Page 163 of Jackie

1968

“There’s too much risk,” I tell Bobby. “Just come out against the war. That’s all you really want. You can do that and not run. You don’t need to run.”

He’s distanced himself from me. Maybe Ethel, maybe the rumors about Onassis, maybe I haven’t behaved as a Kennedy widow should. He still comes to see us. He is good with the children, always. He tells them stories of Jack.

There are fewer instances when we’re alone. But in a crowded room, at a party or event, he’ll draw close to me. Almost like he can’t help it.

He’s told me he’s been tracking the breakdown of American support for Vietnam. In October, one hundred thousand protesters marched on the Pentagon. They descended on the mall, chanting songs, waving banners. They desecrated draft cards, threatened to dye the Potomac red and burn the cherry trees. By February, after the Tet Offensive and the Battle of Saigon, a Gallup poll showed that more than 50 percent of the country disapproved of Johnson’s handling of the war. Johnson was nearly beaten by Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary. He won by less than three hundred votes.

Four days later, on March 16, Bobby stands in the Caucus Room of the Old Senate Office Building to announce he is entering the race. For president.

—

At a party at Diana Vreeland’s brilliant red “garden in hell” apartment, I take Arthur Schlesinger aside.

“I know this is what everyone wants,” I say. “But do you know what I think will happen to Bobby if he wins? The same thing that happened to Jack. There’s too much hate in this country. Bobby doesn’t believe it. He isn’t cynical or fatalistic like I am. He imagines he can change their minds.”

—

When I hear the news that Martin Luther King has been shot in Memphis, I’m on my way out the door to a concert. I cancel.

Bobby calls the next day.

“It could have been you,” I tell him.

He’d been boarding a plane on his way to a campaign rally in Indianapolis when he heard. By the time they landed in Indiana, King was dead. His team told him to cancel the rally. There would be riots, they said. It was too dangerous to go out and speak to a Black crowd. Bobby went anyway. From the back of a flatbed truck, he spoke to them, about King, about nonviolence, about the need for compassion, justice, and love.

“It could have been you, Bobby,” I say again.

He comes to see me that evening, and I ask him to tell me more about that night King was shot. He tells me his team gave him a speech they’d written, but he didn’t use it. He just stood up there in the back of that truck, the crowd of faces around him, wet with tears of mourning and rage, and he told them about his own grief, the feeling he’d lived with since Jack died. It was the first time he’d spoken publicly about Jack.

“I know it’s not the same, Jackie. The world is white and what I know of suffering will never be the same as what they know, but I needed to give them something that was real, at least to me. I didn’t do it to win their vote.”

Watching his face as he tells me this, the brutal earnestness, I understand this is what makes him different. Why he’s always been different. Even from Jack.

He tells me that when he spoke to them that night, he quoted from the book I’d given him, The Greek Way. Lines from Aeschylus, but he got them wrong.

“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair—”

“It’s despite,” I say, “not despair.”

“I know. I didn’t mean to change it. I’ve always felt it should have been despair.”

I love him very much in that moment. The way he is with me right now, the way he was that day years ago when I woke up to his face in the hospital. I’d just lost my baby, Arabella, and I woke up to the pale walls of the hospital room and his face so strangely bright, his eyes harsh and torn and blue when he told me the baby was gone, and he sat with me while I cried, holding my hand like he’d never let go. Everything was simple then between us. He was with me in that devastation, the loss of the baby, Jack’s absence. He was there, holding my anger and my sorrow. It was uncomplicated, pure. Everyone knew their place, their role.

“Coretta Scott King reached out,” he says now. I feel my breath tighten. I know what’s coming. “They’re asking if you and I will attend the funeral.”

“What did you say?”

“That it might be hard for you.”

“Yes.”

“Will you go?” he says.

“I don’t want to.”

“That’s what I thought.”

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