510. America in '68: The Killing of Robert Kennedy (Part 3)

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Speaker 1 For those of you who are black and attempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling.

Speaker 1 I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States.
We have to make an effort to understand,

Speaker 1 to go beyond these rather difficult times.

Speaker 1 My favorite poet was Aeschylus.

Speaker 1 He once wrote, Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

Speaker 1 What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness,

Speaker 1 but love

Speaker 1 and wisdom and compassion toward one another, a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

Speaker 1 Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago

Speaker 1 to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

Speaker 1 I mean, we've had a lot of great oratory and rhetoric so far on this series. I mean, that's not bad, is it? That's Robert F.
Kennedy again.

Speaker 1 It's the same speech with which we began our previous episode on the assassination of Martin Luther King. And there he is talking about the death of his brother, JFK.

Speaker 1 And today's episode, Dominic, is about another assassination. It's about the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
Yes. So that was, as you said, the 4th of April.

Speaker 1 That's the end of that speech he gives in Indianapolis. So he's in this very mixed neighborhood, it's kind of sketchy neighborhood.
He's on campaign. He's speaking to this audience.

Speaker 1 And he is not dumbing down, is he? No. Oh, my God.
There are not many people talking now in the current presidential election. Can't imagine either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris bringing in Aeschylus.

Speaker 1 Not at all. Not at all.
Extraordinary that he does two things there. So he hears that Martin Luther King has been shot.

Speaker 1 He stands up and he talks for the first time in public about his brother's death. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.
You know, he bears his soul.

Speaker 1 And then the fact that he thinks to reach for Greek tragedy and to end the speech by saying to this largely black audience in Indianapolis, let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

Speaker 1 Incredible. And for anybody who says, you know, people have always moaned that politicians are getting worse.
It's a myth that they're getting worse.

Speaker 1 Just look at that speech, which was given, as you said, extempore. Yeah, amazing.
It's an extraordinary moment.

Speaker 1 And that is the quality of this year, that terrible as it is, I mean, there are loads of impressive people.

Speaker 1 And the powers of rhetoric and everything about it is so vivid. It's painted in such rich colours.
It is.

Speaker 1 I mean, that book that we began the very first episode with, the book by the Sunday Times Journalist, An American Melodrama. I mean, the title is well chosen because it does feel

Speaker 1 unbelievably melodramatic. The characters are so bold, so striking in their different ways.

Speaker 1 And we'll come on to some very different characters, George Wallace and Richard Nixon, indeed Ronald Reagan, later on.

Speaker 1 But yeah, of them all, Robert Kennedy is the one who perhaps stands out as the one that's the most technical. And a fascinating.

Speaker 1 I mean, a complicated, conflicted fashion. Yes.
There's a sense of Robert Kennedy's story.

Speaker 1 that he is the great for Democrats, he's the great loss leader, the great martyr, the great what might have been.

Speaker 1 And it's actually really interesting to dig into that and to see, could he become president and what would that have meant? So let's just get straight into his story.

Speaker 1 Give a very quick sketch of who he is. So he was born in 1925.
He's the seventh of the Kennedy children. He, like his brother Jack, boarding school, Harvard.

Speaker 1 But he's slightly, he's sort of second fiddle or indeed seventh fiddle.

Speaker 1 So he's not a boy from... whom great things are expected.
His father fixes him up a job working for, of all people, Joe McCarthy, the great red baiter. A lot of McCarthys.

Speaker 1 Yeah, too many McCarthys, I think, Tom. I think two is too many.
He only worked for McCarthy for six months, but he always got grief about it for the rest of his life.

Speaker 1 He then went on to work for a big Senate committee that was investigating rackets. So union corruption.
Oh,

Speaker 1 not the snort. Not the sport.
No, no.

Speaker 1 So he's investigating union corruption. So Jimmy Hoffer and the Teamsters.
And that's where he really makes his name in the late 50s.

Speaker 1 And so that's also part of the background to the JFK assassination conspiracy stuff, isn't it? Organized crime. Organized crime and everything.
Because he's very tough on organized crime.

Speaker 1 Then he becomes his brother's campaign manager. So he's basically all his life, he's his brother's number two, really.

Speaker 1 And Jack is charming, as we've talked about before, charismatic, a ladies' man, a guy you'd like to go for a drink with. That's his thing.

Speaker 1 Bobby, actually, his friends always called him Bob rather than Bobby, but we'll call him Bobby because people always do. He's shy.
He's unfriendly.

Speaker 1 he's brooding, he's perceived as being sort of puritanical, as you think he is. He's very judgmental.
He's difficult, he's spiky. And that's great for Jack, because basically Bobby is the bad cop.

Speaker 1 So he makes Robert Kennedy his attorney general, youthful attorney general. I mean, it's people say, God, this is nepotism.
Your own brother, attorney general.

Speaker 1 But actually, he's good at it. He handles civil rights.
He tries to crack down on organized crime. And he's always at his brother's hand.

Speaker 1 So, for example, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert Kennedy is Jack's chief sounding board because he is unflaggingly unswervingly loyal. He has no ambitions to have a career of his own.

Speaker 1 He just wants to be his brother's chamberlain basically. And can I also just ask about his wife? Yeah, Ethel.
Ethel, which is a great name. And she's a kind of, there's a little bit of Jackie Kennedy.

Speaker 1 Yeah. A little bit.
I mean, she's from a kind of very, very wealthy background. Socialite, all that.
Socialite, Ethel Skakel.

Speaker 1 People say, gosh, this is basically a union of Catholic new money and Protestant old money. The marriage of Bobby and Ethel, they had 10 children, which I think, controversially, is too many.

Speaker 1 I don't think you can properly devote yourself to all of your 10 children.

Speaker 1 And it contributes further Kennedys, who, you know, one of them has been running in

Speaker 1 this year's campaign, hasn't he? He has. Before dropping out.
A very different kind of campaign, I think it's fair to say.

Speaker 1 He's tied himself completely to his brother. That's all he really wants for himself.
Then in November 1963, he gets this quote from from J. Edgar Hoover, who he hates.
Your brother has been shot.

Speaker 1 And his world completely falls apart. Now, of course, anyone would mourn their brother.
That's completely understandable.

Speaker 1 But people who know them are astounded, shocked, worried by the extent of his grief. He wears mourning clothes for much longer than he needs to.

Speaker 1 He effectively builds a shrine to his brother in his office. He stops eating.
He becomes very thin, very silent, aggressive, withdrawn.

Speaker 1 Lots of people say of him, he's basically having an enormous nervous breakdown. But he solves that breakdown in a completely commendable way

Speaker 1 by going and climbing a mountain in Canada, which actually is called Kennedy, brilliantly. Yeah.
So it was named after his brother by the Canadians. Highest unscaled peak in Canada.

Speaker 1 He went and did it.

Speaker 1 And he did it with a team of mountaineers who were incredibly impressed by him.

Speaker 1 Said, you know, this is a scrawny little guy of tremendous resilience and courage to climb this mountain in this sort of brooding, grim-faced way.

Speaker 1 It's basically the thing he needs to do to get closure, I suppose. Do you know who would approve of that?

Speaker 1 The Greeks. No, Dr.
Johnson, who, whenever he got depressed, he'd go

Speaker 1 to walk to Birmingham. I mean, it's not quite the same as climbing a mountain in

Speaker 1 Canada, but it's the same idea. Now, talk of Dr.
Johnson brings us to a very different Johnson, which is Lyndon Johnson. Very good.

Speaker 1 Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson despise, absolutely despise one another. So Lyndon Johnson always knew that Robert Kennedy didn't want Jack to pick him as vice president.

