Here is a March, 1968 memo from White House aide Harry McPherson telling Lyndon Johnson that Robert Kennedy is on track to beat you for the Democratic presidential nomination.
I agree. I am in the camp that after Robert Kennedy won the California Democratic primary, he would very probably have gotten the political endorsement of Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago and this would have brought along a critical mass of other big city mayors endorsing RFK for president. That combined with RFK's grassroots support would have given him the Democratic nomination and I think he would have beaten Nixon in the 1968 presidential election.
Although I am 100% sure that Lyndon Johnson murdered JFK, I do not think that he or anyone else engaged in a conspiracy to murder RFK although LBJ was euphorically happy at the death of his mortal enemy Robert Kennedy. I think that a Sirhan Sirhan alone murdered RFK and he did it because he was an enraged Palestinian who did like like Robert Kennedy's support for sending fighter jets to Israel. In Sirhan's mind, that was an epic act of betrayal to the Palestinian people.
Robert
Kennedy was on the road to the 1968 Democratic nomination when he was
assassination.
LBJ aide Harry McPherson believed it.
Richard Nixon believed it.
Hubert Humphrey believed it.
Mayor Richard Daley was a 70% chance to endorse RFK according to
Daley’s son Bill Daley: that would have brought along other big city mayors into Kennedy’s
camp.
RFK aide Paul Schrade was there when the Daley endorsement call to RFK came in (see March 2022 interview below with Robert Morrow)
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/09/02/sirhan-sirhan-robert-kennedy-assassination-508476
[“How Robert F.
Kennedy’s Assassination Derailed American Politics,” Larry Tye, Politico,
9-2-2021]
Sirhan Sirhan’s shooting rampage
in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen half a century ago did far more than end the
life of Robert Francis Kennedy. It extinguished a romantic vision for America
and beyond that made Bobby the rare optimist in an age of political cynicism,
and would later inspire Barack Obama’s spirited run for the White House. “Each
time a man stands up for an ideal,” RFK reminded us, “he sends forth a tiny
ripple of hope, 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.”
No wonder his audiences
swooned. And no surprise that most of Bobby’s children are outraged by
California’s recent recommendation to parole his assassin.
Sirhan Sirhan may seem like a character plucked from the
confounding chaos of the 1960s, one with little relevance to our current
moment. But revisiting the campaign he upended, it’s clear not just why his
potential freedom is generating such furor, but also why his is a story of today.
To understand that resonance, the best starting point is June
4, 1968, when California was staging a bare-knuckled presidential primary that
Bobby knew would decide whether he had a political future. With the polls
staying open until 8, election results came in slowly and differently on each
network. CBS had Kennedy ahead. NBC was less sure. But buoyed by unprecedented
turnouts and majorities in Black and Mexican American districts, Bobby scored a
clear-cut victory with 46.3 percent of the vote, compared to 41.8 for Minnesota
Sen. Eugene McCarthy and 12 percent for unpledged delegates. That was enough
for Bobby to go on TV and quietly claim victory, and for journalists and
friends gathered across the hall to start the party.
For the first time since he’d jumped in late to the race,
Bobby believed he could do it. The dream — “make room for the next leader of
the free world,” he’d tease as he sprinted from hotel showers wrapped in a
towel — seemed less distant following the win in California and another that
day in South Dakota. Battle plans were being charted that very night for the
campaign ahead. There’d be a single-minded press in his adopted state of New
York. A full-page ad in The New York Times would feature photos of AFL-CIO boss
George Meany and segregationist Governor Lester Maddox of Georgia — both
staunchly anti-Bobby — asking rhetorically whether insiders like them should be
allowed to pick the next president. The candidate would head overseas next,
showing his gravitas by meeting with the Pope and foreign leaders. Nobody,
least of all Bobby, minimized the obstacles remaining. But he knew the threat
was over from McCarthy, whose defining and sole issue was opposing the Vietnam
War. The only one who could deny him the nomination was Vice President Hubert
Humphrey, or, as the comedian and mock presidential candidate Pat Paulsen had
dubbed him earlier that evening, Herbert Humphrey. “I’m going to chase
Herbert’s ass all over the country,” Bobby vowed.
Before he went anywhere, Bobby
took a quiet moment. Sitting on the floor of his hotel room, arms around his
knees, he lit a victory cigar and contemplated. At the start he hadn’t been
sure whether he was running as Joe Kennedy’s son, Jack’s brother, or President
Lyndon Johnson’s avowed enemy. He still was all of those, but had found a voice
and two uncomplicated motivations of his own: to end the war and end poverty.
