Authors: Lamar Waldron
mary states, but the danger he faced must have been even more apparent
to him in the wake of Dr. King’s murder, particularly because the assas-
sin was still eluding authorities. In spite of the risk and what had hap-
pened to his brother, Bobby insisted on always riding in an open car. Just
as he wore JFK’s clothes at times, perhaps Bobby reasoned that if JFK had
been brave enough to ride in an open limousine through Tampa while
a reported assassin was at large, he could do no less. A week after Dr.
King’s murder, Bobby was visiting Lansing, Michigan, when he learned
that police had spotted a gunman on a roof. An aide wanted to close
the blinds in Bobby’s suite, but the Senator replied, “Don’t close them.
If they’re going to shoot, they’ll shoot.” When he left the hotel, Bobby
made a point to step out of his limo and into the crowd.2
Bobby Kennedy traveled with only one security man, trusted aide Bill
Barry (no relation to the
Miami News
reporter of the same name), who
was unarmed. Barry says that Bobby told him he didn’t want armed pro-
tection, or any intrusive or obvious security men or police. Walter Sheri-
dan worried constantly about Bobby’s lack of security, saying, “There
wasn’t anything you could do about it because he was uncontrollable,
and if you tried to protect him he’d get mad as hell.”3
Even before the King assassination, the press had been worried about
Bobby’s safety. After Bobby’s very first campaign stop, journalist John J.
Lindsay told Jimmy Breslin and a group of reporters that while Bobby
“has the stuff to go all the way . . . he’s not going to go all the way. The
reason is that somebody is going to shoot him. I know it and you know
it. Just as sure as we’re sitting here, somebody is going to shoot him. He’s
out there now waiting for him.” According to Thurston Clarke, “one by
one, the other reporters agreed. But none asked the most heartbreaking
question: Did Kennedy himself know it?”4
Bobby was all too aware of the risks. Though they saw each other
infrequently, Bobby had maintained his friendship with Harry Williams.
Harry saw reporter Haynes Johnson occasionally and was friends with
a Kennedy aide, which enabled Harry to meet privately with Bobby
amidst the Senator’s hectic campaign schedule. When Bobby and Harry
spoke, the subject of Almeida and his wife and children always came up,
but the CIA was still supporting them. Bobby’s view on Cuba had soft-
ened since he and Williams had worked together, while Harry had no
desire to reenter the world of covert Cuban operations, now increasingly
the province of violent bombers like Felipe Rivero and Luis Posada.
Harry had not sought out Bobby to encourage him in his run for
president in the hope that Bobby would reinvigorate the action to topple
Castro. Instead, Harry had a different message for his old friend. Hav-
ing seen the coverage of Bobby’s huge crowds, Harry said, “You got
thousands of people around you [but] if some son of a bitch comes out
. . . and just starts shooting . . . ” Harry didn’t have any specific infor-
mation, but said that “with all these Mafia people [still around], they
[are] going to try to kill you.”5 At a small Hollywood gathering with
Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine, novelist Romain Gary essentially
told Bobby the same thing. Bobby’s simple reply to Gary was “That’s
the chance I have to take.”6
Some people hoped for what Bobby’s friends feared. William Sulli-
van, the number-three man in the FBI at the time, wrote that in late April
1968, Bobby’s “name came up at a top-level FBI meeting. Hoover was
not present, and Clyde Tolson was presiding in his absence. I was one of
eight men who heard Tolson respond to the mention of Kennedy’s name
by saying, ‘I hope someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch.’” Other
conservatives echoed that sentiment: According to Thurston Clarke,
“the right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler . . . welcomed the pos-
sibility that, as he put it, ‘some white patriot of the Southern tier will
spatter [Kennedy’s] spoonful of brains in public premises before the
snow flies.’”7
Bobby had many enemies because of his stance on civil rights and
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
migrant workers, as well as his fights against Hoffa and organized crime.
