Frank Mankiewicz Oral History Interview – RFK #9, 12/16/1969 Administrative Information

Creator: Frank Mankiewicz Interviewer: Larry J. Hackman Date of Interview: December 16, 1969 Place of Interview: Bethesda, Maryland Length: 75 pp.

Biographical Note Mankiewicz was director of the Peace Corps in Lima, Peru from 1962 to 1964, Latin America regional director from 1964 to 1966 and then press secretary to Senator Robert F. Kennedy from 1966 to 1968. This interview focuses on Senator Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign, his debate with Eugene McCarthy, and the California primary, among other issues.

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Transcript of Oral History Interview These electronic documents were created from transcripts available in the research room of the John F. Kennedy Library. The transcripts were scanned using optical character recognition and the resulting text files were proofread against the original transcripts. Some formatting changes were made. Page numbers are noted where they would have occurred at the bottoms of the pages of the original transcripts. If researchers have any concerns about accuracy, they are encouraged to visit the library and consult the transcripts and the interview recordings.

Suggested Citation Frank Mankiewicz, recorded interview by Larry J. Hackman, December 16, 1969, (page number), John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program.

FRANK MANKIEWICZ RFK #9

Table of Contents

Page Topic 1 The McNamara tapes 3 Robert Kennedy’s relationship with Sargent Shriver 8 Supporters of Robert Kennedy in Johnson’s cabinet 10 James Dunn’s radio campaign strategy 16 Support for McCarthy in California 20 Indianapolis newspaper coverage of campaign 23 Indiana campaign 29 Wabash Cannonball 36 Campaign staff 40 New York primary projections 41 McCarthy’s voting record 45 California campaign organization 47 Robert Kennedy – Eugene McCarthy debates 55 Guaranteed wage 57 Pierson column 64 Last conversations with Robert Kennedy 66 Voter turnout 70 Acceptance speeches 71 Robert Kennedy’s attitude toward his personal safety 72 Israel

Ninth Oral History Interview

With

FRANK MANKIEWICZ

December 16, 1969 Bethesda, Maryland

By Larry J. Hackman

For the John F. Kennedy Library

HACKMAN: Let’s go back to a couple of things earlier in the campaign that we’d skipped over. One is – you may not have any involvement – the McNamara [Robert S. McNamara] tapes. What do you know about how those came about? Anything?

MANKIEWICZ: I don’t really. I know only I came back – it wasn’t the Martin Luther King weekend, it was some weekend – it was the day they went to West Virginia and I didn’t go. I came back again to try to do a day’s work at campaign headquarters, to get some staff hired. Yes, that would be the weekend of April twelfth and thirteenth. And I think that night I started getting phone calls from people who had gotten the story

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about the McNamara tapes from the people at the studio. Somebody had talked to the studio about the tapes. That was the first I’d heard about it. I talked to McNamara that night, and he filled me in and told me how they’d been done and what the tapes were. That was all I did really. I went in and told people what the story was, the press. It wasn’t that big a story, and then later they began to use the tapes. But I don’t know how it was decided to do them. They weren’t terribly good.

HACKMAN: You never found out whether Robert Kennedy [Robert F. Kennedy] played a role in getting him to do them or whether it was just…

MANKIEWICZ: No. I’d never worried about that. I don’t know, Ted Sorensen [Theodore C. Sorensen] was very big in those tapes. I mean he clearly had a lot to do with having them made, and then he was on them interviewing McNamara. But whether it was his idea or whether McNamara came forward and suggested it, I don’t know. But it wasn’t really a very major item as it turned out. We did use them though in Indiana a little bit, and I suppose they had a good effect.

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HACKMAN: Okay. Do you know anything about the relationship between Robert Kennedy and Shriver in that period? Were there any efforts to bring Shriver into the campaign or to have him make any statements?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, right at the beginning there was talk about getting Shriver [Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr.] in. He’d just been appointed ambassador to Paris, and I recall some conversation – I don’t remember with whom; it wasn’t with Robert Kennedy – about whether Shriver was going to be in the campaign or not. And then he decided, I think publicly, that he was going to stay as ambassador. But there wasn’t very much talk about it.

HACKMAN: Anything back over the last several years that you could see obvious about it?

MANKIEWICZ: I talked to him about Shriver a couple of times. I knew Sarge, of course, quite well. I was probably the only person who worked for both of them. And we’d talk every once in a while about the Peace Corps and about OEO and about how Shriver had sort of gotten in trouble with OEO because he didn’t understand the bureaucracy and how he was able to

[-3-] make it in the Peace Corps because it was his own bureaucracy. But once he moved into OEO, he just didn’t understand how the government worked and that he had to live with it and that those people, of course, had no loyalty to him at all as the Peace Corps people did. In OEO you had people who counted their accumulated sick leave and worried about the fact that as between two GS-14s, one of them had a secretary who was a 7 and the other had a 9 and that was a very serious matter. Sarge never could understand all that, never wanted to cope with it. And also, I think, he felt that the same sort of emotional impetus would carry the OEO, and obviously it wouldn’t. I mean the Peace Corp didn’t cost any congressman any money, that is to say, it didn’t cost him anything in his district; it didn’t cost him any political problems; it didn’t cost him any contracts; he didn’t get any Job Corps centers or lose any. The OEO was quite a different matter. And suddenly I remember in the early days of OEO when I was working on that task force, they’d run in

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Wilbur Cohen [Wilbur Joseph Cohen], or somebody would show up and point out to Sarge that you’d have to have an allocation formula, so much of this would have to be in each state. You could see what was happening then. And I think it did Sarge in. So I used to talk to Robert Kennedy about that, and he sort of agree that that was where the problem lay. And I got the impression that he was sort of troubled by Sarge, that he seemed to be playing much more the Johnson [Lyndon B. Johnson] game than he had to, particularly in ’67. A lot of those things on hunger and some of the other stuff he really didn’t play a very admirable role in by any means. But I remember one big blow up involving Bill Mullins [William Mullins]. Mullins was a kind of a bat man who…. I don’t know where he worked before, but he worked for Sarge for some time as a sort of kind of the fellow who’d get the airplane tickets and to be sure that Sarge would have a three by five card that would list the people at the head table, that sort of thing. He’s a nice fellow, and occasionally he’d come up with some good jokes. But he

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never did very much and was rather cynical. And in the summer of ’67 Senator Kennedy started making those speeches about his legislation for jobs and housing. And he would make the point that existing programs had not produced and that, in many cases, the poor were worse off than they had been sever or eight years before, that schools were worse and their housing was worse and their unemployment rate was down. The newspapers tended usually to play this up as attacks on the Johnson poverty program. They weren’t really; they were attacks on the whole sort of New Deal welfare structure, included housing and welfare and everything else. And at one point I remember Mullins wrote me a very nasty letter something like…. A fairly accurate paraphrase would be, “Tell your friend that the next time he wants to knock the poverty program after he’s finished sliding the slopes with Andy Williams and other poor people, that there are a lot of us here who have been working on the problem for a long time” or something like that. It was very nasty. And if I recall, Senator

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Kennedy got very mad at that – not mad, but upset about it. He called Sarge, and Sarge, I think, gave Bill hell for doing it. It was a dumb thing to do. He sent the letter around the various people, copies of it. But there wasn’t really very much good liaison there; I think not for any personal reasons. I think the Senator just didn’t understand what Shriver was doing, and also I don’t think ever took him very seriously as a thinker or as a problem solver.

HACKMAN: Do you recall other people who had been close to President Kennedy during the Kennedy…

MANKIEWICZ: I do remember one comment about Eunice [Eunice Kennedy Shriver] that I thought was kind of interesting – I don’t know if I told you that or not. But we went once over to the House recording studio because we had about…

HACKMAN: Oh yes, you told me that.

MANKIEWICZ: And he said he’d rather keep half the House of Representative waiting than Eunice.

HACKMAN: Are there other people who were close to President Kennedy [John F. Kennedy] who then transfer their loyalties to President Johnson that upset

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Robert Kennedy a great deal? Can you just remember him commenting on…. I mean not that Shriver transferred his loyalty to Johnson – where he deals with people, but…

MANKIEWICZ: No. No. No. He worried about Nick [Nicholas deB. Katzenbach]. I never heard him say anything good about Dean Rusk, but I’m not sure he ever thought of him as very loyal to John Kennedy. I mean Rusk really appalled him, particularly his public appearances. I remember during the Tet offensive Rusk and McNamara went on Meet the Press or something together, and Rusk said that he thought probably some people in South Vietnam were grumbling about the success of the Tet offensive, the South Vietnamese, but that was about the extent of it. He could never understand that statement; he used to repeat it often with scorn. I remember – was it Life or Time – I guess it was Time at one point had an assessment of Johnson’s Cabinet officers and guess at how many would be loyal to Robert Kennedy in a showdown. And I remember going over those with him, and he thought the Time figure was about right. I think

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he figured that six were sort of Kennedy people. Let’s see, who would that be? I guess McNamara…

HACKMAN: Freeman [Orville L. Freeman]?

