Bobby, all I can do is try."

A few days later, he sent a nice little note, appreciating the fact that we were both sports fans and saying he wouldn't add to the pressure by asking in advance for that touchdown pass. Just the same, I felt he would make a great playing manager. He had a fine sense of when to put the pressure on and when to take it off.

In the course of my writing the screenplay, we had only one real rhubarb, and the way he handled it was also revealing of the man. Inadvertently, it seemed I had written into the script a scene dealing with the wife of a labor racketeer whom I had invented. It was neither in The Enemy Within nor in the official transcripts of the hearings, since Bob and the Senate committee had avoided the personal lives of the people whose corrupt practices were being examined. A friend of Bob's phoned me to say that R. F. K. was embarrassed by the scene, because it happened to be painfully similar to an actual incident. It could look as if Bob was using the film to make a personal attack on the wife of an official he was accusing of major crimes. Despite what some people believed, Bob was anxious to avoid hurting innocent people or to involve himself in personal vendettas.

I said I sympathized with Bob and did not want to embarrass him, but I also sympathized with myself. It was a strong scene. The fact that I had "invented" something that actually had happened proved its validity. By this time, I knew him pretty well. I warned him that this discussion could not be settled in a matter of minutes, and so back I went to the cozy den at Hickory Hill, to argue it out on a Sunday afternoon. A few of the aides were there, men I had come to admire, though I found them, through their very loyalty and dedication to Bob, somewhat less flexible than he was. They became a little sharp with me. After all, if the Attorney General of the United States asks you to take something out, you simply take it out. I said I couldn't work that way. There was a silence. I realize it was not exactly an earth-shaking event, compared with the tests being faced by the President and his most intimate advisor. But I felt pushed and nerved up. I told Bob I hated to make waves for him when I knew he had a lot more pressing things on his mind. At the same time, I had to remind him that I had tried to make it clear in the beginning that if Bob and his colleagues and Jerry Wald wanted an acquiescent adapter for this project, I was the wrong man for the job. There were some frowns, and even a glare or two, but not from Bob. That was the first time I saw the famous touch football go into action. "Look," Bob said, "it's a Sunday afternoon, a beautiful day, why don't we just go outside and throw the football around for a few minutes?"

We walked along together, Bob tossing the football a few feet in the air and catching it, as we headed for the field. "You feel awfully strongly about this?"

"Damn right I do." By this time, I was encouraged that we were on our way to an unusual film--with luck, the "Waterfront on a national canvas" that Jerry Wald was urging, the kind of picture Hollywood rarely, if ever, tries to make.

"I hate to fight you," I said. "Over these months I've been talking to you, I've come to respect you and like you a lot, but----"

"But you also believe in what you're doing," he said.

"Hell, yes! I believe in the theme of the book. I think you've touched a nerve. This country could be great--if it doesn't flounder, lose its way--if we can defeat--it's your title--your idea--The Enemy Within. But to get that theme across and not just preach at the people, it's got to be done through live people. And that's why I feel we need the scene with the wife and some of the other personal things I've added."

Bob nodded. "After a while, why don't you go back to the hotel and think it over. I will. too. Then come back for supper and we'll talk about it a little more."

After the game, I had to go back to the hotel and he down. I hadn't run out for a pass like that since my late teen years at Deerfield Academy. Bob must have thrown one that went 60 yards. If ever there was a new event added to the Olympics, like the decathlon, but including football, mountain climbing, skiing, running rapids, ice skating, being an attentive and loving family man, bucking racketeers, bigots and warmongers, Bob would have been a shoo-in for the gold medal.

Later that evening, in that thoroughly lived-in house in McLean, Virginia, I stood in front of the fireplace and read--not stammering this time, because I was beginning to know Bob Kennedy, beginning to trust him as a friend--"The Kennedy-Schulberg Compromise." "In the spirit of the immortal Henry Clay ..." I began.

Bob laughed. "We have a couple of high-powered lawyers in this room, but I have a terrible feeling we're going to lose this case."

Actually, we compromised it pretty well. I gave a little and they gave a little and, as Bob said, "Everything worked out fine."

When the screenplay was completed, he phoned me--enthusiastic. He felt that I had dramatized the theme--a challenge to the country--in terms that would both entertain and move a large audience, as Jerry had hoped. He suggested I fly up to Washington, so that certain technical aspects of a Senate investigation could be corrected. And also, he said he had one criticism involving characterization that he would like to make.