Among the remaining primaries, California was the biggest prize, and
Bobby planned to make several trips there in April and May, before
its June 4, 1968, primary. Migrant labor leader César Chávez, head-
quartered in the small California city of Delano, had recovered from
the nearly monthlong hunger strike he’d staged there. César Chávez
worked across California to build support for Kennedy’s campaign
among migrants, Hispanics, and college students. When some of the
students asked Chávez where Bobby had been when they were in New
Hampshire, working for McCarthy in the first primary, Chávez always
replied that Bobby “was walking with me in Delano!”
California’s rich agricultural areas, like Delano, depended on cheap
migrant laborers who often lived in appalling conditions. Delano police
officials would later say that “[Bobby] Kennedy has been to Delano three
times in this past year. Prior to Kennedy’s visits the area was quiet and
untroubled; however, since his visits there have been riots, strikes, and
picketing. The wealthy farmers in the area all hate Kennedy [but] when
Kennedy came to visit Chávez on his hunger strike, he refused to allow
any local police to furnish him [with] any protection.”8
In late April or early May, two Delano police officials overheard a
boast by a wealthy local farmer, Roy Donald Murray, who frequently
gambled large sums in Las Vegas. In uncensored files, quoted here for
the first time and detailed later, Murray said that “he had pledged $2,000
. . . to be utilized to pay off a contract to kill Senator Kennedy,” and that
the Mafia “was behind the letting of the contract.”9
In April 1968, the results of Bobby’s most recent attempt to expose Carlos
Marcello were on America’s newsstands. The press hadn’t followed up
on Bobby’s previous leaked exposé about Marcello, in the September
1967 issues of
Life
magazine, so Bobby couldn’t resist helping a young
writer for
Ramparts
magazine, Michael Dorman, who was working on
an article concerning Marcello. Bobby had begun talking with Dorman
back in February 1968, around the time he had first decided to enter the
presidential race.10
Dorman’s article was about a longtime political-payoff man, Jack Hal-
fen, who provided Mafia money to politicians in both parties. Bobby had
first started investigating Halfen in 1961, and Carlos Marcello was one of
several prominent mob bosses Halfen worked for. The politicians Halfen
claimed he funneled money to included John Connally, Supreme Court
Justice Tom Clark, Texas Congressman Albert Thomas—and Lyndon
Johnson, while he was a leading senator in the 1950s. Halfen claimed
to have funneled a million dollars to LBJ while he was in the Senate, to
block certain gambling legislation.11
According to Gus Russo, Bobby had one of his aides assist Dorman
with his research, and the journalist “received RFK’s personal attention,
meeting with the Senator in his office [where] ‘Senator Kennedy was
enthusiastic about the article.’” By 1972, Dorman would greatly expand
his article into a book called
Payoff
that contained much more material
about Marcello. According to Russo, a memo “obtained from the LBJ
Library in 1992 . . . asserts that the Kennedys helped Dorman write his
book,
Payoff
.” Other memos from the LBJ library show that Johnson had
an advance copy of the article, and knew that Bobby had an interest in
it. In light of the article, the fact that LBJ had been so cordial to Bobby
during their last visit is all the more remarkable.12
Marcello’s friends in the Teamsters were as ruthless as ever, but also
pragmatic. The $2 million fund to “spring Hoffa” from prison hadn’t
secured his release, and for Hoffa as well as his allies, the prospect of
Hoffa’s continued imprisonment during a Bobby Kennedy presidency
would have been their worst nightmare. Evan Thomas documented
that in the spring of 1968, after Bobby announced his run for the
presidency:
. . . a Teamster leader came to Senator Edward Kennedy proposing
that the Teamsters would give RFK $1 million and help him at the
polls—if RFK would . . . shorten Jimmy Hoffa’s prison sentence. . . .