MANKIEWICZ: No, not Freeman. Not Freeman. No, Freeman made it very clear in the hunger stuff in ’67 that he was not interested. Udall [ Stewart L. Udall], McNamara, it was either Ramsey [Clark Ramsey] or Nick, I don’t remember. I think we felt Wirtz [W. Willard Wirtz] was a sort of swing man; he didn’t think Wirtz was particularly loyal to him, but he didn’t think he was very happy with Johnson.

HACKMAN: O’Brien [Lawrence F. O’Brien]?

MANKIEWICZ: Yes, Larry. Who else was in the Cabinet? Dillon [C. Douglas Dillon]?

HACKAN: No, Fowler [Henry H. Fowler] had long since replaced Dillon, hadn’t he?

MANKIEWICZ: Fowler or Barr [Joseph W. Barr], Fowler I guess.

HACKMAN: Joes Fowler. And Barr only the last couple of months wasn’t it?

MANKIEWICZ: Yes. No. Freeman, Udall…

HACKMAN: Who’s at HEW?

MANKIEWICZ: Hew was John Gardner.

HACKMAN: Gardner.

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MANKIEWICZ: Of course, that was such a slightly different kind of appointment. He was a Republican. Wilbur Cohen was later.

HACKMAN: Did he have any…. Well, Boyd [Alan S. Boyd] is at Transportation. That’s a Johnson appointment.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes. Yes. Weaver [Robert C. Weaver] he thought was a Johnson man. But he thought the Time piece was about right. Time didn’t name them, but he said he thought that was about right, about five or six, and he was rather pleased with that one day. But he didn’t worry an awful lot about them; he understood. And he’d often say, “Well, look, you know, the fellows got to get along,” particularly congressmen and senators. He had great respect for Mike Mansfield who he always thought was in a very difficult situation.

HACKMAN: Well, back to Indiana then. You had started to speak off tape about Jim Dunn [James C. Dunn] and that whole thing. I think we ought to put that on.

MANKIEWICZ: Oh yes. Well, I think Jim Dunn’s operation is an interesting one. Dunn came out of California – Fred Dutton [Frederick G. Dutton] and I knew him there –

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and he worked for Pat Brown [Edmund G. Brown] in a couple of campaigns. And his operation is very simple, but it was the first time, I think, we’d done it on this wide a scale. He would set up a recording machine in the headquarters with a phone line. And then he would notify every radio station in the state that they could call that number twice a day, either collect or not – I don’t know whether we did it collect, I don’t think we did it collect in Indiana because the distances weren’t that great – and they could get a live feed of Senator Kennedy’s speeches twice a day to put inot their news programs and radio news. And then he would go along…. Jim Dunn’s probably the only fellow who was at every single microphone right up front with the radio mikes. And he would either tape the whole speech and then I would go over it with him after the speech with the text and show him which portions would be the ones to save, or, if we had time, he’d always come to me on the bus on the way to the speech and say, “Now, if we

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have a text, what do you want me to take off of this?” So I’d say, “Well, take this and this and that, and then let’s see how the crowd reacts.” And then he would, when he’d work his tape and cut it down so that he’d have about a minute of speech and applause. And then he’d lay over a little commentary of his own, where the senator had spoken, and he’d indicate the size of the crowd (usually rather generously), and he’d feed that back to his central headquarters by phone. So that every radio station in Indiana had two different speeches a day that they could use as live news, often “with their special correspondent Jim Dunn” because he put his name on the tape. And he’d say, “This is Jim Dunn in Kokomo,” you know, or “Jim Dunn in Marion, Indiana.” And often the stations upstate would say, you know, “W-such and such’s Jim Dunn was there,” and then he’d give the report. It was a good device. We got a lot of good radio publicity that way. In general, I thought the Indiana press

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was well done. Jim McManus [James McManus] who’s now here with Westinghouse, was our chief guy in the headquarters. George Mitrovitch, who deserves, certainly, an award as press secretary of the year this year, worked with McManus. And we also had Bill Gruver [William Gruver] there. Pierre was in Indiana most of the time. I was out on the road. But you see, we’d come back to Indianapolis almost every night, and it made it easy to coordinate the operation. We got out a lot of special stuff. We got into fights with the Indianapolis Star and the Indianapolis News. And all in all, I think that part of the operation was well done.

HACKMAN: Let me just ask you on that Jim Dunn thing, was that done in other states or is this just Indiana?

MANKIEWICZ: No, no. No, we did it in Nebraska, and we did it particularly in California. We did it on a large scale in California; we did it from Northern and Southern California. And I think he did it in Oregon.

HACKMAN: Would it strictly be limited to the state

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he was campaigning in, or could people call in from points around the country.

MANKIEWICZ: Well, they could call in from around the country. It would cost money. We did it a couple of times with special things. I know we had a couple of speeches leftover from before the campaign that he couldn’t make that we did by phone that way. Phil Hart [Philip A. Hart] wanted him to give some message to a Democratic dinner in Michigan, he was very anxious for him to do that somewhere along about April. And I remember we stopped in a cheese factory in Indiana, Jim Dunn, Senator and me, and we got off in a cheese processing room – it was freezing cold, my god, it was ten below zero, artificially – and he recorded a quick message to these “good Democrats up there in Saginaw County” or whatever it was. And then Dunn sent that in by phone directly to that dinner. They had a line open. He made good use of phones and tapes. And I think he’s now working for some senators in campaigns.

HACKMAN: Did other candidates use this in ’68, do you know?

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MANKIEWICZ: I don’t think so. I don’t think so. Pat Brown had used it in ’66, and Jess Unruh used it all year round – not every day, but whenever he was going to make a speech or his weekly press conference or whatever it was. I guess Jess Unruh had a daily press conference while he was the speaker when the legislature was in session. He’d talk about the day’s legislation and so forth. And Jim would record some of that and then feed it to every radio station in the state. It’s a very effective, very effective device. See, for thirty or forty cents a radio station can get two pieces of, I think they call it “actuality,” so it was pretty good.

HACKMAN: Did you ever get any criticism at all of using this in ’68?

MANKIEWICZ: No. No, no. No. Stations knew very well who Jim Dunn was. I mean there was no attempt to deceive anybody. Stations wanted news of the campaign and so rather than get a piece of UPI copy that said, “Senator Robert Kennedy said today that everybody should be entitled to higher education,” you could hear him saying it in Columbus or Vincennes.

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It was a very effective technique I think. As a matter of fact, I think radio is very much overlooked as a campaign device. And I think we used it well, and all just for the cost of Jim Dunn’s salary and a little electronic equipment rental, I suppose, but not much. It’s a very simple device. He used to take the speaker off the phone. I don’t know how they did that, but he’d take the mouthpiece off, he’d unscrew it, and the he’d hook up wires from his tape recorder to the wires from the phone and then feed it right on in. As soon as we’d finish a speech, he’d get to a phone somewhere, and the reporters would be feeding and he’d feed the two or three minutes of excerpts.

HACKMAN: Well, you talked about this, and you talked about the machine that would transmit the stuff from the research.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes, that was the Xerox, the flying Xerox. That will work some day I suppose, but it didn’t work well enough really. It didn’t work really well enough. [Interruption]

HACKMAN: Are there any other new things that you can remember that were sort of used for

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the first time in ’68, either mechanical or techniques?

MANKIEWICZ: No. You know, we used the testimonial heavily in California in a different way, I think, then it’s customarily been done. I mean we brought an awful lot of people out to speak to specialized audiences – not too specialized, but at least as specialized as youth or psychiatrists or Jews or lawyers – probably more than is usually done in a campaign where you just sort of have somebody come out and speak at a public meeting and do a press release or something. We had some prominent fellows. I mean we had Patsy Mink, for example, going around strictly to the League of Women Voters and Japanese-American groups and things like that.

HACKMAN: Why in California as opposed to – simply because there are more kinds of groups?

MANKIEWICZ: More kinds of groups and because it’s a more free-floating state. People had more allegiances in California, and very thin ones to Party. And also because we had a real challenge from McCarthy [Eugene G. McCarthy] there to a lot of these groups, sort of the general vaguely intellectual, college-oriented, civic-minded, do-gooder group, which

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really makes up an enormous amount of the voting population in California Democratic primary. And they’re way out of proportion to their numbers in the state. The numbers in the state are substantial, but you take all of those people in the communications business and in the sort of soft trades, psychiatry and advertising and do-goodism, Jews, college educated people, and you’ve got a very high percentage of those who vote in a Democratic primary, maybe over 20 per cent. And I thought we were way behind with those people, way behind McCarthy. And I figured if we could split that vote, we’d be doing a tremendous job. And I think we probably did better than that.

