A Campaign Year Call to Greatness

What turned out to be the sinister year of 1968 began at a propitious time for me. I was at the fabulous Villa Serbelloni, once a Sforza palace, now the Rockefeller retreat on Lake Como, writing my novel Sanctuary V. It was there that I received a cable from my friend Bobby Kennedy.

"Have decided to run. Hoping you can help me with your people." Bobby was running for President! He was referring not to my movie associates in Hollywood but to the black community in Watts, the deprived southeastern enclave of the crazy quilt spread of Greater Los Angeles.
When Watts had erupted into violence in the summer of 1965, I had gone down, established a writing school called the Watts Writers Workshop, which grew from a handful to several hundred, and our success had given me unusual entrée there. In the winter of 1966, it was said that only two white men could walk the streets of Watts with impunity -- the Episcopalian street priest Father Sam, and this writer.

Bobby's cable was heartening news. Our country was in the doldrums of the Vietnam War. I had a son, drafted to fight in that senseless conflict, and every day that the deadly fighting dragged on I prayed that our country would rediscover its soul and extricate us from this horror. As President Johnson let his ship of state lurch out of control, a white knight had arisen. Once the gadfly who allegedly did his brother's dirty work, Bobby had surprised his detractors by reinventing himself and emerging as the inspired leader of the democratic forces who wanted to get us out of Vietnam, and instead to wage a war at home against social injustice and economic disadvantage.

It was an inspiring message, and, in his own Boston twangy, soft-spoken voice, Bobby was reaching out to all of us, black and white, poor and middle class, who longed for peace and social reform, and a pox on the General Westmorelands who were sacrificing our kids by the tens of thousands in a faraway civil war that we could not win. I was pleased but not surprised by the stand Bobby was taking. Having met him seven years earlier, I had a front-row seat to his step-by-step development from the President's "hatchet man" to his emerging identity as nothing less than the Galahad of the democratic movement.

How I met Bobby was a fortuitous turn for me. He had published The Enemy Within, taking on Jimmy Hoffa and his racket-ridden Teamsters Union. When the Hollywood honcho Jerry Wald bought the rights to it he submitted a list of writers for Bobby's approval. Happily, Bobby chose me, thanks to his familiarity with my film On the Waterfront.

When I flew up from Mexico City, where I was living, I went from the airport to Bobby's country home in Oak Hill, where I found myself at dinner surrounded by half a dozen of his closest associates. Bobby opened the conversation by asking me what most impressed me about the book and I said I found it an On the Waterfront on a national scale. Then he asked me if there was anything in the book I didn't like. Yes, I said, I objected to the passages about how hard he and his staff had worked. I said I worked hard, I thought most self-respecting people worked hard, and I thought those references sounded self-serving.

My, how Jerry Wald was kicking me under the table. Producers may feel like bigshots in Hollywood, but I've always noticed how craven they became in the company of the Washington elite.

After dinner, alone with Bobby, I had my first insights into what he was really like. He told me that while his staff was very protective, and could be intimidating, he wanted me always to tell him exactly what I was thinking. He welcomed my criticising aspects of the book and said that he realised that I could do my best work only if I felt completely free to express myself. Having heard all those negative stories about how officious he was, I was finding him surprisingly soft-spoken and self-effacing.

I went back to Mexico to write the screenplay, shipped it up to him, and when I returned to DC went out to the house to go over it with him, and his wife Ethel too. Overall he liked it, and there was pretty healthy give-and-take on suggestions for revisions. There were times when I would work right in Bobby's office, on a corner of his desk while he was holding meetings with his Justice Department lawyers. Sometimes, while waiting for the next meeting to assemble, he would actually write lines into the script. "Bobby, if you don't make it here in Washington, I think I may be able to get you a job as a screenwriter in Hollywood," I told him. "I hear you have to be a pretty good politician for that," he said. I found he had an understated and delightful sense of humour. Self-deprecating. Of all the negatives I had heard about Bobby Kennedy, I was finding not one of them to be true.

It wasn't all roses. There were some pretty heated arguments. He was used to getting his way, and surprised when I resisted him. But he took it well. One rather dicey time concerned the way I treated Hoffa's wife, Paula. She was a problem for him because she was a bad drunk, and I had dramatised that. Bobby's aides all said that had to go, and finally Bobby backed them up. He was afraid Hoffa would use it against him, for striking a low, personal blow.

But I held out for my take on it. Bobby wanted it out. I said I didn't want to take it out. Bobby said: "Let's go out and throw the football around."