Speaker 1 And he once said to him at a party, he did the Johnson treatment. He went up to him and he said, Bobby, you don't like me, but your brother likes me.
Your sister-in-law likes me.

Speaker 1 Your daddy likes me, but you don't like me. Why don't you like me? They're not doing this in the original, though.

Speaker 1 He's kind of waving his Johnson around.

Speaker 1 Probably.

Speaker 1 Robert Kennedy hates this kind of talk. He's embarrassed and he slinks away.
And he sometimes would have to have these dinner parties and he would feel he had to invite Johnson.

Speaker 1 But unbelievably, he would always put Johnson on the losers' table. Oh, goodness.
They like the Habsburgs. Yeah, like Sophie, the fans of Ferdinand's wife.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 Johnson would have been sitting at the end with Sophie.

Speaker 1 And in fact, in one party where Johnson doesn't go, the big present that Robert Kennedy's friends have got for him is a Lyndon Johnson voodoo doll because they know he hates Johnson so much.

Speaker 1 Johnson knows this, by the way. Johnson knows all this kind of stuff.
So Johnson feels tremendous resentment. So when JFK is shot, they're immediately, you know, a dagger's drawn.

Speaker 1 RFK, Robert, is livid that Johnson has moved into his brother's office. He then makes a point of turning up late to Johnson's first cabinet meeting.
He never calls Johnson the president.

Speaker 1 He always calls him either Johnson or that man. Of course, Johnson always calls him that boy.
Right. So there's a total sort of breakdown of trust between them.

Speaker 1 On the one hand, Robert Kennedy says, he says, Johnson is a born liar. I hate him.
He's so vulgar. He's so coarse.
And he lies even when he doesn't have to lie.

Speaker 1 On the other hand, Johnson says to his kind of immanuensis, Doris Kearns, I was the president. I had served his brother loyally.
I'd done nothing wrong. I didn't kill him, you know,

Speaker 1 putting that on the record. Yes.

Speaker 1 It didn't seem fair, quote, I had waited for my turn. Bobby should have waited for his.

Speaker 1 So they have a terrible relationship, and Robert Kennedy finally decides he's going to strike out on his own and run for the Senate from New York, which he does.

Speaker 1 And at first, he is a terrible, terrible campaigner. He is not a good speaker.
I mean, he has a very kind of reedy voice. So I don't know what...
I think I conveyed that.

Speaker 1 Did you try to convey that, Tom? Yes, I did. Right, that's nice.
He basically copies everything from his brother.

Speaker 1 So he copies his brother's hand gestures, his way of speaking, his Pintere pauses, all of that kind of stuff. But his hands are shaking when he's out there on campaign.
But he's a phenomenon.

Speaker 1 He's a celebrity in a way that no other politician can possibly match. So it's Kennedy Mania.
It's Kennedy. Kennedy Mania.
It's all that. Of course it is.
And the press love him.

Speaker 1 They give him incredibly syrupy, sycophantic coverage. They buy into the romance and they do that throughout the rest of his life.
So he becomes senator from January 1965.

Speaker 1 And he is now, even though he's not the president, he is by far the biggest political star in America. Gets thousands of letters every day.
dozens of speaking invitations every day.

Speaker 1 He lives an extraordinary life, I have to say. So he has four times as many members of staff as the leader of the Democrats in Congress.
He lives on this country estate.

Speaker 1 And when people sometimes ask us in our bonus club episodes, we talk about class, history of class, and does America have a class system.

Speaker 1 He lives in a Virginia country estate with 10 children, seven dogs, and a sea lion called Sandy who lives in the swimming pool. And then his children, Eth Kennedy Child, has a horse or pony.

Speaker 1 They also have iguanas, raccoons, possums, cockatoos, ducks, rabbits, parakeets, hamsters, geese, chickens, guinea pigs, lizards, a calf, and a leopard tortoise.

Speaker 1 I think we can safely say it's a menagerie, yeah, or a zoo.

Speaker 1 It's more than a menagerie, isn't it? It's like Montezuma's zoo. And they've also got a huge team of, now, what, in the Kennedy books, they call them staff.

Speaker 1 In Britain, to be frank, we would call them servants. nannies, governesses, maids, cooks, secretaries.
I mean, he wants for nothing.

Speaker 1 So he has this kind of gilded life, but I think it's fair to say he's not a happy man. He doesn't really fit in on Capitol Hill.
He's not a hail fellow, well-met kind of character.

Speaker 1 He's also been having this gigantic midlife crisis since his brother died. And is this when he discovers Greek tragedy? It does.

Speaker 1 So to Jackie, Jackie Kennedy gave him, you know, she fancies herself as a reader and as a woman of letters. Well, she loves the Greeks.
She likes a Greek. She does.

Speaker 1 And she gives him this book, The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton. And she also says, oh, you could try reading a bit of Camus or read a bit of Tennyson or this.

Speaker 1 And he's basically having a delayed adolescence because he absolutely loves kind of existentialism.

Speaker 1 He's always giving people quotes from Camus and stuff in a way that from a 16-year-old would be very endearing.

Speaker 1 From a man in his kind of, you know, late 30s, early 40s, you're going to raise an eyebrow. Camus, really? You find this very profound? Aeschylus is classic.
Yeah, it is. It is.

Speaker 1 And when I say Aeschylus, I actually mean Aeschylus. Of course you do.

Speaker 1 But actually, I don't mean to sound sniffy because there's something quite admirable about the way he makes himself the champion of the underdog. Now, that's something that John F.

Speaker 1 Kennedy really never was. John F.
Kennedy was a bit too, maybe a bit too cool, a bit too polished, you know.

Speaker 1 But Robert Kennedy, he loves nothing better than going off to California and meeting kind of Mexican migrant workers and squatting in the dust with them and talking about their lives.

Speaker 1 You know, he absolutely loves all this. He goes to the Mississippi Delta, some of the poorest parts of the United States, And he's visibly shocked and moved by the poverty.

Speaker 1 You know, he's photographed with all these sort of starving children.

Speaker 1 And he says to the cameras, you could, if you were being cynical, say a slightly teenage way, or you could just say a very admirable way. He says, what kind of country are we?

Speaker 1 that we spend $75 billion a year on guns and we don't do anything for children like these who literally have flies crawling over their face. Well, and 3 billion a year on dogs.

Speaker 1 That's rich coming from him with his, with his zoo. Yeah, with his menagerie and his cockatoos and things.

Speaker 1 But that is essentially the Martin Luther King lines about space rockets and submarines and things. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. It is.
Same idea. It is the same idea.

Speaker 1 He has a scheme to pour money into a very depressed part of New York, Bedford Stuyvesant.

Speaker 1 He wants to basically get all his rich friends to set up projects and things to have housing and jobs and stuff.

Speaker 1 He goes off to South Africa, apartheid South Africa, to give a speech at the University of Cape Town. And has any leading historian of 1960s America written about this? Do you know what?

Speaker 1 So this point in their career. Thank you, Tom.
Thank you. Very nice.
Very nicely done. This was the subject of my master's thesis.
And the tragedy now is that I don't know where I've lost it. Oh, God.

Speaker 1 Have the Kennedys not suffered enough tragedies? I know. It was kind of pre, slightly pre-internet.

Speaker 1 I wrote it on like a word processor, you know, one of those kind of machines.

Speaker 1 And I think it may be in the attic in some way in some form, but I don't know how it would be possible to retrieve it. Anyway, I did my master's thesis on this.