HACKMAN: Did McCarthy have any organized effort similar to this going or was these people’s attraction to him more…

MANKIEWICZ: I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I think their attraction to him was that he was against the war and he was there first. And he was a little less frightening. I mean Eugene McCarthy is the prefect kind of candidate for those people in California because they

[-17-] like somebody who sort of makes them warm and comfortable and isn’t really going to do anything. Because the fact is that almost all of them lead a very, very comfortable life, and mostly at the expense of the people that Robert Kennedy was really trying to do something for. I mean if you really dislocate the agricultural workers and bring them up to a place where they have some real power in the community, the state would be vastly unsettled. And the same, of course, is true of blacks and Mexicans generally out there. So McCarthy is a perfect candidate for them just as Adlai Stevenson was, and they’re very comfortable with him. He’s kind of the English professor who says the right things. And in addition, of course, they were very upset about the war, ideologically. And they are for the most part at the most first generation Californians. And they come from other places, and they retain strong ties to the intellectual establishment in whatever their trade is. So that I have a feeling that more than anywhere else

[-18-] it means something to have a Michael Harrington come out and speak for Kennedy or a Harry Golden or Alexander Bickel or dean of the Yale Law School. I saw him the other day for the first time again up at New Haven, and he reminded me of those frantic three days he spent out there. I think we booked him into ten law schools in three days.

HACKMAN: Was an effort going on like that in other places around the country or was that really your effort? I know you were sort of in charge of that in California.

MANKIEWICZ: No. I think we would have done it in New York; we were planning to do it in New York. Adam Yarmolinsky had a lot to do with it and Mrs. Tom Braden [Joan Braden]. She and Adam did the work, getting the people, booking them, getting groups to put them into and so forth. And they had a pretty good system going, and I know that we were just planning to transfer that to New York for the New York primary if it had worked quite well in California. See, you don’t have to do that in Indiana; Indiana people were responding pretty much to older

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allegiances. People were union members or blue collar workers or agricultural or small town business or whatever it was. California is pretty much sui generis in that respect. And also in Indiana we had other things going, you know, and there was the Branigin [Roger D. Branigin] element which is very strong in Indiana. You didn’t have that in California. You had a state pledge to the attorney general [Thomas C. Lynch], but it was a Humphrey state. In Indiana there was at least the fiction that it was a local Indiana thing, that Branigin was somehow the serious fellow.

HACKMAN: How did you try to deal with the Indianapolis newspapers in Indiana? Was there anything you could do about them?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, we went over their heads with a lot of television, and we kept up a pretty steady drum fire in speeches. He talked about them a lot and that got around in radio and television. The national television guys were aware of it. Roger Mudd had quite an essay on some of it in the Indianapolis News but in general there wasn’t very much we

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could do about it. But a lot of people said that nobody paid very much attention to that, that everybody knew how biased they were politically. But I must say the news stories were very rough and got pretty low. There was some kind of bad anti-Catholic business and a lot of stuff about money.

HACKMAN: Would you talk to, for instance, with Roger Mudd about this?

MANKIEWICZ: No. No. I think briefly once or twice I showed something to him. But, no, I didn’t feel I had to do that and I didn’t think they’d be very appreciative of that. But in the evenings press guys would sort of all gather together and we’d talk about it and make jokes. But we were still very tentatively feeling our way then. You know we had some considerable hostility. Phil Potter [Philip Potter] was still very sore and sort of had his people on the campaign who were by no means convinced about Robert Kennedy. The press was generally still rather suspicious of us in some ways, some of them were. Some of the ones that we had known for years were

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not. But there were a lot of new people along and many of them still regarded it as a bit of a job and not as sort of an adventure which I think they later came to see it as. And there was some doubt about Indiana, you know. We had polls there early on that showed that it was a fairly even race. We even had some early polls that showed that Branigin might win it. I never believed those, that is, I did believe them, but I always felt that a real campaign would turn those around very quickly.

HACKMAN: These are whose polls, do you know?

MANKIEWICZ: Quayle [Oliver Quayle]. But at the time we filed, the time he went into Indianapolis personally, you remember, we went up to the courthouse and filed, we had polls that showed, I think, what was it, about 41-39-20. And I knew that McCarthy was going to do better than that, but I also thought Robert Kennedy would too, once the campaign began. The press never believed those. I remember I had a long briefing with the press right at the beginning of the Indiana campaign, told them we thought we’d do very well to

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run second. But it didn’t come off very well.

HACKMAN: Do you remember discussing after those first round of trips to the West Coast and elsewhere, then discussing with Robert Kennedy or other people sort of in the top level of the campaign how you should campaign in Indiana, what kind of changes you might have to make from what you’d been doing say on the western trip in California?

MANKIEWICZ: No. I don’t think so. I think he felt that that first western trip to California was a little frenzied and that he was going to calm that down anyway. I talked to him about that a little bit. I said the press was – that you had to remember the press was scared. I mean they were physically afraid in a lot of these places that they were going to get crushed to death or – I don’t know what they thought was going to happen – they were going to get flung off a balcony of the university fieldhouse or something. And he laughed, but he understood that, you know, that he had to tone that down a little bit. And I think Fred Dutton

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told him – and I remember being in on one of these conversations – that the pictures on the television of tumult and shrieking and all were not very helpful. So he could calm down in Indiana in terms of style. But then they didn’t have that kind of crowds.

HACKMAN: Do you recall any kind of continuing discussion going on about how you treat the law and order issue at that point? Who, if anyone, is upset?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, the press is always worried about that. The press always thought he was getting soft on law and order. But I had a lot of old texts and showed them that this is the kind of thing he’d been saying right along. He certainly wasn’t going to preach divisiveness. I mean he talked about reconciliation and he talked about the need to prevent riots. But then he’d quickly talk about how you got at the causes of riots. Now, I thought that was a phoney issues, and I don’t think it really got very far.

HACKMAN: Do you recall ever having a problem with him departing from the prepared texts of speeches on that issue particularly in that campaign?

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MANKIEWICZ: No, occasionally he’d stress one thing a little more than another, and we’d talk between stops. You know I’d say, “Well, now the press is going to say you’re all out for the cops after that last speech.” And he’d say, “Oh God, do I have to say everything each time? You know, can’t they….” I mean I think his concern was that they never took the totality of the speeches, that they believed that April 19th was a day all by itself, and that the speech at Vincennes, let’s say, is totally isolated from the speeches the same day at five different places. So that if he would have a short stop somewhere in a cold public square and talk only about, let’s say, the need to help the young man in the ghetto get a job, then they would say, “Well, he’s not talking about law and order anymore.” Well, twenty minutes later at Oolitic maybe he’d talk only about law and order because he wasn’t concerned about the votes in these cities; he was concerned about the picture he was conveying to the whole state day by day.

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And I think if you look at the whole Indiana campaign, that it was rather balanced. And he was very careful up through Lake County to give the same speech all the time. And that, of course, is finally what, I think, made believers out of the press, was the last two or three times we went I guess all the way from South Bend to almost the Chicago line. I remember particularly the night before the election – that was an astounding performance! It was late, cold, and just thousands and thousands of people were always out on the street and changing colors as you went, from white to black to mixed and back to black and then white again. It was really quite an evening.

HACKMAN: Was there much discussion of where you campaign in Indiana, how much you spend your time, whether you try to do, say, just outstate and then the black groups in, say Lake County or whether you try to do a lot of blue collar groups? I’ve heard there was some….

MANKIEWICZ: Well, those discussions may have gone on at the Steve Smith [Stephen E. Smith] -Teddy [Edward M. Kennedy]level. I’d sit down and talk to Jerry [Gerald Bruno] every now and then, and it seemed pretty clear that we were

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just going everywhere. And we went back, obviously, to places where we had strength. I mean I think I’ve been in New Albany, Indiana, more times than I want to be – Jefferson County I guess it was. We were very big down there. I remember one of the last motorcades we were doing, he took part of a day off and went through what is called Lincoln country in Indiana – I think it’s the visual sort of thing Fred Dutton was always interested in – the James Whitcomb Riley Trail or something like that – And the press didn’t go. I don’t know – oh, I know what we did. While he and Ethel [Ethel Skakel Kennedy] went off and did that, the press took an hour off to file at some motel at the previous stop and we picked him up on the highway as they were heading into New Albany again, New Albany and what, Jefferson, I guess. And we got on the outskirts of New Albany – it was cold; it was getting dark – and we had to stop to put the top up on his car, the convertible. And he’s sitting in the back and the bus was right behind this car. And we pulled it up and we stopped right in front of some house. I knew it was

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a mistake to stop there because the house had a sign out in front that said somebody for sheriff, a homemade sign, and I’d seen those signs around before and it was the Republican candidate for sheriff. And I figured for all I knew it was his house. And we stopped in front of this house and there were four people out standing at the side of the road, sort of the way people watch the motorcade go by. And when the top came back up and they saw who it was in the car, they all just looked for a minute and then turned around and walked back into their house which is very bad. And, of course, you know, everybody in the press was cheering from the bus as they saw this. It was cold; he was putting on his coat, and I could see him from the front window of the bus. And he finally stopped; he saw me there and stopped putting on his coat. He took out a pencil – no, he wanted a pencil, that’s right – anyway, he wrote a little note and then he waved to me, he wanted to show me the note. So I got out and went over to the car and he gave me the note. And he had written on it, “I am reassessing my candidacy again.” It was

[-28-]

a bad moment. But those were always…. I mean there was hardly anywhere he could go in Indiana that it wasn’t good. And I knew that Jerry and the others wanted to wind up with some stuff in Lake County. Actually, we did very little in Indianapolis. That’s where we didn’t do very much. We preferred to take Indianapolis in a sense by television and worked it that way.