RFK told brother Ted, “Well, you tell so and so that if I get to be
president, then Jimmy Hoffa will never get out of jail and there will
be a lot more of them in jail.”13
Bobby Kennedy faced his first primary challenge in Indiana on May 7,
1968. Though Indiana was considered a conservative state, Bobby won,
with 42 percent of the vote to Eugene McCarthy’s 27 percent (the remain-
ing votes went to the governor as a favorite-son stand-in for Hubert
Humphrey). However, Bobby and his advisors believed he needed to
do even better, so that he could head into the Democratic convention in
Chicago with the momentum needed to secure the nomination. Neither
Bobby nor any other candidate could win enough votes in the primaries
to secure the nomination, so for Bobby, momentum was everything.14
The following week, in Nebraska, Bobby scored a more decisive
victory over McCarthy—51 percent to 31 percent—but it still wasn’t
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
enough to drive his rival from the race. For Bobby, everything would
come down to the two West Coast primaries: Oregon, on May 28, and
especially California, on June 4. Bobby would need to win at least the
latter to have any realistic hope of securing the nomination.15
Bobby visited California as much as possible, but he had to deal with
several distractions during May, two involving President Johnson. On
May 10, 1968, the preliminary peace talks with North Vietnam began,
with Bobby’s old Cuban operations subordinate Cyrus Vance as one
of two US negotiators. In this instance, Bobby’s goals coincided with
LBJ’s because if steps toward peace were soon announced, that would
take much of the wind out of McCarthy’s campaign, since the war was
his main issue. For LBJ, securing a peace deal was his only chance to
leave office on a high note—otherwise, his legacy would be the war
he’d hugely expanded but couldn’t win. President Johnson also knew a
peace agreement was probably the only way to keep a Democrat in the
White House, though LBJ wanted that person to be his vice president,
Hubert Humphrey.16
Though Bobby and Johnson shared peace in Vietnam as a goal, Bobby
probably suspected that LBJ had a hand with Hoover in new articles
slamming Bobby by Drew Pearson that began appearing in late May.
This time, the stories weren’t about Cuba or JFK’s assassination. As
described by Evan Thomas, on May 22, 1968, Pearson printed the “alle-
gation that RFK had paid off a witness in one of the Hoffa cases. Then
on May 24 . . . Pearson revealed that RFK, as attorney general, had
authorized wiretaps on Martin Luther King.” It’s unclear if the deci-
sion to leak the story originated with LBJ or if Hoover had first leaked
it to an LBJ aide who brought it to President Johnson’s attention. But
LBJ certainly supported the leak and talked with Pearson in the White
House six days before the story ran.17
Luckily for Bobby, one of the stories contained an error, saying that
Bobby had not only approved phone wiretaps on Dr. King, but also
approved placing “bugs” in King’s hotel rooms. Since Bobby had
approved the wiretaps but not the bugs, he was able to issue carefully
worded denials giving Bobby enough wiggle room to evade most of
the blame in the press, to the public, and even among many of his own
staff.18
During his hectic May campaigning, Bobby also followed the trials
of Carlos Marcello and Johnny Rosselli. Thanks to a change of venue,
Marcello finally stood trial in Laredo, Texas, on May 20, 1968, for slug-
ging the FBI agent in New Orleans in 1966. John H. Davis writes that
“amid widespread rumors of tampering, the trial ended in a hung jury.”
Bobby could perhaps take solace that the Justice Department’s new
Organized Crime Strike Force was determined to retry Marcello on the
same charges.19
How much Bobby suspected Johnny Rosselli in JFK’s murder is not
known, though in 1992, a close Kennedy aide indicated to us Rosselli’s
responsibility (along with Marcello’s and Trafficante’s). With Bobby’s
own investigations pointing toward Marcello, his Mafia associates, and
those involved in anti-Castro operations, Bobby would have realized
at least that Rosselli was a likely suspect. Rosselli was convicted in Los
Angeles of failure to register as an alien on May 23, 1968, and would