Speaker 1 Well, when they set up the Dominic Sandbrook Library. That's exactly what will happen.
Well, it's the rest of history. History, they'll find it.

Speaker 1 It's the rest library. It's the Rusty Visitor Center, I think.

Speaker 1 Interactive. In Orlando, Florida.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I look forward to it. Yeah.
The general custer experience. It goes on and on and on.
Yeah, never ends.

Speaker 1 How long is that custer experience? We know it for months. Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 And yet the French Revolution, I was in and out in seconds. When he's in South Africa, he gave, I thought, a brilliant, brilliant speech.

Speaker 1 Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.

Speaker 1 And crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

Speaker 1 That's very inspiring stuff if you're a kind of black South African or if you're a liberal white South African student in 1966. And it's a kind of...

Speaker 1 It's oratory that meets the challenge of the circumstances. Yes.
That isn't inadequate to the horror of the state of play in South Africa.

Speaker 1 And it's oratory that meets the mood of the moment, the mood of the mid-60s. So by 1967 or so, he feels like the ultimate kind of late 60s man.
He's grown his hair. He's got younger speech writers.

Speaker 1 He is sort of emblematic of the spirit of the age, I guess.

Speaker 1 So when you read what the newspapers and what columnists said about him at this point, so those those Sunday Times guys who wrote an American melodrama, he was gay but also fatalistic, cynical but idealistic, impulsive by nature and calculating by habit.

Speaker 1 The village voice, part of him was a soldier, a priest, a radical and a football coach. But he was none of these.
He was a politician.

Speaker 1 You know, this kind of coverage, that he is a man apart, that he's an undefinable figure, that there is something dark about him, but also something something very romantic.

Speaker 1 This is repeated everywhere. To go back to something we discussed in the previous episode, this is an era that prizes cool, especially if you are young.
Is he cool?

Speaker 1 I mean, is he the only politician who counts as cool? Yes, he is cool. Absolutely, he is cool.

Speaker 1 People say he's the, I know this sounds a silly thing to say about his politician, but people say at the time he's the ultimate existential man.

Speaker 1 Oh, he'd love that, wouldn't he, with his camo and everything? Exactly. Of course, he loves it.
He's defining himself every day through action. People say that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 He's actually quite ideologically ambiguous. Right.
I was going to ask what all this kind of cool existential stuff means in terms of actual policy. Yeah.
Or is he just about the vibe?

Speaker 1 This is a question I think that is fair to say you were not really expected to ask in America in 1967. Because some people would say, what does all this mean?

Speaker 1 Like you can sort of say, oh, I want to create a world in which fewer children are tortured. I mean, we all agree.
No one disagrees with that unless they're Paul Pott or somebody. But

Speaker 1 what do you mean in terms of policy?

Speaker 1 And actually, he's very ambiguous, partly because he's got so many policy assistants and speechwriters that they're on kind of different wings of the party and whatnot. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So the hope that's rippling out. I mean, what does that mean?

Speaker 1 So what does it mean, for instance, with regard to Vietnam, which is the big policy question? So originally, he had been an anti-communist hawk. He had been a Cold War.
You know, he was all for it.

Speaker 1 But he starts to shift in the mid-60s. He says, I have changed my mind about about the bombing of North Vietnam.
He gets a lot of grief from this.

Speaker 1 The Chicago Tribune called him the senior senator from North Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh's Trojan horse in the United States.
Okay, but is this also personal resentment of LBJ? Is that mixed in with it?

Speaker 1 That's there. There's no denying it.
And because people say that, he then falls quiet. He doesn't want, basically,

Speaker 1 people to think that. So then he's quiet.
But then he waits a couple of years. And then by the spring of 1967, he's back on the case.
And he says, look, we've got to stop this bombing.

Speaker 1 We've got to have negotiations. We've got to have a coalition government in Saigon and withdraw our troops.
This is what other Senate doves say. So it's nothing unusual.

Speaker 1 It's basically exactly the same as what somebody like Eugene McCarthy is saying. So the thing about is he just another politician, the fact that he doesn't challenge Johnson suggests that he is.

Speaker 1 Because he's all for month after month, he's weighing up his options. Should I run? Should I not run? And eventually he decides against running.
And then, of course, Eugene McCarthy runs

Speaker 1 and he doesn't beat Johnson, but he cripples him in New Hampshire. And immediately Kennedy says, oh, well, I'm now reassessing my position.
And so lots of people are like, oh,

Speaker 1 he's just another politician.

Speaker 1 And so this is like McCarthy is now the cool one. Of course.
Yeah. So it's like the Beatles and the Beach Boys kind of trying to outdo each other, that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 I guess so if you want to, yeah, if you want to go with that. A little bit.
Yeah. You know, who's the cool one on the block?

Speaker 1 I mean, this is kind of important in this period of American life, isn't it? It is. If that's the constituency you're appealing to.

Speaker 1 And they are both appealing to the kind of people who are following the Beach Boys or whatever. This is exactly the conversation that people have.

Speaker 1 So on the 16th of March, so that's what, four days after New Hampshire, he goes to the same caucus room in the Senate. It's very Camelot revival.

Speaker 1 The same room that his brother had declared his campaign. for the presidency in.
He uses the same opening line that his brother used.

Speaker 1 And he says, you know, I'm running against Johnson to propose propose new policies, deal with the poverty in America, the terrible poverty, end the war, reassert, and I quote, our right to the moral leadership of this planet, which is very JFK, actually.

Speaker 1 But right from the start, people say what you said. He's doing it because he feels aggrieved that McCarthy has run off with all his supporters.
The Washington Post.

Speaker 1 Seeing the romance flower between his people, idealistic young people and McCarthy, he moved to break it up with the ruthlessness of a Victorian father whose daughter has fallen in love with a dustman.

Speaker 1 That's brilliant. And a lot of people say he's just being unbelievably opportunistic here.
You know, he didn't have the courage to take on Johnson himself.

Speaker 1 He let McCarthy do it, and now he's moving in. And Kennedy undoubtedly feels this himself because he's incredibly sensitive and sore about it.
And he is somebody who's spent years.

Speaker 1 basically priding himself on his courage. The existential man.
What would Camus do? What would the Greeks do? And actually what they wouldn't have done is sit at home with their menagerie

Speaker 1 and let this go. They might actually.
Actually, they might have done. Maybe they would.
So his plan, I guess, was to sit out LBJ's term of office, which he's assuming would end in 1972, and then run.

Speaker 1 And this is still the point at which LBJ hasn't announced he's standing down. So that presumably is also, to be fair to him, part of the context that he's not really running against McCarthy.

Speaker 1 He wants to have a crack at LBJ. Yes, exactly.
And that is a kind of rivalry that he's been nurturing for many years. Yeah.
So he might feel, you know, who's McCarthy to run against LBJ? Yeah.

Speaker 1 If anyone's going to take him down, it's going to be me. Yeah, which is fair, but then he's got a massive problem.
Yeah, of course, because LBJ says he's not running.

Speaker 1 Two weeks after he's declared, LBJ says, I'm out, I'm gone. Now he's got a very different prospect.

Speaker 1 Now he's facing a very different opponent because he's still got McCarthy, and we'll come back to Kennedy versus McCarthy, which you can argue is one of the most bitter struggles in modern American political history.

Speaker 1 But he's also got Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Now that Johnson is out, Hubert Humphrey is going to basically inherit the Johnson machine.
Now, Humphrey is a very different character.

Speaker 1 Of all of these men, Humphrey is the most liberal. Humphrey's from Minnesota.
He had an impeccable liberal record, mayor of Minneapolis, champion of civil rights.

