My God! That would be a real tragedy. It could imperil his own private “Late-Late Show,” his beloved “Swinging Shift.” Having taken the necessary precautions on that vital front, Hughes moved on to other business.
“Returning to this morning, I am certain that you, at no time, really understood what I was urging you to do. Bob, it is true that I have discussed another project with you: The proposal to select one Repub. and one Demo, candidate and then to give that candidate full and all-out support. This project I still want carried out. Just as I still want the Reno TV project carried out. However, the item set forth in my first message of Thursday morning was something entirely different.”
That was his plan to buy the Kennedy gang and place his own man in the White House. He had to make sure that Maheu understood the mission. Yet not even that megalomaniac vision could still his hatred of the Kennedys. It had been building all night while he watched TV chronicle their whole damn glorious and tragic saga. Now, on the day of Bobby’s death, it all came boiling up out of Hughes, even as he continued to coldly calculate the opportunities presented by the assassination.
“I am mor[e] familiar than you realize with the history and the remaining entity of the Kennedy family,” he wrote, thinking now of old Joe and letting loose his long-nurtured grudge. “…The Kennedy family and their money and influence have been a thorn that has been relentlessly shoved into my guts since the very beginning of my business activities. So you can see how cruel it was, after my all-out support of Nixon, to have Jack Kennedy achieve that very, very marginal so-called victory over my man.
“So, as I point out, thru this long-standing feeling of jealousy and personal enmity, I have become fairly well informed about the organization of people that sprung up, first around Jack, and then around Bob. Essentially the same group. They just moved over. But think of the experience they have had in the two campaigns combined!”
These were the men he needed, and now they were vulnerable. Hughes was not so blinded by hate as to miss the opportunity.
“Now, I am positive that all of these people (and dont forget the Convention and victory was virtually within their grasp) that all of these people, after they come- to following a 48 hour effort to drink themselves into oblivion, will feel awfully and terribly alone and frightened. Of course, they might make it again with Ted, but that is a long and uncertain road. Now, Bob, just try to visualize how it would feel,” continued Hughes, imagining the horrible shock his own death would cause his gang. “I have a group of people who have remained loyal to me, or so I have chosen to believe, and I have worried sufficiently about them being faced with such a situation, that I have gone to extreme lengths in furnishing them protection against any such adversity….
“Also, there is some similarity between the group who assisted the Kennedy brothers and my organization,” he added, comparing the Irish Mafia to his strange crew of Mormons, “although, unfortunately, I do not have the lovable qualities of Jack and Bob that led to their famous popularity.
“Anyway, I do feel competant to judge the feelings of fear and lonliness which I am certain must have consumed the Kennedy group by now. I have experienced these emotions myself and I know how powerful they can be. So, I repeat that I am positive this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to acquire a ready-made political organization, all trained and ready to go….”
Hughes sensed that he had to move fast, before the Kennedy gang sobered up and found new patrons.
“So, Bob,… instead of waiting until somebody else grabs these people, let’s move first!”
Bobby Kennedy was not yet buried as Hughes plotted to steal his legacy. His body lay in state at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where the men Hughes planned to hire formed an honor guard around his coffin, while tens of thousands of mourners filed past the bier in silent tribute.
At a solemn high-requiem mass that Saturday, Teddy Kennedy stood above the coffin to deliver his eulogy:
“My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life. He should be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.
“As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him, ‘Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say, why not?’”
And then Bobby Kennedy’s body was carried out through the great bronze doors of the cathedral and placed aboard a train to Washington, for burial in Arlington National Cemetery.
Howard Hughes watched the funeral rites on television, also dreaming of things that never were. Yet even as he plotted to hire the Kennedy machine and with it seize national power, he could not resist one last jab at the sole surviving brother of the hated first family.
“I just saw Ted Kennedy campaigning from the tail end of the funeral train,” wrote Hughes. “If that isn’t the all time high in bad taste, I dont know what you may chose to call it. While I am all in favor of the effort to latch onto the Kennedy organization at this propitious moment,… I urge you not to do anything that might identify us as being in any way associated with Kennedy or his campaign. I am afraid that whoever has been acting as Mrs. Kennedy’s guiding light since her husband’s death has not been as shrewd or as clever as everybody anticipated. Personally, I think the entire funeral operation since the Good Samaritan has been one ghastly over-played, over-produced, and over-dramatized spectacle. I think that this whole deal is going to erupt into one horrible shambles. Mrs. Jack Kennedy was criticized badly for over-doing Pres. Kennedy’s funeral activities and I think this operation is many times worse, if such a thing is possible.”
Larry O’Brien was on that funeral train, feeling awfully alone and terribly frightened. He had quit Lyndon Johnson’s cabinet to manage Robert Kennedy’s campaign, as he had managed John Kennedy’s eight years before, and now Bobby lay dead in a flag-draped coffin in the last of the twenty-one cars, en route to a grave beside his brother’s.
At first O’Brien watched the crowds along the tracks, but as the crush of mourners blocked the way and the train slowed to a crawl on its eight-hour journey from New York to Washington, he just sat in a daze, recalling the nightmare flight of Air Force One that had brought another Kennedy back to the capital, from Dallas. The president’s widow had been on that plane, her pink dress still splattered with blood, and now, pacing the aisle of the train, O’Brien again encountered Jacqueline Kennedy. “Oh, Larry,” she said in a whisper, “isn’t it terrible for us to be together again like this? It’s unbelievable.” Night had fallen by the time the train reached Washington. Finally, in the darkness of Arlington National Cemetery, O’Brien watched Bobby’s casket being lowered into the ground next to the grave where he had seen Jack buried. And then, it was all over.
After sixteen years in service to the Kennedys, from Jack’s first Senate race to Bobby’s last campaign, Larry O’Brien was suddenly left without a job, without a patron, with no idea how to support his family or what to do next.
He was sitting home in Washington when Robert Maheu called.