Both were doable, he told himself, as aides pressed him to head down to the
ballroom. Legions of restless believers were there singing “This Land Is Your
Land,” the Woody Guthrie ballad that Bobby had promised to make America’s
anthem.
His valedictory speech began
with a nod to Don Drysdale, the Los Angeles Dodgers ace “who pitched his sixth
straight shutout tonight, and I hope that we have as good fortune in our
campaign.” (Bobby was one of the few men in America who actually didn’t know
who the future Hall of Famer was.) Then he got serious: “I think we can end the
divisions within the United States . . . whether it’s between Blacks and
whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups, or over
the war in Vietnam.” The crowd loved it, shouting “Bobby Power!” He ended on
another light note, saying that “Mayor Yorty has just sent me a message that
we’ve been here too long already. So my thanks to all of you, and on to
Chicago, and let’s win there.” Giving a thumbs-up, then flashing the
V-for-victory sign, he turned to leave for a reception on a lower level
followed by a press conference.
But plans had changed. Aides
decided to skip the reception and go directly to the press conference, where
reporters were eager to file their stories. The shortest route was the way he’d
come in, through the waiters’ swinging doors and into the kitchen and pantry.
In the pushing of the crowd, Bobby got separated from ex-FBI agent Bill Barry,
his devoted and solitary bodyguard, who was helping Kennedy’s pregnant wife
Ethel off the podium. Nobody worried, since the candidate was among friends,
with a busboy reaching for his hand as a cluster of reporters, photographers,
and aides trailed behind. Past the rusty ice machine, 30 feet from the media
room, a curly-haired young man wearing a pale blue sweatshirt was standing
unnoticed on a low tray stacker, waiting for his opening. It was shortly after
midnight and Andrew West, a reporter for the Mutual Radio Network, was asking
Bobby his plans for catching up to Humphrey’s delegate lead. Bobby: “It just
goes back to the struggle for it . . .”
That was as
far as he got. The shooter stepped from his hiding place, reached straight
ahead with his right arm, and started firing a .22-caliber revolver. A single
shot was followed by a volley – pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Just how many
shots were fired, at what range and angle, would become grist for another
assassination conspiracy mill. Bobby lurched against the ice machine, then
sagged to the ground, lying face-up on the grimy concrete floor. He was
conscious, eyes wide open, as blood oozed behind his right ear. “Is everybody
okay?” he whispered. The busboy, Juan Romero, placed rosary beads in Bobby’s
hand and tried to cushion his head as Ethel pleaded with the pressing crowd to
“give him room to breathe.” Then she turned to her husband and said softly,
“I’m with you, my baby.” The scene was bedlam. “Get the gun,” pleaded West, the
radio man. “You monster! You’ll die for this!” a kitchen worker yelled from his
perch atop the steam table. The only one who seemed serene was Bobby himself —
“a kind of sweet accepting smile on his face,” recalled the journalist and
Kennedy friend Pete Hamill, “as if he knew it would all end this way.”
Medics finally arrived, and as
the ambulance drove away, campaign volunteers sobbed and prayed as a large man
pounded a hotel pillar with his bloody right fist, shouting the questions being
echoed across America: “Why, God, why? Why again? Why another Kennedy?”
The next 25 hours were a
hellish whirlwind. Police, who showed up at the hotel about fifteen minutes
after the shooting, quickly assembled evidence that the gunman was a
24-year-old Palestinian with the improbable name Sirhan Sirhan who hated Israel
and hated the Kennedys for supporting Israel. His shooting spree wounded five
others along with Bobby, whose wounds were recognized from the first to be
life-threatening. Friends rounded up the children. 12-year-old son David, who’d
always been scared to death that his father would be shot like Uncle Jack,
learned by watching the election-night proceedings on TV that his nightmare had
come true. Kerry, who was just 8, woke early the following morning to watch
Bugs Bunny; “a news flash interrupted the cartoon,” she recalled. “That’s how I
learned my father had been shot.”
At two o’clock the following
morning campaign press secretary Frank Mankiewicz appeared in the media room across
from the hospital with the announcement everyone dreaded. “Senator Robert
Francis Kennedy died at 1:44 a.m. today, June 6, 1968 … He was 42 years old.”
Back at the Ambassador Hotel, a red rose marked the spot on the blood-stained
pantry floor where the senator was felled. On the wall above was a
hand-lettered cardboard sign that might have been up for weeks but seemed
especially appropriate now: “The Once and Future King.”