Speaker 1 He'd been one of the key authors of a lot of the civil rights legislation.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately for him, he's been, I mean, I can't, there's no other way of putting it, Tom, a very Tom Holland-friendly description. He's been LBJ's eunuch since 1964 as vice president.

Speaker 1 LBJ has tamed him and humiliates him. And humiliates him constantly.
Hubert Humphrey is not a man who would expose himself in a public talk. Yeah, he wouldn't swing his dick in the arinyl.

Speaker 1 He would not. He seems a nice man.
He seems a very nice man. Yeah, he's a nice man.
I think he is a nice man.

Speaker 1 People said afterwards he sort of apparently wasn't terribly nice to his family because he was always off campaigning and never had any time for them.

Speaker 1 But I mean, that's the nature of being a politician, I suppose. And his middle name is Horatio, isn't it? Yeah, Hubert.
Do you want to say that? He will subsequently be introduced by Jimmy Carter.

Speaker 1 What is it? Hubert Horatio Hornblower.

Speaker 1 It's actually not introduced. It's Jimmy Carter's eulogy at the Democratic Convention.

Speaker 1 He says, what a tremendous man he was. Hubert Horatio Hornblower.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the hero of the

Speaker 1 Napoleonic War, Nelsonian.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 If you ever wanted to, I mean,

Speaker 1 there's a lot of nice things to be said about Jimmy Carter, but he's not, I think it's fair to say, a man of enormous political oratorical skill. Yes.

Speaker 1 Right. Hubert Humphrey or Hubert Oratio hornblower, if you prefer.
Let's call him hornblower. Special fun.

Speaker 1 He's massively popular with like the party machine, with the trade unions, the labor unions, with the city bosses, all of those kinds of people.

Speaker 1 Basically, if you're in the Democratic Party and you've been there for more than about five years, you love Hubert Humphrey. He's like...

Speaker 1 you know, the ultimate party man. And the way that the system works, you don't need to run in the primaries.
And so he's not going to. In fact, he's too late to run in a lot of them.

Speaker 1 He can hoover up the delegates and become the party nominee. And nobody really hates him.
He's kind of everybody's second choice. And that's fine.
Can I just ask you about him? Yeah.

Speaker 1 What is his take on Vietnam? Because am I right that basically he's pretty against it, but because he's LBJ's vice president, he's been holding his tongue the whole way through. Exactly.

Speaker 1 That's exactly it. And LBJ mistrusts him, thinks he's unsound on Vietnam.
He does. That's exactly, exactly right.

Speaker 1 So poor old Hubert Humphrey, who would undoubtedly have been one of the doves, one of the critics of the war, if he'd not been vice president, because he's vice president and he's really loyal, he will never break with Johnson.

Speaker 1 And he's been quiet, biting his tongue all this time. And even now as the candidate, he won't break with Johnson because he's Johnson's vice president.
And he doesn't want to alienate him.

Speaker 1 So he's in a very difficult position. McCarthy is also still hanging around, of course.
Now, McCarthy is behaving absolutely splendidly.

Speaker 1 He says um having thought i would run just to basically you know cause a bit of a stir i now think actually i will be president you know i i do quite like the job he says publicly i think it would take me two hours a day of work to be president and i think it would be best for the country if i spent the rest of the time reading poetry do you know i'd vote for him he's now the darling of the press because of this campaign against um against lbj the darling of liberal opinion he's got loads of celebs turning out for him paul newman Dustin Hoffman.

Speaker 1 Stravinsky, I read. Stravinsky.
He's still around. Stravinsky at the age of 1,000.

Speaker 1 The other thing is, you cannot put into words how much he hates Robert Kennedy. He absolutely despises him.
He says, first of all, he says, Robert Kennedy is a coward.

Speaker 1 He says, the Kennedy people were, and I quote, this is a very good line, they were willing to stay up on the mountain and light signal fires and bonfires and dance in the light of the moon.

Speaker 1 But none of them came down. I tell you, it was a little lonely in New Hampshire.
I walked alone. You know, when Robert Kennedy hears this, you steam coming out of rage, coming out of his ears.

Speaker 1 He also says Kennedy is a wimp. Quote, he plays touch football.
I play football. He plays softball.
I play baseball. He skates in Rockefeller Center.
I play hockey.

Speaker 1 And then my favourite line, which leads me to believe that he would actually have been a very good presenter on the rest is history. This is a very restaurant history vibe.
He says, Kennedy is thick.

Speaker 1 I got an A in economics and Bobby only got a C. Imagine saying that.
Imagine going around saying that. That's exactly what I would do actually if I ran for president.
I'd go in with my GCSE results.

Speaker 1 So it's a shame that McCarthy ended up disliking you so much when you had so much in common. I think we had so much in common.
I think there was only room really for one of us.

Speaker 1 I think that was the thing. Well, like with McCarthy and Kennedy.
And Kennedy. The interesting thing.
So do you want to hear about my discovery? Yes. So this is this is your archival discovery.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 A discovery. And what the tragic thing is, I made this discovery and I wrote about it and nobody cared or was ever acknowledged.

Speaker 1 Well, this is your chance to make amends for that. I discovered in Hubert Humphrey's papers that Hubert Humphrey was secretly funding McCarthy's campaign.
That is a bombshell. Bombshell.

Speaker 1 Was channeling money to McCarthy's campaign because there's all these...

Speaker 1 I mean, that's a properly... genuine revelation.
There's messages from GoBetween saying McCarthy would need more money in Oregon. McCarthy says, hold off on the money.
He can deal with Bobby for us.

Speaker 1 Because McCarthy and Humphrey had been pals in Minnesota. And I also found a letter in George McGovern's papers from McCarthy's campaign manager.

Speaker 1 And he says, I was literally handed envelopes of cash by one of Humphrey's backers. So there you go.
Isn't that interesting? That is interesting. Robert Kennedy faces this real uphill struggle.

Speaker 1 He's got Hubert Humphrey who's doing all these backroom deals to get delegates. And he's got McCarthy saying he's only got to see an economic.
He's a wimper.

Speaker 1 He doesn't play ice hockey. Basically, the only way he can get the nomination is he's going to have to overwhelm the convention and the delegates with his own celebrity, with his popularity.

Speaker 1 Kennedy mania. With Kennedy mania.
He will have to wage a kind of psychological campaign as much as a political one.

Speaker 1 Loads of rallies, loads of emotion, revivalism, college campuses, people crying, shaking his hand.

Speaker 1 He'll campaign in the primaries, win as many primaries as he can and go to the convention and say to the delegates, come on. Look how popular I am.
You've got to pick me.

Speaker 1 But there's a huge risk, and it's a physical risk. Because for everybody who loves Robert Kennedy, there is somebody who loathes him.
No politician in America, I think it's fair to say, is as hated.

Speaker 1 And who are the haters? On the right? On the right. Or fellow liberals? Or what? I would say mainly on the right and people who are more conservative or more square by temperament.

Speaker 1 So people who say, who don't like, who resent his wealth, they resent his celebrity and his charisma. People who are not young or poor or black or marginalized.

Speaker 1 People to whom he is not the answer to disorder, but the embodiment of it.

Speaker 1 There have always been a lot of people who didn't like the Kennedy faction, who regard them as arrogant and overbearing and all of that. They loathe Robert Kennedy

Speaker 1 with a white-hot passion. He's getting a lot of death threats.
Ethel, who you mentioned, his wife, is terrified that he will be shot.

Speaker 1 And it is clear that there are a lot of people who would welcome him being shot.