Again. I returned to Hickory Hill. Bob was sitting in that favorite little den in his shirt sleeves. "Now I can tell you. even when Wald was calling and urging me to let him make a movie out of it, I could never really picture how anyone could get a story out of it." But then he called out to Ethel, "Ethel, dearest. I know you have had a hard day, but I wonder if you would be kind enough to bring me some ice cream. Is that too much to ask, Ethel, dearest?"

And Ethel answered sweetly, "No, of course not, Bobby, dear, after all those long hours you've been putting in at the office, working so hard for the people of this country .... "

And Bob replied in kind. And then Ethel. Until finally, I said. "Ok. Ok, I get the picture. You're right." It had been Bob's way of telling me that he thought the one false section of the script was the relationship of the young chief investigator and his wife, drawn from but not intended specifically to represent the Kennedys. I had made them too sentimental, too overtly loving and too talkative. The only thing Bob wasn't kidding about that evening was the ice cream. Ethel, now the devoted but brisk and offbeat wife for real, and not the sugary version I had written and that they had just satirized so effectively--brought Bob a half-gallon carton of ice cream. If I remember correctly, he finished it all while discussing other points in the script. I had noticed, over what had been nearly a year now, that he was getting better and better as a dramatic critic. He did not limit himself to those sections involving his work and that of his colleagues on the Senate racket committee. In several cases, he suggested, since the script was over length, that I would seem to make my point in a scene and then extend it another six lines or so that were anticlimactic. In everything I had an opportunity to watch Bob do over the seven years I knew him. I found him an incredibly quick study. He read and he watched and he listened and he learned.

In this case. I said, "Bob, if you're ever out of work, feel free to call on me--at the rate you're improving. I'll happily recommend you as a story editor at 20th Century-Fox."

Bob grinned. "Thanks. I'll remember that. At the moment, I'm gainfully employed. But in this world, you never know."

In their thoughtful appreciation of Bob Kennedy, written in those first nightmare hours after we lost him in that cursed pantry of the Ambassador Hotel, Warren Rogers and Stanley Tretick of Look magazine, good and true friends of Bob's over a long period, added, "He was fun to be around .... " Everyone who knew him personally, with the exception of his enemies, would heartily agree. The kind of whimsical scene he had created to debunk one section of my script, rather than to come at it head on, made him a consistently entertaining companion. One morning, he asked me to breakfast at the family apartment on Central Park South. Ed Guthman, his press officer, was there. It was 8:30 and Bob had just returned from Mass. "What would you fell as like for breakfast?" he asked. Ed and I both thought bacon and eggs would be fine. "A nice Catholic boy like me has to cook bacon and eggs on Friday for a couple of backsliding Jewish boys." But while we stood around in the small kitchen, Bob started, quite efficiently, to prepare the breakfast. Gore Vidal had just published what seemed to Bob's friends an incredibly malicious profile of Bob in a national magazine, managing to edit out all of his virtues and providing a professional job of character assassination in Gore's well-known waspish style. The bacon and eggs turned out fine and as Bob served them, downing his solicitude, he said, "If only Gore Vidal could see me now--the lovable Bobby--standing over a hot stove to see that his friends get a good, nutritious start on the day."

We all laughed and I think I mumbled something about asking that magazine to give us equal time to refute Vidal's distortion of the Kennedy we knew. But behind the laughter and the wry humor, I felt a real hurt, even a sense of bafflement in Bob that his public image was so much closer to Vidal's caricature than to the actual, intensely human being we knew. And as I look back on that day, it seems a tragic irony that "equal time" for Bob Kennedy had to come in the form of a post-mortem.

If I emphasize the sense of fun in Bob Kennedy, it is only because that part of the total picture of the man seems to have been more blurred than any other. But I--and I speak for hundreds and scores of hundreds of others fortunate enough to have known him--also saw him when he was deadly serious. When something struck him as wrong or evil, it was his nature to root it out, or to try like hell--not tomorrow, but now. For instance, it may be a little-known fact that one of Bob's first acts as Attorney General was to ask how many Negroes there were among the 1500 lawyers in the Justice Department. The astonishing answer was, "About ten." Bob was shocked. Less than one percent! He said, "That number should be multiplied by ten, as soon as possible." The old bugaboo about "qualified personnel" was mentioned, the timeworn barrier to black advancement on professional and unionized technical levels. Here was Bob Kennedy at his best, which was as good as the country could get, maybe better than it will get for a long, long time. "Why can't we cut through this right away? I'll call the head of the Bar Association of every big city, get them to give me the names of the leading black lawyers in their communities. Then I'll call those lawyers and ask them if they're interested in coming to work for the Justice Department."