HACKMAN: Where did the idea of the Wabash Cannonball come from, and how well did it work?

MANKIEWICZ: I don’t know. Jerry came up with it first that I knew of, but somebody had told it to him, maybe somebody at the railroad, I’m not sure. But it worked very, very well, tremendous.

HACKMAN: He liked it?

MANKIEWICZ: He liked it. Well, he used it again in Nebraska and he used it in California. He liked it; Ethel liked it; the press liked it, and particularly the television liked it. It was very visual. You know, we had an NBC helicopter up above. I think Huntley [Chester R. Huntley]-Brinkley [David Brinkley] did a very good piece on it that day. And we had those singers, two kids from the University of Indiana with a kind of a jug and

[-29-]

a guitar. We went through some very interesting little towns and the people really showed up. The whole thing with the train was very good. You know, there hadn’t been any train campaigning for twenty years. I don’t know whose idea it was. But I know Jerry sold it, so somebody must have sold it to him.

HACKMAN: You said last time, off tape I believe, that it wasn’t apparent to you that there were any serious problems between, say, Edward Kennedy’s people including Jerry Doherty [Gerard Doherty] and Robert Kennedy’s people, like Bruno and other advance people, Tolan, and these people who’d worked for him for a long time. That’s not something that sticks out, and the press wouldn’t have been aware of it at all?

MANKIEWICZ: No. I don’t think so. Nobody ever asked me about it. I mean I was sort of aware always of a kind of running battle between maybe Sorensen and Adam [Adam Walinsky] and Jeff Greenfield, but I never…. Actually, I was not very aware of Ted Kennedy in Indiana at all, and I’m sure he was very present and very active. So I can only assume that whatever was going on I wasn’t near because I was always so much

[-30-]

involved with the sort of day-to-day mechanics of moving fifty or sixty of those press people around and making sure where we were going to wind up, and that they’d have enough time to file, and then trying to find out what they’d been filing. And I was often trying to work on some of the guys who were rather hostile and trying to give them material and show them that some of their fears were not justified.

HACKMAN: Did you get at all involved in the TV side in Indiana of doing any reviewing of film or working with…

MANKIEWICZ: Some. Some. Some of the outdoor stuff. I picked a couple of locations. I remember I went out one morning and picked out a country store and a couple of things like that. But that, again, was mostly Fred Papert [Frederic S. Papert]. Then in California we got into John Frankenheimer and Dick Goodwin [Richard N. Goodwin], they did a little bit more.

HACKMAN: I never really understood the sort of division of responsibility between Don Wilson [Donald M. Wilson], I guess, who spent some time in Indiana, and Papert and Frankenheimer and…

MANKIEWICZ: Well, this wasn’t easy to understand.

[-31-]

HACKMAN: Who was the other guy? George Stevens was out there for a while?

MANKIEWICZ: Yes. George Stevens was out there for a while. Well, there was a responsibility to get a half an hour of film done for Indiana, and I guess everybody sort of took it on. Frankenheimer did some. And Charlie Guggenheim [Charles Eli Guggenheim], I guess, was working with Papert. And then he had all these sort of free lancers, Don Wilson and Frankenheimer and Dick Goodwin later. Let’s see, did Goodwin come in Indiana?

HACKMAN: I think he was in Indiana for a while, wasn’t he?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, he came right after the Wisconsin primary which was…

HACKMAN: What, April tenth or something like that?

MANKIEWICZ: Yes, the Wisconsin primary was like April tenth or…. No. Well, the Wisconsin primary was the Tuesday after Lyndon Johnson withdrew so it was the third.

HACKMAN: So it would have been April third or something like that.

MANKIEWICZ: April third. And I think Dick came about a week later.

[-32-]

HACKMAN: Can you remember Robert Kennedy being particularly dissatisfied with that side of things?

MANKIEWICZ: No. No. No. He didn’t like having to spend as much time as he did, and he, I think, was a little annoyed at some of the set pieces. He did one in an old folks home in Indiana which was really not very good because the people were terribly old and not very attractive. You know, he went up to one women and asked her how she felt, and she said, “If I can make it until Thursday, I’ll be 99 years old.” And that bothered him. I mean that just didn’t seem like the kind of thing people should be filming.

HACKMAN: Can you remember any change in the kind of things he tried to do on TV after any particular events in the campaign, either the King assassination or Johnson’s withdrawal? Did that change that side of things?

MANKIEWICZ: No. No. I think that was all pretty much still kept up in there. He was a little Rooseveltian about sort of letting everybody do it and fight with everybody – creative tension probably that was going to make some good stuff. I thought the Indiana

[-33-]

campaign was the best run that we had. And probably in retrospect it was because we had complete control of it. That is, the state organization was totally hostile so we didn’t have to worry about accommodating Edith Green or Jess Unruh or anybody. And I thought it was well done. It was a small state with a relatively homogeneous population – or really populations. We also did a couple of things in Indiana that we did in the other states as well, and it was very helpful. We’d take – and I don’t know who did this, Pierre [Pierre Salinger] got somebody to do it – we would take out about twenty-five precincts around the state as fair samples of the kind of precinct they were – black, urban, ghetto, rural, university faculty type precincts, lower middle class white, blue collar, Catholic, Slav, just a lot of different kinds of precincts. And then election night we’d put special guys in those precincts to get the count early and phone it in to use specially. We’d brief the press ahead of time on what those precincts were. Then we’d get those results early so that an hour or two after the polls were closed we’d

[-34-]

be able to give them fifteen or twenty of those sample precincts. And that way they would not only be able to say that Robert Kennedy got 42 per cent of the vote but that he was running twenty to one in black precincts and holding almost even in some of the rural areas and so forth. And those stories were used by almost everybody. They were widely circulated and, in effect, became the stuff of the campaign and the results, and it was very effective. We did it in Nebraska; we did it in Oregon.

HACKMAN: Is this the first time this has been done?

MANKIEWICZ: As far as I know, so far as I know. And then the press began to be very eager for it. You know they’d say, “Are we going to get those special precincts?” In California particularly, we had about forty of them in California because there are so many different kinds.

HACKMAN: I’d like to hear a little bit more about the McManus-Gruver type of operation. Did something like that go to California then, or was it…?

MANKIEWICZ: Yes. Yes. Well, we had it in Nebraska, too. We had George Mitrovich in Nebraska with

[-35-]

somebody else. And McManus, I think, went to Oregon. No, McManus – where’d he go from Indiana? He went to Oregon and then we pulled him out and sent him to New York for a week in New York. But we had George Mitrovich and somebody else in Nebraska. But we had Bill Gruver and McManus for a while (who put the letters) in Oregon. There was simply the local press operation to see that the texts got out to the local press, that they got the schedules, that they got accommodations, that the people in Fort Wayne knew that he was coming to Fort Wayne the next day, and that they could pick up the bus at somewhere out of town and drive on in, and people who wanted special stuff, special features for Indiana. They would also handle the special people who would come in, you know, like Time might want to come in for a day and cover the whole campaign, and we’d get them special cars and availabilities and all. So it was like running the local press. It was very tough in California because Dick Klein [Richard Kline] was already there. He’d been put in by Art Seltzer and he was not very good. But

[-36-]

we did do it in every state. Pierre and I would sort of look around and hire people and decide how many we needed in each state. Usually Pierre knew some good people and we’d go out and get them.

HACKMAN: You’d mentioned earlier about problems dealing with Branigin and St. Angelo [Gordon St. Angelo] and these people. Can you just recall some examples of anything…

MANKIEWICZ: Well, St. Angelo really put out an awful lot of bad stuff – a lot of things on money – and people tended to believe him. And then there was all that business about Branigin, about how he was going to be vice president and maybe he was going to be a justice of the Supreme Court, you know, which is really all kind of silly. But I just thought Gordon St. Angelo didn’t play it very straight, particularly as far as the money was concerned. I mean he knew better.

