Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [132]
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.
“Larry O’Brien—He is coming here on Wednesday next for a conference as per our request after the assassination of Senator Kennedy,” Maheu reported to the penthouse. “He is prepared to talk employment and has received a commitment (without any obligation whatsoever) from the four or five key men in the Kennedy camp that they will not become obligated until they hear from him.”
The leader of the Irish Mafia arrived in Las Vegas on the Fourth of July. He was put up in style at the Desert Inn and had the run of