In a short time, there were more than 100 black lawyers in the department. I happened, quite accidentally, to walk in on a meeting in the big office of the Attorney General at which one of the new black recruits, attorney Charley Smith from Los Angeles, was giving his report to perhaps 30 other department attorneys on a complicated case of tax evasion. Some clever manipulator--not quite as clever as Smith, apparently--had moved his funds from one company to another and from one bank to another. Smith kept rattling off enormous figures, names of banks, various people through whose hands these large sums had passed--without ever referring to his notes. To a layman like me, it was a dazzling performance. And to many of the lawyers present, it was no less so. Over and over again, they would have to interrupt to say they had missed the last couple of points. "You've got to go a little slower, Charley," Bob said. "Remember, you not only know a lot more about this case but you're smarter than most of us." Smith smiled and ran his mind back a few hundred feet and then raced forward again, six- and seven-figure amounts pouring from him as from a human computer. "Now you see what's happened," Bob said to me at the end of the day, which meant fairly late into the evening. "Now we've got a lot of new lawyers and most of them are so smart we can't keep up with them."

I also happened to see Bob Kennedy on the day that James Meredith was ready for his effort to go through the color barrier at Ole Miss. The bigots in Oxford were out in full force that day and the governor himself was going to stand in the doorway of the university and refuse young Meredith his civil and human rights to an education at the state university. It has been said by his detractors that Bob didn't care, that he was merely going through the motions of supporting civil rights for political reasons. But I saw him that day and night, in direct contact with Big Jim McShane and the U. S. marshals trying to protect Meredith from the broken bottles, the stones and the obscenities. I remember Bob's saying to me, "I know it's only one"--he was much more sensitive to the debilitating concept of tokenism than his black critics may have realized--"but it's the first one, and then two and then four, eight, until everybody who's qualified to go to college gets his chance in that state. We have got to enforce the Constitution; and now that the Supreme Court has made that very clear, we've got to speed up the process. We've got to--it's the law, it's our moral obligation .... " Then he added, not as any kind of speech but as a human outcry, "Oh, God, I hope nothing happens to Meredith. I feel responsible for him. I promised we'd back him up all the way--and I'm worried for McShane and the others, too. It seems so simple, so simple to us, and down there it's bloody hell."

Bob stayed up all through that night, getting minute-by-minute reports and even wondering if he should go down in person to help direct that battle. No one can ever tell me that Bob Kennedy was merely going through the motions of supporting human rights. He lived human rights; and just as he had telephoned Martin Luther King in jail in the earlier years of the civil rights struggle, he was at the end of his short life closer to understanding the cries, threats, demands and needs of the black ghettos than anyone else in high public life.

As for The Enemy Within, the picture never got made. Jerry Wald died and there seemed to be no one left in Hollywood courageous enough to produce it. It attacked labor racketeering and big-business corruption, which go together like the horse and carriage, the unhappy harnessing that continues to this day. On one occasion, a big, tough, corrupt labor boss walked into the office of a film-studio head and growled that if the studio dared make that picture, the film trucks that carried it would be overturned and there would be stink bombs in the theaters. A nationally known racketeer-lawyer, mentioned prominently in Bob's book, present at the Apalachin summit conference, heard that another studio was considering my screenplay and made it clear to everyone scheduled to attend the meeting (of which this important Syndicate member obviously had news in advance) that there would be trouble, and not merely legal trouble, if The Enemy Within was brought to the screen.

In the course of a long struggle to overcome that semi-invisible censorship, I would see Bob from time to time. I understood that it was not his role to ask any studio to produce his book. And he, in turn, understood my reluctance to give up a project into which I had poured so much time and passion. In time, I had to abandon the project (though never the dream of one day seeing it on film) and move on to other work--a Broadway musical, short stories, a magazine series on "The Waterfront Revisited," subtitled, "Jimmy Hoffa Is the Sewer Through Which the Mob Flows into the Labor Movement." Said Bob of that one, "You're getting tougher, meaner and more ruthless than I am!" By this time, we had moved from a healthy professional to a relaxed personal relationship. I would see him when I went East and often would spend an hour or an evening with him when he passed through Los Angeles.