Speaker 1 When he announces his candidacy, a veteran columnist with the very American name of Westbrook Pegler, who's a columnist, it's fair to say, on the very far right, writes, with luck, some white patriot of the southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah.
Goodness. That's printed.
Yeah. That's what he thinks.
That's what, and there are people who, who absolutely think. Well, people say that political discourse today is toxic.

Speaker 1 But I mean, can't imagine that being run in the newspaper today. Do you know what J.
Edgar Hoover's partner, Clyde Tolson, said? He says it much more pithily.

Speaker 1 He says, I hope someone shoots and kills that son of a bitch. Well, I think probably we should take a break at that point.
And when we come back, we'll find out whether Clyde Tolson's wish comes true.

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Speaker 1 RFK, RFK, RFK.

Speaker 1 And then Kennedy was there. His teeth gleamed startlingly white in the television lights, and his tanned skin glowed.

Speaker 1 He looked, as he sometimes did, more vital, more handsome than any film star, the personification of brilliance and success. This last political moment went beyond politics.

Speaker 1 Kennedy was at once broker of power, magic leader, desired sexual object, protagonist of aspirations, liberator, and hero.

Speaker 1 So that's the book by the three Sunday Times journalists, an American melodrama that we've been referring to quite a lot over the course of this series.

Speaker 1 And the book is describing the scene in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, just moments before the murder of... Bobby Kennedy.

Speaker 1 And so, Dominic, we will be building up to that dramatic night in California through the second half of the episode. But before we get there, there's some twists, aren't there? Some turns.

Speaker 1 We love a twist and a turn. We do indeed.

Speaker 1 So we've got to get to the 4th of June, really to sort of mid-April, because that's when King has been shot. There's the funeral.
Everything stops a little bit because there's been the riots.

Speaker 1 There's been all the kind of hullabaloo about the death of Martin Luther King. And then the campaign kind of restarts in earnest.
And don't forget what Robert Kennedy needs to do.

Speaker 1 Somehow he needs to see off McCarthy. He needs to sweep the primaries.

Speaker 1 And he needs to build up this head of steam that will take him to the convention and persuade people to switch from Hubert Humphrey to him.

Speaker 1 So the first primary is in Indiana, and that's why he's in Indiapolis, of course, when Martin Luther King is shot. So Indiana is a tough state for Kennedy.

Speaker 1 It's a Midwestern state, but it's quite industrial.

Speaker 1 It's got a lot of steel works, got lots of blue-collar workers who are what were called in the jargon of the time white ethnics, meaning they are German or Polish or Irish or Italian or whatever.

Speaker 1 So these are not people who would instinctively be sympathetic to someone whose 10 children all have a cockatoo.

Speaker 1 No, exactly. It's traditionally been seen in Indiana as quite a conservative state.
So Nixon had won it in 1960. It had once had the largest Klan membership in America.

Speaker 1 And at the very bottom of Indiana, you're almost in the South. So it's tough for Kennedy.
And he's facing McCarthy.

Speaker 1 He's also facing, confusingly, the local governor who is standing as a stand-in effectively for Hubert Humphrey, Governor Branagan.

Speaker 1 At first, Kennedy goes to the college campuses and he's mobbed by crowds and he's got his hair is quite long and he's talking about poverty and all this stuff.

Speaker 1 And as his biographer Larry Ty says, actually, this was a bad look because Indiana worried more about crime than poverty. It wanted a father figure, not a fifth Beatle.

Speaker 1 So he's persuaded by his aides to change his look. He cuts his hair.
He puts on cheaper suits. He starts to brand himself the former Attorney General.
basically say tough on law and order. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm the Dick Tracy of the 1960 of the late 1960s. Carmel Harris.
Exactly like Carmela Harris. He's obviously, he's got loads of money because daddy's credit card is coming in for quite a pounding.

Speaker 1 So daddy's still around, isn't he? Yes, he is. He's had a stroke.
So he's kind of, but he can't really say anything or do anything. He can just sign the checks.
Except for sign the checks, exactly.

Speaker 1 So he gives that famous Martin Luther King speech, and actually he wins. So Indiana is one down and it got the result.
He wins about four out of 10 votes. He wins the majority of the delegates.

Speaker 1 And on election night, he says to his aides, this is great. I want to build, and I quote, a new coalition of Negroes and working-class white people against the union and the party establishments.

Speaker 1 But can he do that? If you look at the Indiana results, he has a few glaring weaknesses. So first of all, I said a lot of people can't stand him.
This is borne out.

Speaker 1 Three out of every five people in Indiana do not vote for him. This is in the Democratic primary.

Speaker 1 And historians historians have really dug into these figures because this, you know, his fate is so fascinating to historians.

Speaker 1 And they've discovered that among white voters, he does really, really badly. And it's basically black voters that are his margin of victory.

Speaker 1 He is locked into now this kind of core constituency of people who are quite poor, some of these kind of so-called white ethnic voters, black voters, Hispanic voters, and so on, because he's the champion of the underdog.

Speaker 1 The question is, can he pivot from that towards the center ground later on?

Speaker 1 And the problem is if you've got an election year in which the cities are going up in flames, law and order is on everybody's lips, all the papers are full of crime and chaos and all of this stuff, it's going to be really, really difficult to do.

Speaker 1 So this makes him very different from his brother. John F.
Kennedy had been the man of the centre ground, really.

Speaker 1 Nothing you could really object to. Robert Kennedy has put himself way out on what you might call, I guess, the left.
And it's quite hard for him to win over people who don't already agree with him.

Speaker 1 And you see this in the next contest. So this is in Oregon, 28th of May.
Oregon, obviously it's in the Pacific Northwest.

Speaker 1 It's a small town, farming state, very well educated, very white, very progressive, perfect for Eugene McCarthy. And Kennedy, when he gets there, he doesn't like it.

Speaker 1 He says to his aides, this place is like one giant suburb. Let's face it, I appeal best to people who have problems.
McCarthy's in his element.

Speaker 1 He's kind of going to all these little liberal arts colleges and whatnot. They've got little bookshop bookstores.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he loves it. Poetry.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 And he is, to use the vernacular much loved by our former producer, Dom Johnson. He rinces Kennedy about Vietnam and about the Cold War.

Speaker 1 And he says, look, he was part of the people who got us into this mess, right? He was a Cold War hawk. He's part of the military-industrial complex.

Speaker 1 That's a term that McCarthy is using a lot at this point. He's absolutely part of the military-industrial complex.
All his friends are in the military industrial complex.

Speaker 1 Why would you vote for someone like this who is clearly part of the problem, not part of the solution? The result? McCarthy wins 45 to 39%.

Speaker 1 The first time a Kennedy has ever lost a public election. And this is the news.
That's the headline. The Kennedys are not invincible.
They can be beaten.

Speaker 1 And this kind of guy who everyone was saying was a joke six months ago. They're not laughing now.
Yeah. The guy who's talking about the Punic Wars, he's just wiped the floor with Kennedy.

Speaker 1 So what you have now is a situation where Hubert Humphrey is still accumulating on his delegates, by the way. But the left of center of American politics is clearly being divided into.

Speaker 1 On the one hand, you have the suburban middle class, the university people, well-heeled, the guardian readers of America. They are Team Eugene McCarthy.

Speaker 1 And on the other hand, you have obviously the Camelot fan club, but you also have have black voters, Hispanics, people who feel that they are, as it were, towards the bottom, the losers of society, if you like.

Speaker 1 They are Kennedy's people. There's no way that, you know, he keeps hoping that McCarthy will drop out or will reach a compromise.

Speaker 1 McCarthy despises him so much, and of course, has all this Humphrey money, that there's no way he's ever going to do that. So it's all going to come down to California.

