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

Transcription

1 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 This interview focuses on Senator Robert Kennedy s 1968 campaign, his debate with Eugene McCarthy, and the California primary, 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 The copyright law extends its protection to unpublished works from the moment of creation in a tangible form.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.

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

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4 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

5 Ninth Oral History Interview With FRANK MANKIEWICZ December 16, 1969 Bethesda, Maryland By Larry J. Hackman For the John F. Kennedy Library 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? 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 [-1-] 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.

6 You never found out whether Robert Kennedy [Robert F. Kennedy] played a role in getting him to do them or whether it was just 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. [-2-] 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? 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. Anything back over the last several years that you could see obvious about it? 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

7 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 [-4-] 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 [-5-] 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 [-6-] 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. Do you recall other people who had been close to President Kennedy

8 during the Kennedy had about 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 Oh yes, you told me that. And he said he d rather keep half the House of Representative waiting than Eunice. Are there other people who were close to President Kennedy [John F. Kennedy] who then transfer their loyalties to President Johnson that upset [-7-] 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 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 [-8-] he figured that six were sort of Kennedy people. Let s see, who would that be? I guess McNamara Freeman [Orville L. Freeman]? 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

9 Johnson. HACKAN: O Brien [Lawrence F. O Brien]? Yes, Larry. Who else was in the Cabinet? Dillon [C. Douglas Dillon]? No, Fowler [Henry H. Fowler] had long since replaced Dillon, hadn t he? Fowler or Barr [Joseph W. Barr], Fowler I guess. Joes Fowler. And Barr only the last couple of months wasn t it? Yes. No. Freeman, Udall Who s at HEW? Hew was John Gardner. Gardner. [-9-] Of course, that was such a slightly different kind of appointment. He was a Republican. Wilbur Cohen was later. Did he have any. Well, Boyd [Alan S. Boyd] is at Transportation. That s a Johnson appointment. 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. 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. 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

10 [-10-] 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 [-11-] 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 [-12-] 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. Let me just ask you on that Jim Dunn thing, was that done in other states or is this just Indiana? No, no. No, we did it in Nebraska, and we did it particularly in

11 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. Would it strictly be limited to the state [-13-] he was campaigning in, or could people call in from points around the country. 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. Did other candidates use this in 68, do you know? [-14-] 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. Did you ever get any criticism at all of using this in 68? 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. [-14-]

12 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. Well, you talked about this, and you talked about the machine that would transmit the stuff from the research. 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] Are there any other new things that you can remember that were sort of used for [-15-] the first time in 68, either mechanical or techniques? 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. Why in California as opposed to simply because there are more kinds of groups? 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 [-16-] 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

13 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. Did McCarthy have any organized effort similar to this going or was these people s attraction to him more 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. 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. 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

14 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 [-19-] 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. How did you try to deal with the Indianapolis newspapers in Indiana? Was there anything you could do about them? 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 [-20-] 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. Would you talk to, for instance, with Roger Mudd about this? 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 [-21-] 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

15 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. These are whose polls, do you know? 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 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 run second. But it didn t come off very well. [-22-] 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? 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 [-23-] 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. 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? Well, the press is always worried about that. The press always

16 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. Do you recall ever having a problem with him departing from the prepared texts of speeches on that issue particularly in that campaign? [-24-] 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 19 th 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. [-25-] 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. 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. 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

17 we were [-26-] 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 [-27-] 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. Where did the idea of the Wabash Cannonball come from, and how well did it work?

18 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. He liked it? 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. 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? 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. Did you get at all involved in the TV side in Indiana of doing any reviewing of film or working with

19 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. 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 Well, this wasn t easy to understand. [-31-] Who was the other guy? George Stevens was out there for a while? 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? I think he was in Indiana for a while, wasn t he? Well, he came right after the Wisconsin primary which was What, April tenth or something like that? 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. So it would have been April third or something like that. April third. And I think Dick came about a week later. [-32-] Can you remember Robert Kennedy being particularly dissatisfied with that side of things? 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

20 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. things? 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 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. Is this the first time this has been done? 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

21 in California because there are so many different kinds. 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? 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. 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 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. that s 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

22 [-37-] important? Yes. 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. 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. Well, by the end of the campaign can you And South Dakota, of course, was a primary state. Yes. In conversations with Robert Kennedy by the end of the campaign, how optimistic do you really think he was, or pessimistic? 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-]

23 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. Did he feel New York was really a serious problem or that he could put it together? 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. very upsetting. 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 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-] He deals with that specifically in the book. 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

24 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. out a lot of 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 Yes, I remember that, but I would say none. None. I don t think anybody ever met him. McCarthy says in the book again that people [-43-] were telling him that Salinger had very close ties with this guy, something like that. 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

25 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. Yes. Speaking of that trip. I ll have to read McCarthy s book I guess. 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? Not that I know of. Do you know if they did? 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. 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. What kind of approach does Steve Smith (East) [-45-] have, say, coming to California? What kind of organizer is he? What are his talents or lack of them? 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