After the August fires of 1965 told the world about Watts, I founded a small creative-writing class there that grew into the Watts Writers Workshop, with a resident center of its own, which the writers called Douglass House, in honor of the ex-slave who taught himself to write, who escaped to the North and became one of the towering figures of the Abolition Movement and whose book My Bondage and My Freedom became one of the pivotal works of the pre-Civil War period. In the beginning, Douglass House was financed by my writing all the writers I knew and asking each one to contribute $25 each month or $300 a year. In my letter to Bob, I said I was appealing to him not as a Senator (as he since had become) but as a fellow writer. His check arrived with a note asking me to keep him in touch with our progress. From time to time, he would give me his observations on the growing black urban dislocation. From my experience in Watts, it seemed to me that he was one of the rare public figures who understood the marginal life, the inner tension, the growing alienation and the search for identity and self-development in the black ghettos. When we sent him our anthology, From the Ashes: Voices of Watts, he acknowledged it with a warm letter, saying he would like to pay a personal visit to the Workshop the next time he was in Los Angeles.

When he was in Los Angeles in May 1967, as part of a subcommittee with Senator Joe Clark holding public hearings in Watts, Bob asked me (at the home of Pierre Salinger on the eve of his going to Watts) if I could arrange an informal meeting for him, a private meeting, without publicity, at Douglass House. "And don't stack it with Uncle Toms or middle of-the-roaders. I'd like to hear from the militants, how they're really thinking. Formal hearings can only tell you so much .... "

Late the next afternoon, after the public hearings and an exhausting tour of a score of facilities in Watts, Bob accompanied Harry Dolan, director of the Watts Workshop, and me to our rendezvous. For more than 90 minutes, the kids in the Malcolm X sweaters, and a few of the oldsters who were almost as angry, let Bob have it. "What street did they bring you down?" a fierce 19-year-old demanded. "I bet they brought you down Century. Those phony city-hall hand kerchief heads showed you only what they want to show you .... We're sick of all this bouncin'-off-the-wall talk.... Why do our brothers do all the dying in Vietnam?" Bob mostly parried the questions that were more like accusations of the entire white establishment, occasionally saying something personal and pointed, in his quiet, diffident way.

"You see," said the ebullient James Thomas Jackson, "we look on you as the boss cat. So we figure you should do something extra for us."

"I'll try. I'll try."

When I asked a talented, angry young man who was at the meeting and who had been one of the most vociferous what he thought, he said, "Hell, he's not as bad as some. But I'll bet he goes back to Washington and forgets all about it."

Interestingly, when Bob addressed a campaign luncheon at the Beverly Hilton on the Thursday before that final Tuesday, he said that when he had been in Watts a year earlier, a young man had accused him of seeing only the wide, clean streets of Watts, and that in the back yard of his mother's ramshackle house, the garbage was piled up, because the city did not offer the same facilities to poor blacks as it did to middle-class whites. At the Hilton, Bob went on to say that he tried to explain to the young man that while this was basically a municipal problem rather than one he could help solve in the Senate, at the same time he recognized the depth of the anger and he felt it was symbolic of the problems we must solve from Watts to Bedford-Stuyvesant, or sacrifice our claims on greatness with liberty and justice for all. He had remembered. He had a remarkable memory. As well as a unique capacity for indignation.

On the evening of June fourth, along with scores of other well-wishers, I was in one of the Kennedy suites on the fifth floor of the Ambassador, talking with friends--Sandy Vanocur, John Franken heimer, Pete Hamill, George Plimpton--when Warren Rogers came in to tell me that Bob would like to talk to me for a few minutes before he went down to accept his victory in the Embassy Room. I went into a small room, where he was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, with his arms around his knees, smoking a small cigar. In this moment of a key victory over Senator McCarthy in California, he looked less arrogant than ever. Again, the adjective "wistful" comes to mind. Wistful and concerned.

He asked me what I thought he ought to say. I do not want to make more of this than there is. Of course, he had talked to Sorensen, Schlesinger, and others, and knew from more astute advisors than I--and from his own deep instincts--exactly what he would like to say. I think he asked me because we were friends.

"Well, of course you know who won this election for you--" I began.

He smiled softly. "You are going to give me the speech about the eighty-five or ninety percent black vote and the Chicanos' practically one hundred percent."