Speaker 1 California's primary is on the 4th of June. And California is massively important.
It's just overtaken New York York as the biggest state in the Union. And also the eyes of the world are on it.

Speaker 1 Exactly. The Summer of Love, the hippies, and all that.
Exactly. But you've got Reagan, too, haven't you? This is the great thing about California.
It's 60s America and microcosm.

Speaker 1 You've got the student protests in Berkeley. You've got riots in Watts.

Speaker 1 You have the white backlash in suburbia that propelled Reagan in. So it's almost, you can tell the whole story of 60s America through the state of California.

Speaker 1 California also sends the most delegates to the Democratic Convention. I think something like 174.

Speaker 1 So what is that? About eight or nine times New Hampshire, where McCarthy had started his campaign. The timetable of the primaries now is so compressed that it's basically a two-week campaign.

Speaker 1 And it's one of the most anticipated and keenly followed primary campaigns in American history. Because what both candidates are doing is they both double down on their appeal.

Speaker 1 McCarthy in the TV studios, very reasoned, very calm, goes to the college campuses, quoting Catholic writers of the 1910s that no one's ever heard of.

Speaker 1 But I can't imagine that being popular with the freaks.

Speaker 1 No, I don't think the freaks, not the freaks, but the sort of slightly squarer students, maybe only a little bit squarer, but students who are idealistic. Yeah, okay.
Students who are dreamers.

Speaker 1 They like the idea of this romantic underdog, a cerebral, serious person.

Speaker 1 you know, who quotes poets poems and is interested in philosophy. But the Fairy Freak brothers, they're breaking for Bobby, are they?

Speaker 1 Well, so what Bobby does, his aides say to him, do you want to row back a little bit on going all in on these massive rallies in scruffy areas and things? Is this really a wise strategy?

Speaker 1 And he says, no, no, this is what I do. So he goes all in on massive rallies.
He goes to poor areas of cities. He's got big black crowds.

Speaker 1 And one headline at the time said it was basically a contest between an evangelist and a philosopher. I think there's some truth in that.
That captures the kind of temperamental difference.

Speaker 1 Of course, if you're a real freak, Tom, you wouldn't go to either, would you? I mean, do you go to a political rally if you're a... You'd stick it to the man.
Yeah. By spliffing up, taking LSD.

Speaker 1 A sign of how exciting the campaign is that they have a TV debate, which is actually quite boring because they don't really disagree about anything, which is watched by 32 million people.

Speaker 1 So a huge audience for a debate in one primary in one state among supporters of one party. They have a disagreement about how they're going to break up the ghettos.

Speaker 1 Kennedy says you have to take jobs and housing and stuff into the ghettos. McCarthy says, no, that's kind of apartheid.
You have to kind of break them up. They then have an argument about that.

Speaker 1 Kennedy says, what, you're going to take all these black people and move them out into Orange County. It was very suburban, very conservative.

Speaker 1 And lots of people say, oh, gosh, that's a terrible dog whistle. But actually, what's so fascinating about this campaign, which is so embittered, so dramatic, is that it is pure vibes.

Speaker 1 So it's like the Roman Republic. It's totally the Roman Republic.
I was thinking of this while reading about it just now.

Speaker 1 What's the optimates and the popularis?

Speaker 1 So the people who think they are the representatives of the old privileged class, restrained, sober, cerebral, and then the other people who are sort of part of the mob. Is that the distinction?

Speaker 1 Well, no, not quite, but yes, they're peeling over the heads of the traditional elites. Yeah, a sort of populist and a patronist.
It's about style rather than about...

Speaker 1 Well, they're both elite. I mean, that's the whole thing.
Well, which you could say about these two senators, right? Yeah. So it's a good parallel.
So I think it is a good parallel.

Speaker 1 Anyway, we get to the last full day of campaigning, the 3rd of June. That day, Robert Kennedy traveled 1,200 miles.

Speaker 1 He went from Los Angeles to San Francisco, then back down to Long Beach, to Watts, to San Diego, then back to Los Angeles. Massive rallies, pressing the flesh.

Speaker 1 He's giving these speeches about his two big issues, which are the Vietnam War and poverty in America. He is absolutely shattered.
His hands are covered with blood. They're very badly bruised.

Speaker 1 He's shaken so many hands. He's, in fact, been advised to stop shaking hands because he's literally shaking hundreds, if not thousands.
I've never heard of that. Every day.
Oh, yeah. I mean...

Speaker 1 Hands bleeding because you're shaking hands so. But think about it.
If you see the footage of his rallies. Yeah, of course.
I see.

Speaker 1 He's kind of reaching out and pumping in the Kennedy way, a Camelot shake. Absolutely.
But it's very different from his brother's rallies, which are much more controlled.

Speaker 1 There's a frenzied, you know, very 1968, a frenzied... frenetic atmosphere to this.
People screaming and shouting. It's hot, obviously.
It's California in June.

Speaker 1 You know, the whole thing is really overwrought. Shea Stadium vibe.
Very much. Candlestick Park.
Yeah, he's lost his voice. He's on the verge of collapse.

Speaker 1 His team are very worried now about the danger of assassination. They've had a lot of death threats.
Ethel is very frightened.

Speaker 1 What's worse is they have terrible relations with the local police in California because the boss in Los Angeles, this guy called Sam Yorty, is not a Kennedy ally by any means.

Speaker 1 Their relations with the local police department, the LAPD, are very bad. The Kennedy people said the LAPD refused to help us.

Speaker 1 The LAPD guys said afterwards, actually the problem was the Kennedy people were arrogant and they wouldn't cooperate with us.

Speaker 1 Kennedy's own biographer, Larry Ty, says the truth is the candidate himself is part of the problem here, that he's given advice, be careful, don't be too visible.

Speaker 1 But of course, he wants to be visible because the courage is such an important, proving his courage is so important. And to McCarthy as much as to anyone else, I suppose.
Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 It's so important to him. What kind of presidential candidate hides away? Well, as we will see, Richard Nixon.
But we'll get onto that later on. So the 4th of June, polling day.

Speaker 1 If Kennedy loses, he is out. He cannot continue if he loses to McCarthy a second time.
It's a cold day, unseasonably cold. The smog over Los Angeles.
The Kennedy Mainage is staying at Malibu.

Speaker 1 They've been lent the beach house of the film director John Frankenheimer, who made the Manchurian candidate, great conspiracy, political conspiracy thriller, of course, of the 1950s.

Speaker 1 Kennedy, because he's exhausted, he sleeps in late and then he goes swimming with his family.

Speaker 1 Son David is almost drowned and he dives in to rescue him, which is a very nice, very Kennedy behavior, Tom. Unlike his younger brother, of course, Teddy Kennedy.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Chappaquidic notably failed to behave like that. That's true.
That's harsh. That's harsh.
But I can't argue with it. Anyway, they go back to the house.

Speaker 1 Thankfully, nobody has died on this occasion, unlike Chappaquidic. Critic.
And the first reports are coming through. It's looking quite good, but they're not certain.
It's going to be very close.

Speaker 1 Frankenheimer, the film director, drives Kennedy into the city. He takes a very strange meandering route because he's going to avoid the crowds, which gets everybody very stressed, more stressed.

Speaker 1 They finally get to the Ambassador Hotel at about seven o'clock. So the Ambassador Hotel is on Wilshire Boulevard.
It's in the middle of the great sprawl of Los Angeles. And it's a city landmark.

Speaker 1 It had been built in the 20s and it was famous for this nightclub called the Coconut Grove, which was the ultimate Hollywood hangout. And Frank Sinatra was always there.
Dean Martin.