HACKMAN: You said you went on some of the trips with Robert Kennedy outside of Indiana during April. Can you remember just from that list that you have in front of you anything particular about any of those trips that’s

[-37-]

important?

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

HACKMAN: I guess particularly whether he was very satisfied with the reception he got from delegates in those states or anything or potential delegates or whether it appeared to discourage him.

MANKIEWICZ: Pennsylvania, New Jersey. North Dakota was a very good…. And Michigan was great – Grand Rapids, Lansing, and Kalamazoo – tremendous crowds and very good response from the local people. I mean an awful lot of local legislators and mayors and all wanted to ride along. I think Mildred Jeffrey was very pleased up through there. I think she was convinced we were going to have considerable delegate support there. Kalamazoo was tremendous. He hit Kalamazoo very late, about 7 o’clock. I remember I had a guy who used to work for me in the Peace Corps who was then a municipal judge in Kalamazoo, and he met us at the airport and rode in on the bus. And we started to go through and he saw all these people lining the streets and he said, “You know this is not possible in Kalamazoo.” He

[-38-]

said, “People don’t stand outside and watch cars and busses go by at 7 o’clock in the evening.” And we estimated a crowd of twenty, twenty-five thousand out in front of the courthouse. That was when the woman took his shoe for the first time. You know, that was a considerable achievement. And then in Fargo, North Dakota, we had a tremendous crowd too. The whole North Dakota thing was good. I think we were going to…. Senator Burdick [Quentin N. Burdick] was cracked by that I think – although Burdick, I think, was pretty much always with us. But he was very impressed with the way it went in North Dakota. And, of course, the South Dakota stuff was good.

HACKMAN: Well, by the end of the campaign can you…

MANKIEWICZ: And South Dakota, of course, was a primary state.

HACKMAN: Yes. In conversations with Robert Kennedy by the end of the campaign, how optimistic do you really think he was, or pessimistic?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I think Oregon shook him up. I think he felt that he had to win them all and that bothered him. But I think by California and by, say, two or three days before the primary,

[-39-] he thought there was a pretty good chance. I mean, he knew it was going to be tough and we’d begin talking about how he was going to have to bring out these crowds all summer, and he was discussing all kinds of special ideas. You know, somebody had a notion that we would challenge Humphrey to primaries, set them up, set up voting booths and have primary elections in any state, Whatever state he wanted. And then there was the thought of following him around. But I think he felt that California, South Dakota, and New York was going to be a win and that we’d just have to keep on the pressure. But I would say that he thought he had certainly an even chance, maybe little less than even.

HACKMAN: Did he feel New York was really a serious problem or that he could put it together?

MANKIEWICZ: No. No, I don’t think anybody was very worried about New York. I mean we knew we were going to loose some delegates there. Out of about a hundred and ninety delegates in New York, we’d probably lose fifteen. But we had all

[-40-] the at-large, and I think he felt that he was going to win most of the contests. McCarthy was not doing very much campaigning in New York and probably would not.

HACKMAN: I was reading in McCarthy’s book last night on the ’68 campaign, The Year of the People, again where he charges the Kennedy campaign with putting out material about his voting records which is very upsetting.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes. He really keeps coming back to that which is odd. I mean, he protests for too much about that. In the first place, the only thing that happened on voting record was that some kids at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] put out some material which I think we paid for some way because they were our people. And it was a pretty good summary of his voting record. We didn’t…. You know, nobody distorted it. There were a couple of errors, but they weren’t serious ones. They were cases, for instance, where he had opposed a minimum wage provision, let’s say, in committee and then voted for it on the floor, and we said he opposed it. Well, what the hell.

[-41-]

HACKMAN: He deals with that specifically in the book.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes. But nine tenths of what they said in that voting record sheet was all quite true, and he does not have a very good voting record. And the interesting thing about McCarthy is that he never claimed he did. I mean he was never the champion of the ADA [Americans for Democratic Action], he never had the 100 per cent CIO or New Republic plus list. He was an indifferent legislator. You knew he was always going to vote wrong when the question concerned the drug industry. His votes on gun control were always bad and remained so now. The only thing I could think of was that he was very mad at that voting record thing because it was old politics sort of. And his feeling was not that he had a better voting records than our people were saying he did, but that it wasn’t relevant. And, in a way, he was right. I remember telling Robert Kennedy that before he came out to California when I first went out there and sort of sized up the situation even before Indiana was over. And I remember talking to him and saying, “Listen, these people don’t

[-42-]

care about voting records. You can come out here all you want and tell them that Gene McCarthy opposed minimum wage for farm workers or whatever it is. That’s not why they’re for him. They’re for him because of something he represents having to do with the war and Johnson and courage. And if you attack him, you’re going to lose rather than gain.” And he agreed with that. And so we tried wherever we could stop that voting record business, but it hardly ever came out. I mean I think it was one ad in the Daily Bruin. Then, I suppose, thereafter people distributed reprints of it from time to time, but in very small ways and never anything official with the campaign. I never saw it again.

HACKMAN: What kind of ties, if any, did anyone in the Kennedy camp have with the doctor George – what was his name – Dr. Martin Shepard, the guy who supposedly was…. Do you remember that? He was putting out a lot of…

MANKIEWICZ: Yes, I remember that, but I would say none. None. I don’t think anybody ever met him.

HACKMAN: McCarthy says in the book again that people

[-43-]

were telling him that Salinger had very close ties with this guy, something like that.

MANKIEWICZ: Oh, no. Martin Shepard is a New York psychiatrist who was always having trouble also with his own draft deferment, as I understood it. But I never talked to him and I don’t know anybody who ever talked to him. I wouldn’t know what he looked like. I gather – in fact, I was rather surprised recently to find out how young he was. I think he turned out to be about…. Well, obviously, he must have been young because he was of draft age. But we never knew who he was, and we always tried to discourage him. I mean you’d get these things in the mail from him and write him back and say, “Look, Senator Kennedy is not a candidate and please stop.” He was always running this Kennedy-Fulbright [William J. Fulbright] ticket or Fulbright-Kennedy – no, I guess it was Kennedy-Fulbright. But I never saw him and I don’t know anybody who did. And I’m pretty sure Pierre never knew him. I don’t see how Pierre could possibly know him. McCarthy really didn’t like Pierre. He didn’t like Pierre and he didn’t like Dick Tuck [Richard G. Tuck]. That struck me as two very unlikely people to

[-44-] zero in on. But maybe he sensed Pierre’s unpopularity in California which is probably true, at least among Democrats because of that Senate race. But no, Martin Shepard was a very minor figure. He existed on paper only.

HACKMAN: Yes. Speaking of that trip….

MANKIEWICZ: I’ll have to read McCarthy’s book I guess.

HACKMAN: …the trip you do out during April again to California, was anybody complaining about your being out there? I mean did Unruh or any of those people complain that you know of, to Robert Kennedy?

MANKIEWICZ: Not that I know of. Do you know if they did?

HACKMAN: No. I’ve heard one person say that. But I’m not sure if the complaint went to Robert Kennedy or if the complaint went to the person who said this – I suspect the latter, you know.

MANKIEWICZ: No. I went around to all the headquarters, and I went up north and it seemed to me that a lot of people were unhappy. And I told Art Seltzer and Steve Smith (West) what I thought some of the complaints were. The places were dead. There just wasn’t a lot going on.

HACKMAN: What kind of approach does Steve Smith (East)

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have, say, coming to California? What kind of organizer is he? What are his talents or lack of them?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, he wanted to get it organized. But he did…. No, we had a couple of talks about it, about what we were going to do. And the question was, of course, do we move all those guys out and put in our own people, or do we work with them. And that was really the decision that Steve had to make. And he decided to work with them, decided to leave them in place and then fill in around them – except up north where we had to have somebody and where he got Seigenthaler [John L. Seigenthaler]. But from there on, it was simply a question of how to salvage some of the immediate things like the gala that was big trouble and was taking a lot of people’s time, the press operation which was not very efficient, and in general, how to salvage particular elements of the campaign that were in trouble – television. And he said to me once, “Look, we’ll just go ahead and do what we’re going to do here. And, you know, we can’t move these people

[-46-]

out, and don’t get them mad. Use them when you can use them and go around them when you can go around them.”

HACKMAN: Yes. At some point you came out…

MANKIEWICZ: And then he started bringing various people in for special jobs – Walter Sheridan [Walter James Sheridan] and Earl Graves and this one and that one. And I remember talking to him about this liberal thing and he said, “Sure, go do that.” And then I did a couple of other things on election day organization, Get Out the Vote, that kind of the thing. And we just sort of went ahead. I’d talk to him usually every morning, and we’d sort of get a pattern on what we were going to do.