Out on the big back lawn Bobby threw me a very long pass. I was a long way from my Deerfield Academy football days but I ran like crazy to catch that pass. Somehow I felt if I did it would help my cause in the argument. And I think maybe it did. When we got back in the house, Bobby said: "Look, Budd, I realise this is a screenplay, not a Justice Department brief, so if you feel so strongly about it, maybe we can leave it in."

On the evening of the election, we went early to Bobby's suite in the Ambassador Hotel, and hung out with what had become Bobby's family, a motley gathering of pro and amateur politicos, friendly news commentators, Hollywood liberals and adoring black athletes -- all with their eyes glued to the TV screen as encouraging reports kept coming in on Bobby's ascendancy over McCarthy. Bobby was "in". We rejoiced. I was out on a mini-balcony when the TV commentator Sander Vanocur found me to say Bobby would like to see me. When I came into the large bedroom I was surprised to see him sitting in the far corner on the floor, barefoot, smoking a small cigar. I had never seen that before. Stalking up and down the room impatiently was Big Daddy Unruh, the Democratic boss of California.

When I sat down with Bobby, he immediately started talking about our Watts Workshop. He was fascinated with it. He said it was so cost-effective because writers needed only paper and typewriters. But what they wrote expressed the deepest feelings and aspirations of their community. If he became President, he said, he would like to see the Government fund workshops like that in every city in the country, sort of a throwback to the New Deal days of the Federal Writers Project. I was in political heaven. I actually had visions of heading up a Federal Writers Project for the Vietnam generation. Meanwhile, Big Daddy was getting mad. "For Christ's sake, Bobby, get up. We gotta get downstairs. We'll miss the prime time."

In the elevator going down Bobby said the Empire Room he was headed for would be too crowded, so on leaving he was going to make a short cut through the pantry. He'd meet me, and a bunch of fellow writers, Pete Hamill, George Plimpton, Jimmy Breslin, at the far end of the pantry. "And we'll all go out to the Factory to celebrate."

So that's where I was when the shots rang out. Sirhan Sirhan ran straight down toward us. For a moment I held him in my arms. His gun was so tiny it looked like a toy but he kept firing it and several people screamed. Sirhan was very small but he felt like a coiled spring and I couldn't hold him. The other writers tried grabbing him too, but he spun away. Finally he was held for good by Bobby's two star athlete bodyguards, the giant but gentle football player Rosie Grier, and the decathlon star Rafer Johnson.

Jerry and I gravitated up to Bobby's suite and found that a dozen other friends had done so too. Rosey was sobbing that he felt guilty for not doing a better job of protecting Bobby, and then suddenly passed out and lay back on Bobby's bed. All of us stayed there till dawn. What amazed me was that all through that fraught night, not one police officer, or FBI, not one of the officials we would have expected to come up to examine Bobby's room, appeared. It seemed unreal. Of course we knew Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty hated Bobby. And so did J. Edgar Hoover. Just the same, after the most history-bending assassination since Lincoln, we would have thought law enforcement would have had to make its presence felt, if only for appearance's sake. After all, in that bedroom that night were a dozen eyewitnesses.

In its own oblique way, the Emilio Estevez film Bobby does justice to this tragedy. It's an ingenious cross-section of Americans drawn to the hotel that day for their own personal and sometimes even trivial reasons. A young girl, played by Lindsay Lohan, is having her nails done by the hair salon keeper Sharon Stone. Lindsay is marrying her young beau (Elijah Wood) to keep him out of the Vietnam War. The star singer in the hotel's Coconut Grove, played by Demi Moore, is a lush who finally drives her patient husband (Estevez) away. Helen Hunt contributes as a socialite whose main problem is that she forgot to pack her black shoes for the formal affair in the hotel. In his role as her husband, Martin Sheen gives one of the best performances.

All of these comings and goings are folded into the explosive climax when all the high hopes of Bobby and his followers come crashing down in that infamous pantry. Counterpointing the unspeakable violence, Estevez has superimposed the voice of Bobby, after the death of Martin Luther King. To meet the high ideals Bobby was calling for, to remind America and world audiences of the awesome fork in the road we came to in the early hours of June 5, 1968, to try to encompass Bobby's mission in this sorry day when we have been demeaned by Bush rather than uplifted by Bobby's legacy, is a tall order for a motion picture.

To my surprise, Estevez has been inspired to rise to the challenge. Something of the unique quality of Bobby has reached out to him.

In his heart-wrenchingly premature passing, Bobby Kennedy lives. And today, in these dark days for America, we need his spirit, and his call to greatness, more than ever.