Speaker 1 Yeah, all that kind of thing. But the whole thing is very faded now, right? We talked in the previous episode about Memphis.

Speaker 1 One of the things about late 60s America is that all these old places, these kind of art deco places or intersperses. You wouldn't find Jim Morrison there.
No, they're kind of faded and old-fashioned.

Speaker 1 And this is very true of the Ambassador Hotel. Up he goes to Suite 512.
He's He's got all his aides.

Speaker 1 He's got banks of telephones, you know, the whole scene that you would expect from a Kennedy campaign.

Speaker 1 The polls close at eight o'clock and the returns are very slow to come in and they're studying the returns. As expected, McCarthy is piling up votes in the small towns and in the suburbs.

Speaker 1 He is clearly going to win Northern California, the area around San Francisco. Kennedy is doing really well with the black and Hispanic voters.

Speaker 1 The question is, can he get enough of them in Los Angeles County to offset McCarthy's strength in Northern California? It's really nerve-wracking for him and his team.

Speaker 1 The results are coming in very slowly. There's computers breaking down.
It's a very, very familiar American election night scene.

Speaker 1 Finally, we get to about 11 o'clock at night. They get good news.
They have won Los Angeles County very decisively. All that time spent on those rallies has been worth it.

Speaker 1 It seems pretty clear he's going to win a narrow victory, perhaps 46 to 42%. But that's enough.

Speaker 1 Narrower than he would have liked because it keeps mccarthy in but he's now got the big mo he well or has he this is the question at this moment in his suite people are pouring over delegate counts they cannot be sure exactly how the delegates are going to go at the convention there's one delegate count that is shown to robert kennedy just before he died that is very bleak for him they say humphrey's on 994

Speaker 1 You're on 524 and a half. I don't know how you can get half a delegate, but there you go.
And McCarthy on 204. There are others that are closer, but he is still a long way behind Humphrey.

Speaker 1 Also, the polls show, counterintuitively to people who have drunk deep of the romance of the 60s, Humphrey is still by far the preferred choice of registered Democrats. They know him.

Speaker 1 He's the party man. Everybody likes him.
Kennedy only gets about a third of registered Democrats as their top choice.

Speaker 1 What's also a problem for him is the next primary is in New York. McCarthy is definitely not going to pull out.
McCarthy has already held a massive rally in Madison Square Garden.

Speaker 1 He's got loads of promises of money from people in New York.

Speaker 1 His aides are actually quite confident that he can do really well in New York, perhaps win it. So at that moment, up in his suite, Kennedy is musing with his team.

Speaker 1 Shall I make McCarthy an offer? Offer him Secretary of State if he pulls out now and I become president.

Speaker 1 I hate McCarthy and he's treated me like with total contempt, but I will offer him this prize job if he pulls out.

Speaker 1 But will he go for it anyway enough we have to go down and declare victory he takes a few moments he has a little cigar he's sitting there on the floor of his suite very nice you know very Robert Kennedy 1968 very groovy cross-legged on the floor smoking a cigar and what's even groovier is they then go down and sing Woody Guthrie songs yes so he goes downstairs to the ballroom where all his crowd all his supporters are waiting The place is absolutely packed.

Speaker 1 If you watch clips of this on YouTube, it's unbelievable how they, not only that they've managed to fit so many people into the ballroom, but the platform, this kind of dace at the end of the room, is absolutely stuffed with people singing Woody Guthrie songs.

Speaker 1 So Kennedy pushes his way onto the platform. He's surrounded by people.
He's almost dwarfed by all these people. It's an ecstatic reception.
People are screaming and shouting.

Speaker 1 It's now two minutes past midnight. And Kennedy declares victory.
We've won in California. Brilliant.
He gives, you know, the speech that you would expect.

Speaker 1 He says, we can end the divisions in the United States between black and white. We're a great country, an unselfish country, a compassionate country.
I'm going to make this my basis for running.

Speaker 1 We want to deal with these problems and we want peace in Vietnam. So my thanks to all of you and on to Chicago and let's win there.
And then he gives a V sign, peace, but also victory.

Speaker 1 And now he turns to go. Now the plan is...

Speaker 1 to go out to a second rally on a lower floor where an overspill crowd of supporters are waiting and then to go into an annex where there's a load of pressmen and and there's going to be a press conference.

Speaker 1 In the chaos as he leaves the stage because it's so crowded, his campaign manager shouts in his ear and says, it's too crowded and it's so late.

Speaker 1 We will skip the second rally and we'll go straight to the press conference. And they push their way out through the back of the ballroom through these swinging doors into the hotel kitchen.

Speaker 1 It's unbelievably crowded and in the crush behind him, Kennedy is separated from his bodyguard. His bodyguard is helping Ethel, who is heavily pregnant, off the platform.

Speaker 1 But he's he's got all his team around him. They continue to sort of push into the kitchen.
They're almost carried along by this great sort of wave of people, a huge mob of photographers behind them.

Speaker 1 The kitchens are full of the kitchen staff who have waited because they get a glimpse of, you know, America's most famous political celebrity.

Speaker 1 And as they go through the kitchen, Kennedy is reaching to shake hands. They go through into a kind of corridor, sort of.
pantry style corridor. There's an ice machine.

Speaker 1 There's a row of heated steel cupboards. It's just yards to go now until the room where the newspaper men are waiting.

Speaker 1 As they say in an American melodrama, the Sunday Times guys, it was like an alleyway in a ship. It was like the corridor of the Titanic or something.

Speaker 1 It's got naked metal, cooking smells, yellow light. It's very kind of unsettling atmosphere and packed with people.

Speaker 1 As Kennedy passes through into this room, a radio journalist is asking him about the fact that he's so far behind Humphrey and the delegate count. And he's turning his head to talk to this guy.

Speaker 1 At the same time, he's reaching out in another direction to shake hands with a Mexican bus boy, or as you would say in English, a kitchen assistant called Juan Romero.

Speaker 1 And at this point, as he's reaching out, somebody pushes through the crowd. And this is a young man who has been waiting there all this time.

Speaker 1 People say he was wearing a blue sweatshirt and he had what they called a sickly expression on his face. And the young man is holding a gun and he fires.
A number of shots, how many is contested.

Speaker 1 There is a huge melee. People are piling onto this bloke, throwing themselves onto him.
Get the gun, get the gun. The radio reporters are recording this.

Speaker 1 So we have the audio footage of people screaming and shouting, get the gun,

Speaker 1 break his fingers, get the gun.

Speaker 1 Kennedy had fallen back against the ice machine, and then he's down on the floor. He's still conscious and his eyes are open, but people see there is blood coming out from behind his ear.

Speaker 1 Juan Romero, the Mexican busboy, drops to his side and Kennedy says to him, whispers, is everybody okay? Romero, yes, everybody's okay.

Speaker 1 But now the blood is absolutely flooding out from behind Kennedy's ear. In fact, what has happened is that he has been shot three times, once in the head and twice in his back.

Speaker 1 Five other people were shot too in the chaos, reporters and campaign volunteers, but none of them injured so badly.

Speaker 1 Romero reaches into his pocket and gets out some rosary beads and presses them into Kennedy's hand and he cradles his head and his hand is now covered with blood because there's so much blood coming from his head.

Speaker 1 Ethel is now caught up with her husband and she's crying and she says, give him room to breathe, give him room to breathe. And then she whispers to Robert Kennedy, I'm with you, I'm with you, my baby.