HACKMAN: I guess the other thing on California is the debate. Did you get at all involved in the discussion of whether you debate or not throughout the campaign?

MANKIEWICZ: It was pretty obvious in California that obviously we were going to debate. I participated by phone in the debates over whether to debate in Oregon because I was never in Oregon. I mean I was in Oregon, but I wasn’t there after the 7th of May. And I felt he should debate because

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I thought that fairness is the big thing, and you just don’t want to be unfair. And I thought by Oregon McCarthy was that important anyway, and the only reason not to debate was that you would sort of play up McCarthy. But, hell, by Oregon he was pretty well played up anyway, and indeed it looked like he was ahead up there. So once he got to California that morning and said he was going to debate, by that time we already had worked it out pretty good. And it was my idea to do the debate on Saturday night on ABC. We had offers from all three networks. But my feeling was that if the main purpose of the debate was to have the debate, to remove it as an issue, the debate itself I didn’t think was going to amount to very much unless one of the two went on his ass because they were both pretty good and it was inconceivable to me that one would destroy the other. So the important thing as far as we were concerned was just to have it, so that nobody could say, “How come you won’t debate him?” So if that’s all you want, then the best thing to do is to have it on ABC on a Saturday night so you’ll get fewer

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people watching. I remember Milton Berle’s great suggestion for how to end the way in Vietnam. His suggestion was to put it on ABC and it’d be over in thirteen weeks. So we did; we picked up the Issues and Answers invitation and went ahead and worked that out. And McCarthy, curiously enough, didn’t care either. Oddly enough he just wanted to have a debate – I never could understand that – because we had all kinds of discussions about format and all, and his people just weren’t interested.

HACKMAN: Why do you think Senator Kennedy was reluctant in Oregon or earlier really – I guess Oregon primarily?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I think he had the feeling that when you’re ahead you don’t debate, that you have nothing to gain and a lot to lose. And I think he lacked a little confidence, I think he felt that McCarthy might look too good or he might not look good. He never really did trust himself in that kind of give and take. He was always, I thought, quite good because it generated such enormous tension. If anybody’d ask him a question on

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television, there was always such terrible drama as to whether he was going to answer it at all, you know. He always did and always well, but there was always that terrible moment when you’d see something in his eyes and his face and you’d think he was going to leave the studio. I thought he would have been good at a debate. I didn’t see any problem with it, but we never got very far.

HACKMAN: What can you remember then about the discussion which I believe you were in on before the debate?

MANKIEWICZ: Oh, in San Francisco.

HACKMAN: Yes.

MANKIEWICZ: We threw a lot of questions at him and suggested some ways in which he could turn some questions around. And I remember Bill vanden Heuvel [William vanden Heuvel] insisting that he get briefed on [Interruption]

HACKMAN: vanden Heuvel

MANKIEWICZ: Yes. But vanden Heuvel kept insisting that he get briefed about monetary policy, about, you know, there was that problem then about gold, special drawing rights. And he refused all day; he wanted to know nothing about it. And, of course, there was nothing – hopeless. And

[-50-] finally I remember he said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. If there’s a question on it, Bill, I’ll say, “That’s a very good question and Mr. vanden Heuvel here will be happy to answer that.” But otherwise we talked about questions that we thought he was likely to get and approaches that had developed in the campaign and also this whole notion, this whole thing that came up about McCarthy – that McCarthy later…. I don’t know how that happened. It wasn’t McCarthy; it was that terrible fellow, that black guy who had the television show – I’ll think of his name. Senator Kennedy talked about McCarthy’s proposal for taking people out of the ghetto and putting them in the suburbs – Lomax, Lucius?

HACKMAN: Louis.

MANKIEWICZ: Louis Lomax. Louis Lomax made a big thing out of that the next day and came out and supported McCarthy. But you see, what happened with Louis Lomax was that he had…

[BEGIN SIDE II, TAPE I]

MANKIEWICZ: What were we talking about?

HACKMAN: We were just talking about Louis Lomax.

[-51-]

MANKIEWICZ: Oh yes. Well, he came to us earlier that week long series of negotiations. He said that he had been offered…. Drew Pearson [Andrew Russell Pearson] had offered him twenty-five thousand dollars to go on television and support McCarthy, but that de didn’t want to do that. He wanted to go on television and support Robert Kennedy, but he needed money to do that. And we weren’t going to pay him anything. He thought fifteen thousand would be about right, would about cover his expenses. And we weren’t going to give him anything and kept getting him to see if he wouldn’t do it anyhow. And he kept giving us names of people who would not attack Senator Kennedy on the basis of guaranteed income if we’d just call them up and tell them that he really favored a sort of guaranteed income. I said, “Well, we can’t do that because he doesn’t favor it. He does favor jobs.” And finally Lomax figured, I guess, that there wasn’t anything to be had out of us. And then I noticed that after the debate he came out for McCarthy so I assume that somebody met at least the minimal price. But who was up there? Adam Yarmolinsky was there in San Francisco

[-52-] and Arthur – was Arthur there? I’m not sure Arthur was there.

HACKMAN: For the debate you mean?

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

HACKMAN: Yes, he was. At least I’ve read he was.

MANKIEWICZ: He was. Adam, Arthur, Adam Walinsky, Fred Dutton, Sorensen – I don’t think so, I don’t think Sorensen had come out – Bill vanden Heuvel. And we just talked about all the things that were likely to come up and the way in which they could be handled.

HACKMAN: Did this thing on McCarthy’s civil rights program, the sending the blacks to the suburbs, come up in this?

MANKIEWICZ: Oh yes. Yes. In fact, I said, “You know, after all, the suburbs today are just for the most part filled with people who started out in the ghetto and got good jobs. If they didn’t get out, at least their kids did.” I said, “But just to take people who are unemployed not out of the ghetto and fill Orange County with them or Marin County isn’t very helpful because they can’t buy those houses anyway.” And so he used it on the show. And

[-53-]

I remember when he came back from the debate, he said to me, “The only reason why I didn’t mention Marin County is because I forgot at the last minute whether it was Marin County or Merrin County so I didn’t use that. But I did use Orange County.” But that was my line. And it did get him in a little trouble, I guess, but not, I don’t think, very seriously because I think the point was quite clear that you have to deal with this problem where it is. The problem is one of employment, which he made very clear. Otherwise, I thought the debate was pretty much a standoff, which is fine. I think all we needed was to have the debate and not lose disastrously. In fact, I think he probably had a little bit of an edget because McCarthy, I thought, was very aloof and distant.

HACKMAN: Do you remember his own reaction to the debate?

MANKIEWICZ: His reaction was quite pleased. He felt the same way, too, which was that he really just had to stay alive, just so he didn’t lose badly. And he certainly hadn’t. In fact, most people thought he had done quite well and

[-54-]

probably a little bit better, although I don’t know how you judge those things. I thought McCarthy very good at the very end. But he went right on from there to a big gala in San Francisco that night, a big fundraiser, so he was sort of immediately…. I mean once the debate was over, he had very little time to talk about the debate. Who was there? Hodding Carter [William Hodding Carter, II] had come, and he had a little supper with Hodding Carter, Ethel and some of the rest of us who’d been at the briefing. And then he went on to the gala.

HACKMAN: It’s interesting when you mention about a guaranteed wage. Was he always in discussing this very much against it?

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

HACKMAN: You felt he was against it?

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

HACKMAN: I mean some of the things he said come, in some ways, fairly close to that.

MANKIEWICZ: No, he…. Peter [Peter B. Edelman] and Adam, I think were

[-55-]

always trying to get him in that direction, and he never really wanted to go. He felt that…. I think it was a little bit of Puritan thing there. And also, it went against all of the things he had been saying about welfare. He talked a lot always – it became quite a favorite phrase of his about, “The answer’s not welfare, the answer’s jobs, people want to work and by creating jobs you get people off the tax rolls.” And he had mastered and understood very well that a job is a double benefit because it not only gives a man money, but it makes him a taxpayer and removes the tax burden from somebody else. And he just felt that – what was the phrase, was it guaranteed annual income – some phrase that was then in vogue – he just never would go for it. Martin Luther King wanted him to go for it and Abernathy [Ralph D. Abernathy] and King’s successors, but he wouldn’t make that jump.

[-56-]

HACKMAN: Well, another thing that, I guess, really comes…

MANKIEWICZ: It held up the delivery of some of the economic white papers. We were putting out something every Sunday to business editors and people like that, these sort of rather lengthy policy statements. And the one on economics and welfare, I think, was held up a couple of weeks just because of how to phrase this question.

HACKMAN: Right at the end of Oregon, I believe it is when the Drew Pearson columns on Martin Luther King come out, can you remember getting involved in this issue?

