Sixth Oral History Interview

Frank Mankiewicz Oral History Interview – RFK #6, 11/6/1969 Administrative Information Creator: Frank Mankiewicz Interviewer: Larry J. Hackman Date of Interview: November 6, 1969 Place of Interview: Bethesda, Maryland Length: 63 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 Robert Kennedy’s decision to run in the 1968 campaign, including his relationship with his staff, constituent groups, and fellow politicians, among other issues. Access Restrictions No restrictions. Usage Restrictions According to the deed of gift signed March 1, 2000, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. Copyright The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be “used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research.” If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excesses of “fair use,” that user may be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgment, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law. The copyright law extends its protection to unpublished works from the moment of creation in a tangible form. Direct your questions concerning copyright to the reference staff. 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, November 6, 1969, (page number), John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program. FRANK MANKIEWICZ RFK #6 Table of Contents Page Topic 1 Robert Kennedy’s decision to run in 1968 3 New York politics 5 Detroit Riots 11 Tet Offensive 14 Decision regarding campaigning for President Johnson 18 Impact of the polls 30 Liberal groups in the Senate 34 McCarthy’s campaign 36 Youth vote 38 Jesse Unruh’s influence on Robert Kennedy 43 California filing committee 50 Robert McNamara’s resignation Sixth Oral History Interview With FRANK MANKIEWICZ November 6, 1969 Bethesda, Maryland By Larry J. Hackman For the John F. Kennedy Library HACKMAN: At what point in '67 do you really become aware that Robert Kennedy is considering going in '68? Any tip-offs or anything? MANKIEWICZ: Well, no real tip-offs until late in the year. But I think we thought about it all through that summer because the question would keep coming up. You know, people would keep asking him and he’d keep devising new answers. And every time he’d come up with an answer, Joe Dolan [Joseph F. Dolan] or I would try to get him to edge it. And then the conversation would start, “Well, you know I can’t do that.” “Well why not?” “Well, maybe I can” HACKMAN: You mean among the three of you? [-1-] MANKIEWICZ: Yes, or whichever of us was talking to him about it. And there was this fellow – what was his name, Martin… Well, he had a thing called Kennedy-Fulbright Clubs and he was always…. He was a New York psychiatrist and he was always putting out news stories every once in awhile about how he was going to run “Draft Kennedy and Fulbright [J. William Fulbright] in ‘68”, and he was giving out bumper stickers. And then reporters would call up and ask us if we were secretly supporting him. And then we’d really kind of filed him off because he was not very responsible. And then Charlie Porter [Charles Porter] out in Oregon was starting moves. So the thing was always…. I mean there was hardly three or four days that went by that we didn’t have to talk about it. And it was clear to me that it was not entirely foreclosed. I mean I never thought he was actively considering it but I had the feeling that it was an ultimate option. Although, through most of ’67 he was also talking a lot and hitting very hard on the [-2-] notion of his reelection. His point was that whatever we were going to do in New York we should do in ’67 and ’68 because ’68 was going to be an election year and it was going to be hard to do anything, and by ’69 people would think he was just doing it to get reelected. So he was constantly at staff things. He’d talk to Joe or me or Adam [Adam Walinsky], you know, “For God sake let’s get some things going in New York,” and “Why hasn’t this and this and that been done?” And he was after me all the time to, you know, get with the New York press people, which I did. I can’t remember if I told you in another interview or not, but I had a thing going in ’67, which I’d tell him about regularly, which almost everyday I’d call just at random one or two upstate editors. And we’d also set up a television show for him in ’67, a monthly half hour to go into about seven or eight stations in New York. HACKMAN: Live or film? MANKIEWICZ: Tape. No – I think it was tape, I think it was tape. We met a guy in New York I met through [-3-] Bill vanden Heuvel [William vanden Heuvel], and he would come down and produce it. What we’d do is we’d get a – we’d pick a subject and then he’d interview two or three people who knew something about the subject. I remember we did our first one on the cities. We got Pat Moynihan [Daniel P. Moynihan] and somebody else. Instead of them asking him questions, he’d ask them questions. Then we had some students one month; we had one on the constitutional convention. My brother, as a matter of fact, was on that. He was a delegate. And Judge Bill Lawless [William B. Lawless], from Buffalo who is now the dean of the Notre Dame Law School. Scotty Campbell [Alan K. Campbell] came down. We tried to do those once a month starting, oh I guess, in the summer of ’67 and did them for four or five months until the campaign began. So that he was at one and the same time very serious about New York. Jerry [Jerome R. McDougal, Jr.] booked him a lot into New York. But, of course, he’d find that more and more, as he’d go up to Rochester and Buffalo and Syracuse, Albany, places like that, that [-4-] they’d be talking about national issues. I mean it was one thing to go to Binghamton; it was another to go to Binghamton and talk about the extension of Route 70. I mean that was almost more than he could bear. But he’d go there and he’d talk a little bit about Route 70 and the five counties, whatever it was, and then somebody’d ask him about Vietnam or worse, about the cities which were exploding through the summer of 1967, which were very much on his mind. And I have a feeling that President Johnson’s response to the Detroit riots may have started him off, too. As I think back now, I realize that I’ve been saying that it was the Tet offensive that changed his mind – I think it was. But I think what put him in a position to have his mind changed was the Detroit riots and the terrible feeling he had as he watched Johnson that night that nothing was going to happen anymore, that the Administration was through with domestic reform of any kind, that he wasn’t going to do [-5-] anything for the cities. He was going to appoint a commission – that was the Kerner [Otto Kerner] Commission – and it originally was not going to report until the following September. So from then on he began to talk more and in terms of the kind of leadership that the presidency and only the presidency could furnish. And I began to think that there were possibilities here. And then, of course, we got into late ’67, Joe and I, particularly Joe Dolan, began canvassing election laws and finding out about primaries just so we’d be ready if the occasion arose. And then he began having a lot of meetings about it. HACKMAN: Is the sort of research that Dolan is doing, is this on Dolan’s own or is it Robert Kennedy…. I mean does he tell Robert Kennedy he’s doing it? MANKIEWICZ: No. No. No. You’ll have to ask Joe about that. But if he did tell him he was doing it, he concealed it from everybody else because he told me that he hadn’t.

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