"Bob, you're the only white man in this country they trust," I said.

He said, "Is Cesar Chavez downstairs? I was hoping he would be on the platform with me. I'd like to have you on the platform with me, too, if you'd like to." And then he brought up the Watts Writers Workshop and the Douglass House Theater. "I think you've touched a nerve," he said. "We need so many new ideas. I had one, about the private sector joining with the public to encourage business enterprise in the ghettos--to build jobs for people within their own community. I have a feeling of what they need, and must have. But we need so many ideas. We're way behind in ideas. I've learned a lot since you and I first talked about civil rights. I think this workshop idea of yours is kind of a throwback to the Federal Theater and Writers Project of the New Deal. We have to encourage not just mechanical skills and find jobs in those areas but creative talent--I saw it in Watts, at the Douglass House--so much talent to be channeled, strong self-expression. I'd like to see it on a national scale, with Federal help. I'll do everything I can .... "

Speaker of the California House Jesse Unruh came over to remind Bob that it was getting close to midnight, time to go down and acknowledge the victory and appear on national television. The voice of the able and practical professional.

"All right," Bob said. He moved slowly. He did not seem excited or prideful. I do not think it is after the fact to say that his attitude struck me as resigned determination.

He turned to my wife, Geraldine, and to me. Warren Rogers and a few others now gathered around. "After I say a few words, I'll come through the pantry and meet you in that little pressroom."

That is how we happened to be so close to that pantry door, Warren and Geraldine and Pete Hamill and Booker Griffin and a few others, when we heard those shots that were to change the course of American life. The last words he said to me, as he started down the hall with Speaker Unruh and his entourage, were, "Budd, stick around, we'll talk later."

As I took my turns standing vigil at his bier in St. Patrick's, I looked into the faces of thousands of mourners who had come to say goodbye. Four out of five were poorly dressed and a disproportionate number were black or Puerto Rican. From the funeral train moving slowly to Washington, I looked into the thousands of faces lining the tracks and again it seemed undeniable that they were largely the common people, of whom Lincoln had said, "God must have loved them, because he made so many of them." Passing through Baltimore, it seemed as if its black citizenry had turned out en masse to well their voices in an unforgettable Battle Hymn of the Republic. When the funeral procession passed Resurrection City on its way to Arlington, the desperately poor of all colors lined the edge of their tragic encampment that had lost its black leader and its white champion within eight infamous and inconsolable weeks. In the drizzling darkness, we could not see their faces, only their flickering candles, as they, too, like their brothers along the way, lifted their voices in The Battle Hymn.

Feeling the presence of those people who could yet make a revolution or resign themselves to permanent poverty in a land of plenty, I was made even more painfully aware of our loss. Only Bob Kennedy was breathing a fresh new spirit into American politics, tired of the Johnsons, the Nixons and the Humphreys and unmoved by the intellectual aloofness of McCarthy. He was the human, perhaps the last remaining bridge between the best forces of the establishment and the revolutionaries--the angry students and the angry blacks, the dispossessed. With dangerous polarization, the conservatives and reactionaries behind Nixon mouthing platitudes, the speak no evil, see no evil of H. H. H. and the menace of the backlash Wallace movement, our country may be in for years of hell, disruption--it could be torn apart in the upheavals to come. How desperately we needed Bob-I see him sitting on the floor, waiting to go down and take the applause (and the bullets waiting in the pantry corridor). Talking about the Watts Workshop and Chavez and the Chicanos--and meaning it.

That was Bobbyism--an advanced New Dealism getting ready for the Seventies, a style blending the popularism of the 19th Century with a feeling for the suffering caused by the dislocations of the late 20th Century. Nobody else had it--not Rockefeller, who is not a bad man but can't decide to be good enough; not Jack Javits, who is still the white Jewish liberal not quite digging the other ghetto; not McCarthy, who will never be at home with the poor, the working stiff or the unemployed or the black. Bobby had it.

The last remaining bridge? He would not have liked that concept. He still believed in the greatness of man but not in the indispensable man.

But if--to borrow John Gardner's metaphor--"Our 20th Century institutions are caught in a savage cross fire," Bob Kennedy was uniquely prepared to walk through that cross fire in search of that newer world that still eludes us.

Alas, eschewing strong-arm police protection, he was not able to walk through one small pantry where one small man was waiting for him with one small gun.

Ok, Bob, we'll stick around. It's just going to be a hell of a lot harder without you.