MANKIEWICZ: Oh yes, very much so. Somebody sent us…. Pierre was in – no, Pierre was up there, I guess. But somebody sent us the Pearson column before it was due out. And it was pretty horrendous because, in addition to what was printed, there was about that much again that was not printed all about what their tapes had picked up – not the tapes, but the

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bugs – in the last year or two including a threat by King that he would throw himself out a window if some women didn’t say she loved him and a big party and all this business about the Los Angeles dentist and that maybe that was the suspected assassin – terrible stuff about King. So we started to get calls on it and I remember talking to – I guess I talked to Burke Marshall because I had to get a statement out on it. I talked to Burke and I talked to the Senator. And he said, “Well, don’t deny it because it’s, in part, true.” And then he told me what subsequently was told, which was that Hoover [J. Edgar Hoover] had been after him for a long time and that finally they did agree to put a wiretap on, in part to get rid of Hoover and convince him that it wasn’t so, and also because King had refused to send a couple of guys away from his headquarters whom Burke at least was quite convinced were indeed Communists and using him rather badly. And Burke’s feeling was

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that, in a way, they were doing it almost as much for King to sort of show him what these guys were doing. And the tap was on for a while, but, of course, they had never consented to any bugs. And it was quite clear from Pearson’s column that most of what had been obtained had been obtained by bugs, including that celebrated tape that Hoover was so fond of playing from King’s hotel room the night of the March on Washington. But, of course, you can’t in the middle of the campaign come out and say, “No, it isn’t true that he authorized a bug on Martin Luther King; he did authorize a wiretap.” So we worked out a statement which, in effect, admitted it because he never said that he never approved any bugs at all, and second, that he did approve some wiretaps in national security cases, but he wasn’t going to discuss any particular one. Well, since he didn’t come out and say the story was wholly false, most people concluded that the story was at least

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in part true. And it was, in part, true, but it was put in a rather nasty way. And as I said, a third or half of the column was really quite vile with respect to King, not to Robert Kennedy. And that flack, of course, went on all weekend. I think it was even on the debate, there was a question on it. Ed Guthman [Edwin O. Guthman] didn’t use the column in the L.A. Times. Luckily, in a way, he had decided a month or so before and had checked it out all the way up and down in the Times that since Pearson had become a fundraiser for Humphrey, that he was therefore partisan and they wouldn’t use any political stuff of his during the campaign at all on any side.

HACKMAN: So that’s how it really…

MANKIEWICZ: Yes, well, Pearson hadn’t been running since April, since he and the Teamsters got together in that luncheon here or dinner and raised the money for Humphrey. Sinatra [Francis A. Sinatra], I think, was here. Pearson had sent out the invitations, Pearson and Sinatra. So Guthman hadn’t been

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running Pearson’s column for about a month.

HACKMAN: Are there phone calls that you can make at the time to try and get other people not to run the column? Is anybody making phone calls like that?

MANKIEWICZ: No, no, no. I don’t believe in that. And anyway, it’s very dangerous, very dangerous because then the guy says, “They called up,” and it’s suppressed, and you never get anywhere doing that, I don’t think. No, we didn’t try that. It ran a lot in Oregon, and some California papers carried it. I did talk to the papers that had carried it to see what they were carrying because if they ran that stuff about King, that would prompt one comment; if they didn’t, it would prompt another. But what we were concerned about was its effect down on the black areas, and it didn’t seem to have much effect. Charles Evers [James Charles Evers] was in town, had been down there every day. And he would come back at the end of the day and

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talk to me about what was going on in the barbershops and the bars and the restaurants. And I remember he told me a great story, he said, “Well, yes, there’s a thing about Martin Luther King.” He said, “I talked to a fellow today, asked him what he thought about the fact that Bobby had put a wiretap on Martin Luther King. And the guy said to me, “Well, you know, it’s like if somebody comes up to you and tells you that your wife is sleeping with somebody,” he said, “you know it’s probably true but you love her so much it just doesn’t matter.” He said, “Don’t worry about that,” because the McCarthy people were putting around literature in Watts and elsewhere, Compton, and it included a record. You know, you can talk about McCarthy getting mad because Kennedy people distorted his voting record. Martin Luther King made a speech at the California Democratic Council, CDC, in March, I guess, February – no, I guess it was March –

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and he endorsed both candidates. He said he thought Gene McCarthy was a great fellow, and then he also said he thought Robert Kennedy was a good man and that he supported both of them. The McCarthy people took the McCarthy endorsement off the record – or made a record called “Martin Luther King Endorses Eugene McCarthy” and put that record around with literature of McCarthy’s. And they were making a big distribution of it that weekend along with the Pearson column which they reproduced, in the Negro areas. And Charles Evers told me that not only weren’t they having any great success getting people to distribute it, but that people wouldn’t take it and that whole stacks of it were just left on street corners because they’d come to people’s doors and they’d offer it to them and they’d look and see how it was and say, “We don’t even want it>” So we were not worried that vote had been dented, and indeed it had not.

HACKMAN: What did Robert Kennedy think of Drew Pearson

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over the years, his writing?

MANKIEWICZ: He didn’t like him at all, at all. We used to talk about Pearson from time to time. He felt that Pearson didn’t like the Kennedys, and he felt that it was based largely on a strong anti-Catholic bias, which I must say I think is true. I mean you look over Pearson over the years and I think there is a strong anti-Catholic bias. And it crops up in discussions of all these good Protestant things like population control and divorce and that kind of thing. Pearson always gets a little nasty about the Pope and all the real estate the Vatican owns and all of that. Now that whole question, the anti-Catholicism in the press, is interesting. We talked about that from time to time – and in the New York Times, too.

HACKMAN: That’s right. You mentioned the New York Times.

MANKIEWICZ: There’s that story he told Jimmy Breslin [James Breslin] the night he was shot. One of the last things he did, in his conversation with Breslin, he said,

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“The New York Times’ idea of a good news story is ‘More and More Nuns are Leaving the Church.’”

HACKMAN: Can you remember other things about that last night, the last conversations?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I was downstairs, he was upstairs for most of the evening. I’d call from time to time to give him returns. And we were all very worried about that CBS projection because it never seemed to be quite coming through, and indeed it didn’t finally. It said he was going to get 51 percent. What did he get in California finally? 46?

HACKMAN: Yes, 46 to 47, I think.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes. And we were worried about when he should come down and make a statement. And we thought we’d wait until NBC came along with something that looked like a good projection because he was running behind all night, although it was quite clear he wasn’t going to stay behind because none of the Los Angeles returns were in. There was that intense foul up in

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how they were counting the Los Angeles return because they had to take them by truck downtown. They were voting for the first time in California with punch cards. And we knew that our vote had turned out. By 8 o’clock I had checked most of the areas where we thought we were going to get a lot of votes, and our turnout was tremendous. We were getting 90-95 percent turnouts. And in some of the Mexican areas we had 100 percent turnout by 4 or 5 o’clock in the afternoon. I mean Chavez’ guys went around to precincts to say, “Cesar Chavez says today’s the day to vote for Robert Kennedy,” that was the line. And by 4 and 5 o’clock in the afternoon they were phoning back in and saying we had 100 percent turnout. I couldn’t believe it! We even sent somebody down to two of those precincts to go look at the…. You know, in California you have a sheet with all the names of the registered voters in the precinct that has to be posted out in front. And every hour somebody from the

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voting commission in each precinct has to come out and cross out the people who have voted. So it makes it very easy to get out the vote in California because you can show up at 3 o’clock and look and see immediately who has not voted. So I sent a couple of people down to those precincts, and they were all crossed out, school was out, voting was over for the day with three hours still to go. So I knew we had the votes, but they weren’t coming in. And finally, about 11:30 it looked as though NBC had caved in and said he had won California, and CBS had been saying it all night, and McCarthy had conceded. So I went up to the suite and talked to somebody. Well, I talked to Jimmy and a couple of others. And then the Senator, Fred Dutton and I went off into one of the other rooms to talk about what he would say. And I’d written some notes out – those are those ones that that radio station – I’ve got them here somewhere – that radio station in California had stolen. I wrote that out and

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gave it to him while we were sitting there in the room. The notes talked about Don Drysdale who had pitched his sixth straight shutout that night. He said, “Yes, that’s great, we’ll use that.” And then I said, “You’ve got to thank Jesse Unruh and Cesar Chavez, Bert Carona. And then we wondered about what to say about the blacks and who could we identify. And I said, “Well, there isn’t anybody really to identify,” and he said, “Rafer Johnson.” And I said, “Well, yes, but he didn’t really get out any vote.” So he put his name down – that’s his handwriting.

HACKMAN: Yes.