53 years
later, the question still haunts: While Bobby never was the king, could he have
been? Research I did for my biography of this iconic Kennedy convinces me the
answer is a resounding yes.
That evidence begins with what
Bobby really meant that night when he uttered “on to Chicago.” Journalists and
most everyone else assumed he was referring to that summer’s Democratic
Convention in the Windy City, but this last progressive icon was a master
political maestro, and he wasn’t about to wait until August. What he actually was signaling
is that he intended to stop in Chicago on his way from Los Angeles back East,
and to meet quietly with Mayor Richard J. Daley, who’d help Jack Kennedy win
the White House eight years before. “I would say there was a 70 percent chance
he was going to endorse him,” says Bill Daley, son of the legendary mayor and
chief of staff to President Obama, who was privy to and told me about the
planned rendezvous. “Then the momentum would have shifted to where other people
like my dad who were still left would have been hard pressed not to go there.”
Bobby knew that Humphrey was counting not on primary voters but on
kingmakers like Daley to anoint him the nominee. I think RFK was right about
the way to upend the vice president’s plans and nail down the nomination for
himself. Daley would woo
other Democratic leaders into the Kennedy camp, justifying the move by pointing
to Bobby’s wide margin over Humphrey among actual voters. The party would then
unite behind a Kennedy-Humphrey ticket much as it had four years before behind
former adversaries JFK and LBJ. And the Chicago convention would have had none
of the angry left-wing riots that ended up dooming Humphrey’s campaign and
leading to a bitter third-party bid by George Wallace, who captured 13.5
percent of the vote in an election where Nixon edged Humphrey by just 0.7
percent.
That’s not history’s
conventional version of what would have come next, but it is the read of
crucial insiders from back then. “Had Bobby lived,” said Humphrey, “I think there’d have been a Democrat
in the White House.” And on that night of the California primary, Nixon told
his family, “It sure looks like we’ll be going against Bobby.” Nixon
knew that it was Bobby even more than Jack, who’d orchestrated the Kennedy win
over him in 1960, and that nobody was better situated than Bobby to answer Nixon
and Wallace on fighting crime and restitching the social safety net into a
trampoline.
Michael Harrington was
contemplating that and more as he looked out the window of the 21-car train
that carried Robert F. Kennedy’s corpse from his funeral in New York to his
burial in Washington that sticky Saturday afternoon in June 1968. Girl Scouts
lined the Penn Central tracks next to Little Leaguers. Factory workers stood
alongside rag pickers and nuns, stretching on tiptoes to see. Husbands embraced
sobbing wives. They arrived in yellow pick-up trucks and flotillas of boats,
wearing Bermuda shorts and hair curlers, tossing roses. Outside Newark, three
firemen saluted from the deck of their vessel, The John F. Kennedy. There were
brass bands, police bands, school bands, and Catholic bands. Hands were cupped
in prayer or held over hearts, hats off.
It was Bobby’s America, and Harrington couldn’t keep from
staring. “Every time I did, I began to cry. The sorrowing faces along the way
were a mirror of my own feelings,” said the author whose writings helped launch
the War on Poverty and who saw Bobby as “the man who actually could have
changed the course of American history.” As for those with him inside the rail
cars — politicians of the old school and new, intellectuals and trade
unionists, Black, Irish, Chicano, and Jewish citizens — they were, said Harrington,
“the administration of Robert Kennedy that was never going to be.”
POSTSCRIPT REPLY FROM JOSEPH PALERMO in an email dated 3/10/2022 to Robert Morrow:
Joseph Palermo:
QUOTE
Yes, in my 2001 book about RFK I found that Daley was going to support him for the nomination as early as February 8, 1968 (when RFK visited Chicago and appeared with Daley at an event where he voiced his interpretation of the Tet Offensive) - there are many reasons why Daley was going to support RFK (I'd say there was a 100 percent chance Daley would endorse RFK)- Joseph
UNQUOTE
Paul Schrade, age 97 in 2022, email on 3/10/22 to Robert Morrow:
QUOTE
ROBERT…Daley was 100% for RFK…I was with Bob
when the call came in that night…in solidarity… PAUL
UNQUOTE
Robert Morrow interview with Paul Shrade, 3/10/22 at 5:30PM CST: Paul
Shrade told me he was at the Ambassador Hotel and WITH Robert Kennedy in Los
Angeles on the night of RFK’s win in the California primary when the call came
in from Mayor Richard Daley saying he was going to support Robert Kennedy for
the Democratic nomination.