Speaker 1 One of Kennedy's friends, who was a journalist called Pete Hamill, said at this point that Kennedy had this strange smile on his face, like he was very... A kind of sweet, accepting smile.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Then there are paramedics pushing their way through the crowd and the paramedics are straight to his side and they immediately try to lift him to get him out.

Speaker 1 And at that, that, Kennedy says, he just says very quietly, oh, no, don't lift me. And those are the last words he ever says, because he passes out.

Speaker 1 So Kennedy is taken out of the hotel and rushed to the, eventually to the Good Samaritan hospital. And news flashes around the country.
I will just say this.

Speaker 1 McCarthy is in his hotel room writing his concession speech. And his campaign manager told me that when...

Speaker 1 the news reached McCarthy that Kennedy had been shot, his first reaction was to say, he brought it upon himself.

Speaker 1 A day goes by, the nation is waiting, people are stunned and shocked by this.

Speaker 1 But it's not until the 6th, at 2 o'clock in the morning, that Kennedy's press secretary comes out of the hospital, and again, you can see it on YouTube, absolutely stricken.

Speaker 1 And he says to the waiting reporters that he has died. In fact, he had effectively died.
When he was shot, like his brother. Exactly.
And indeed, like Martin Luther King.

Speaker 1 Now, to compare it with the shootings of John F.

Speaker 1 Kennedy and Martin Luther King, one difference is that we know precisely who the gunman was beyond any possible doubt because the people threw themselves on top of him at the time and fought to get the gun out of his hand.

Speaker 1 He was 24 years old and he was called Sahan Sahan. He was Palestinian, born in Jerusalem in 1944, not as you often read, a Palestinian Muslim, but a Palestinian Christian.

Speaker 1 He said later that he had been traumatized by the war of the late 1940s, that his brother had been run over by an Israeli military vehicle. I guess it's just about possible.

Speaker 1 He might just remember the late 1940s if you're four or five years old. His family had moved to the United States when he was 12, and he'd been to school in Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 He was very short and slight and a loner, a drifter. He'd been in and out of various churches.
He'd been a Baptist, a Seventh-day Adventist. He'd even been a Rosicrucian, would you believe?

Speaker 1 So all these people are drifters. Yeah, well, there's a pattern, right?

Speaker 1 The assassins. Of course.
Sahan Sahan said later that he had been radicalized, as it were, by the Six-Day War of 1967, which had begun exactly one year before the day he assassinated Robert Kennedy.

Speaker 1 He later told David Frost in an interview that he shot.

Speaker 1 uh Kennedy because of, quote, his support for Israel and his deliberate attempt to send 50 fighter jets to Israel to obviously do harm to the Palestinians.

Speaker 1 And we know that he wrote in his diary about his determination to eliminate RFK. Kennedy must die before June the 5th.

Speaker 1 The reason is because he wants to shoot Kennedy to mark the anniversary of the six-day war. Again, amazing.
Another parallel with 2024, the salience of the war in Israel and Gaza.

Speaker 1 Exactly, as providing a kind of background to what's going on.

Speaker 1 He admitted his guilt straight away and he was sentenced to death. That sentence was commuted to life imprisonment when California scrapped the death penalty.

Speaker 1 And then he he decided that he wasn't guilty after all. And said that actually he'd been framed or he'd been brainwashed or whatever.
So, you know, I told, said that that director.

Speaker 1 Kind of Manchurian candidate thing. Again, another weird link there.

Speaker 1 That the main conspiracy theory, as far as I can tell, I mean, there are lots of different conspiracy theories about Sahan Sahan, but one of the most popular is that he was in some way part of a CIA experiment and had been brainwashed, and that this was all a CIA plot to kill Kennedy.

Speaker 1 I don't want to offend listeners who believe it, but it's not true. But I have to say, I regard it as totally untrue.
Sohan Sahan is still alive. He's 80 years old.

Speaker 1 Ethel Kennedy is still alive. As is Ethel, yeah, 96.
So Hans Sahan has made 17 different appeals for parole, which have all been turned down. In 2021, he had an unexpected support.

Speaker 1 All the Kennedy children said, please don't let this guy out, except one. That was RFK Jr.

Speaker 1 the eccentric erstwhile presidential candidate who said, no, no, I support his campaign. Let him out.
But they didn't. The final question.
What if? You know, the great question of Kennedy's life.

Speaker 1 When he was taken out of the kitchen, the journalists noticed that somebody had scrawled graffiti on one of the walls. They didn't know it was a coincidence or what it was.

Speaker 1 They had scrawled the words, the once and future king. So that's a camelottale.
Camelotta.

Speaker 1 Exactly. And that's his enduring reputation among Liberal Democrats, I think, or 60s veterans, that he is the great lost leader, the martyr, the champion of the underdog.
And if he had lived,

Speaker 1 maybe everything would have been different. That this is a real turning point in history and that the political course of American life.

Speaker 1 Do you think that resonance would be even higher, you know, if he'd been shot by a white supremacist or somebody from a less marginalized background than a Palestinian? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, it would be a better story, right? It would be a more Hollywood ending. It would have more resonance, wouldn't it? Because Martin Luther King is shot by a white supremacist.
Yes, he is.

Speaker 1 And that obviously amplifies the kind of the resonance of his fate. Yeah, I agree with you.
As it is, and I know a lot of listeners, American listeners in particular, will disagree with me about this.

Speaker 1 I don't think there was any prospect of him being president in 1968. First of all, I think it's incredibly unlikely that he would have been the Democratic nominee.

Speaker 1 So many people didn't like him in the party.

Speaker 1 I think it's highly implausible that he would ever have overhauled Humphrey's lead among the delegates and defied the union leaders and the city bosses and people who generally controlled the convention.

Speaker 1 If he had been the the nominee, again, I know a lot of listeners would agree with this, I think Nixon would have beaten him in 1968 in the general election.

Speaker 1 And even if he had then run in 1972, or if he'd just run in 1972, I think Nixon would have beaten him in 1972 as well. And I think the reason is that Americans craved order and stability.

Speaker 1 And a lot of middle America would have seen Kennedy as a threat to those things rather than as the answer to their problems. problems.

Speaker 1 And I think the thing that people often say is, you're discounting the Kennedy Mystique, the Kennedy celebrity.

Speaker 1 But he'd already lost one election to McCarthy, who's not exactly the best candidate in the world.

Speaker 1 And what is more, his brother Ted, if you believe in the Kennedy Mystique, his brother Ted couldn't even beat Jimmy Carter in the Democratic primaries in 1980.

Speaker 1 But he was very damaged goods by that point. He was.
But if Tom, I think if you can't beat Jimmy Carter in 1980, you can't beat anyone, frankly. I know that sounds very harsh.

Speaker 1 I don't want to stamp on Carter. Anyway, because I think there'll be lots of people who say, I think that's rubbish.
I think Kennedy Kennedy could have won.

Speaker 1 And maybe we can discuss this in a bonus episode at some point for our club members. So, LBJ is out.
Martin Luther King has been murdered. Robert Kennedy has been murdered.
And we're not even

Speaker 1 halfway through the year. So there's a lot to come.
We have the Chicago Convention. We have the campaign of George Wallace, the new populism.

Speaker 1 And we have one of the great comebacks in American history: the return from the dead of the ultimate Lazarus, Richard Milhouse Nixon. Well, that is exciting.

Speaker 1 But next episode, we'll be with the Yippies. So yippe for that.

Speaker 1 And you can hear it straight away if you want to by signing up at therestohistory.com. And you'll be able to hear all the rest of the series.
If you don't want to, fine.

Speaker 1 It will be coming in due course. And we will be back very soon.
Missing you already. Goodbye.
Goodbye.