MANKIEWICZ: Paul Schrade and the labor vote and agriculture, cities where he got the vote all over. And then I put the South Dakota returns down there for him – fifty counties. He got fifty, Humphrey got three and McCarthy carried none. He got 48 percent of the vote, Humphrey 32 and McCarthy 20 – actually it turned out to be 51 percent.

HACKMAN: He has Johnson-Humphrey.

MANKIEWICZ: That’s right. That’s right. And he took that

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and that was what he gave his speech from down there. And then he crumpled it up and left it on the podium, and then this kid from some radio station, some Baptist radio station, showed up a couple of weeks later with it claiming that it was Robert Kennedy’s last speech and thought it was Kennedy’s handwriting. And I saw it in the paper, and I called him up and told him that it wasn’t Kennedy’s handwriting, it was mine and I sure wanted that piece of paper. And he tried to sell it to me. But we finally got it, finally got it from him. But we talked up there about what he should say, and I mentioned to him that Jesse was upset. For some reason Jesse felt that somebody had been attacking him that night, and he said, “I hope nobody says anything bad about me or anything I’ve done.” And I said, “Well, don’t worry about it.” But I did pass that on to the Senator. He said, “Well, you know, everybody likes to think that he’s been solely responsible.” And, you

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know, he said, “Jesse is a good fellow. Don’t worry about it.” And we talked more about what he would say, and we also talked about what he was going to do. And I said, “You now, when you get through with that, they want you to go downstairs to the other ballroom.” I said, “But I think the TV will carry it in there, and you don’t have to do that if you don’t want to.” But in any event, after you do the Embassy, you ought to do the press, the writing press.” We always had that problem election night. He would go to make his acceptance speech, in effect, and he’d do it on television. And then the writers would get very annoyed because they couldn’t ask him any questions. So starting with Indiana he’d make his speech in the ballroom, and then we’d take him right to a little press conference with the writing press only, without television. Indiana, that’s where Joan Kennedy [Joan Bennett Kennedy] asked her question about whether he’d make his brother Attorney General. And so

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then that’s where he was headed in the Ambassador. So we talked about that, and I must say, he seemed in very good spirits. He was finally convinced that he had won in California, and he was overjoyed about South Dakota.

HACKMAN: What can you recall about his attitude throughout the campaign, if you had conversations with him about this, about personal safety and security.

MANKIEWICZ: None. None. The only thing is occasionally I’d talk to him about the cops at the airport. I remember particularly at Fresno where he got so mad at Carmine Parici because he didn’t want the cops escorting him anywhere. And he’d complain every once in a while that he’d see too many cops. But except for that we never talked about it. It never entered – I mean a lot of people worried about it; I never did. I never did. And in a curious way I think I was right that as long as he stayed in the crowds

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he was fine.

HACKMAN: What about his attitude towards speaking to Jewish groups on Israel in ’68.

MANKIEWICZ: Well, he didn’t like it. I mean he didn’t like pandering to any group. He didn’t like the idea that every time he talked to a Jewish group he had to talk about Israel. I tell you, in ’67 at the time of the war, he really got enormous emotional responses to some of the things he was saying, and he really felt it, you know. I mean he had great admiration for Israel. He didn’t have so much admiration for American Zionists, but he had great admiration for Israel and it was just that unqualified. I mean he thought these were great people because they knew what they wanted, and they went about their business, and they weren’t anybody’s puppet and they fought when they had to fight and fought brilliantly. And he identified with them. And every once in a while I remember in the campaign he’d say

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to me, “Listen, can’t we get one of those speeches in front of some of your people where they applaud wildly every three or four minutes?” So he liked that. He didn’t care that much. He didn’t want to make overt commitments that he’d have to meet as President. I mean he was very cautious about that. But he did know what he wanted Israel to have. He certainly wanted parity. He felt that they had not been treated well in the Johnson Administration, and he was terribly resentful of that awful business where Johnson got Arthur Goldberg to call the Jewish leaders together and said he’d threaten them, and tell them that if they didn’t support him on Vietnam, he wasn’t going to support them on Israel. It was the most awful vulgarity. He thought about that a lot. But he didn’t like to do it very much, but he did, and he knew he had to do some of it. And I kept telling him we had to do it in California, so we set up that one thing at Temple Israel in Westwood. That

[-73-] was a funny night because they were an hour and a half late or an hour and forty-five minutes late, and I had to hold the crowd. I remember he came in, he was about to be introduced, and he called me over and said, “Now, tell me again the name of my close friend here that is about to introduce me.” Well, he did one speech there and did one in Oregon on the Middle East. But he didn’t like the ritualistic aspects of New York politics particularly. He’d do the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and he’d do the San Gennaro Festival, and he’d make a few speeches about Israel. But he tried to keep that to a minimum. And he never made that trip, you see, that the “three I” voyage that ever New York politician has to make. He flatly refused to go to Israel and Italy and, I guess, Ireland.

HACKMAN: That’s really about all I have on the campaign. I mean I’m sure there are a lot of anecdotes that you could put down, and probably the best

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way to do that… Frank Mankiewicz Oral History Transcript – RFK #8 Name List

A G

Abernathy, Ralph D., 56 Gardner, John W., 9 Americans for Democratic Action, 42 Goldberg, Arthur J., 73 Golden, Harry, 19 B Goodwin, Richard N., 31, 32 Graves, Earl G., 47 Barr, Joseph W., 9 Green, Edith, 34 Berle, Milton, 49 Greenfield, Jeff, 30 Bickel, Alexander, 19 Gruver, William R., 13, 35, 36 Boyd, Alan S., 10 Guggenheim, Charles Eli, 32 Braden, Joan, 19 Guthman, Edwin O., 60 Branigin, Roger D., 20, 22, 37 Breslin, James, 64 H Brinkley, David, 29 Brown, Edmund G., 11, 14 Harrington, Michael, 19 Bruno, Gerald J., 26, 29, 30, Hart, Philip A., 14 Burdick, Quentin N., 39 Hoover, J. Edgar, 58 Humphrey, Hubert H., 20, 40, 60, 68 C Huntley, Chester R., 29

Carona, Bert, 68 J Carter, William Hodding, II., 55 Chavez, Cesar, 68 Jeffrey, Mildred, 38 Clark, Ramsey, 9 Johnson, Lyndon B., 5-7, 9, 32, 43, 68, 73 Cohen, Wilbur J., 5, 10 Johnson, Rafer, 68

D K Dillon, C. Douglas, 9 Doherty, Gerard F., 30 Katzenbach, Nicholas deB., 8, 9 Drysdale, Don, 68 Kennedy, Edward M., 26, 30 Dunn, James C., 10, 11-15 Kennedy, Ethel Skakel, 27, 29, 55 Dutton, Frederick G., 10, 23, 27, 53 Kennedy, Joan Bennett, 70 Kennedy, John F., 7, 8 E Kennedy, Robert F., 2, 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 18, 21-23, 30, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41-45, 49, 52, 58, 60, 62, Edelman, Peter B., 55 63, 69 Evers, James Charles, 61, 63 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 56-63 Kline, Richard, 36 F L Fowler, Henry H., 9 Frankenheimer, John F., 31, 32 Lomax, Louis, 51 Freeman, Orville L., 9 Lynch, Thomas C., 20 Fulbright, William J., 44

M T

Marshall, Burke, 58 Tuck, Richard G., 44 McCarthy, Eugene G., 16-18, 22, 41-45, 48-55, 62, 63, 68 McManus, James, 13, 35, 36 U McNamara, Robert S., 1, 2, 8, 9 Mink, Patsy, 16 Udall, Stewart L., 9 Mitrovitch, George, 13, 35, 36 Unruh, Jesse M., 14, 34, 45, 68-70 Mudd, Roger H., 20, 21 Mullins, William, 5-7 V

O vanden Heuvel, William, 50, 51, 53

O’Brien, Lawrence F., 9 W

Walinsky, Adam, 30, 53, 55 P Weaver, Robert C., 10 Williams, Andy, 6 Papert, Frederic S., 31, 32 Wilson, Donald M., 31, 32 Parici, Carmine, 71 Wirtz, W. William, 9 Pearson, Andrew Russell, 52, 57, 59, 60, 63, 64 Potter, Philip, 21 Y

Q Yarmolinsky, Adam, 19, 52, 53

Quayle, Oliver, 22

R

Rusk, Dean, 8

S

Salinger, Pierre, 34, 37, 44, 45, 57 Schrade, Paul, 68 Seigenthaler, John L., 46 Seltzer, Art, 36, 45 Shepard, Martin, 43-45 Sheridan, Walter James, 47 Shriver, Eunice Kennedy, 7 Shriver, Robert Sargent, Jr., 3-5, 7 Sinatra, Francis A., 60 Smith, Stephen E., 26, 45, 46 Sorensen, Theodore C., 2, 30, 53 St. Angelo, Gordon, 37 Stevens, George, 32 Stevenson, Adlai, 18