97-year-old Paul Schrade’s 3-12-2022 email to Robert Morrow on how
he knew that Mayor Richard Daley was going to support Robert Kennedy for President.
QUOTE
I
remember tracking Mayor Daley prior to RFK entering the race as he reported to
LBJ on Bob’s scouting for support. The night of Bob’s victory Ken O’Donnell
called Bob and reported Daley was in. Later Bob said Daley had called and would
support him at the Chicago Convention.
UNQUOTE
Paul Schrade bio: https://www.huffpost.com/author/paul-schrade
Paul Schrade
Friend to Robert F. Kennedy
Paul Schrade may be better known in American
history because he was severely wounded when his friend Robert Kennedy was
assassinated in 1968 in Los Angeles. Why he was with Kennedy that night is much
more important to him than what happened to him there.
He was there because in the sixties their agendas merged in civil rights, the
farm workers struggle, building community unions in the inner cities and the
effort to end the war against the people of Viet Nam. They were both activists.
Robert Kennedy was his hope for a better and more peaceful world. He served as
Labor Chair and was elected as a convention delegate in Kennedy’s California
campaign,
A college dropout in 1948, Schrade found the excitement of re-organizing the
new post-war factory workforce at North American Aviation in Los Angeles most
fulfilling. He was president of United Auto Workers Local 887 during the strike
of 16,000 workers in 1953. Major gains in wages and benefits were won for the
first time for all aerospace workers paid far less than autoworkers in the same
union. He then served four years as United Auto Workers President Walter
Reuther’s administrative assistant in Detroit.
As the UAW’s elected Western states director in the 1960’s traditional
organizing and bargaining were high priorities as the union grew to 90,000
members in California but social movements were supported too.
In 1965 he joined with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta in the farm workers
struggle. He helped arrange for Robert Kennedy’s two visits to Delano to
support the farm workers, who became his winning margin in his 1968 campaign
for the presidency
He initiated the formation of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee
(WLCAC) and the East Los Angeles Community Union (TELACU in 1965. Robert
Kennedy, when Senator visited Watts and used the WLCAC as a model for the
Bedford Restoration Project.
He marched with Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma and Los Angeles and with Cesar
Chavez and Dolores Huerta. He joined the anti-war movement and the UAW provided
draft counseling for union members and their sons.
In 1975, as one of the shooting victims, he filed lawsuits with a team of
lawyers and Kennedy supporters to re-open the investigation of the fatal
shooting of Robert Kennedy in the Ambassador Hotel. They confirmed that a
second gunman was involved. Their work continues with new forensic evidence
discovered in FBI files in 2005.
In 1987 LAUSD President Jackie Goldberg proposed building a school on the
abandoned Ambassador Hotel site owned by Donald Trump. She agreed that the
school curriculum would be one that would carry on the peace and social legacy
of Robert Kennedy.
He coordinated the RFK-12 Community Task Force based at CARECEN with parents,
students and community organizations. MALDEF became the primary organizer of
legal and political strategy and support. Big supporters were the Dolores
Huerta Foundation, the Chavez Foundation and the AFL-CIO.
In 2011 the RFK Community Schools were opened to 4000 children from the
neighborhood now able to walk to their own schools freed from forced bussing
and overcrowded schools. This new school campus has five high schools, three
middle schools and three elementary schools with six different curricula and a
peace and social justice component. Several members of the Robert Kennedy
family attended the opening. For his work his name is on the RFK school
library.
He is a charter member of the Dolores Huerta Foundation and the WLCAC and
received the Chavez Legacy Award on behalf of the United Auto Workers union’s
support of the farm workers struggle starting in 1965.
Paul is married to Monica Weil formerly an attorney and mediator. For many
years Monica also worked in opera production and recently as president of the
LA Opera League. She also partners with him on peace and social justice actions
and on the strategy to solve the Robert Kennedy case.
His love of good food has sent him to cooking school with Guliano Bugialli, and
home-test breads for Nancy Silverton’s BREADS of LA BREA BAKERY. He supports
growers at local farmers markets and cultivates his own vegetable and herb
garden at their home. This was the work of his ancestors who were farmers and
bakers not into progressive political and social action.
“Remembering Robert Kennedy” by Paul Schrade, 11-20-2013:”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/robert-f-kennedy-birthday_b_4306016
