John Bartlow Martin, Robert F. Kennedy, and the 1968 Indiana Primary

In the 1960s the Marott Hotel, located on the near north side of Indianapolis at 2625 North Meridian Street, had faded from its original glory days of the 1920s and 1930s when it had hosted key political and social events for the community, and welcomed such famous guests as Winston Churchill, Clark Gable, and Herbert Hoover. On the evening of April 4, 1968, however, the hotel hummed once again with activity as staff for U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy strolled up and down its hallways.

They were staying there after the end of a long first day in Kennedy’s quest to win Indiana’s Democratic presidential primary. Kennedy’s Senate speechwriters Adam Walinsky and Jeff Greenfield, along with a new member of the team, John Bartlow Martin, were busy discussing the details of a foreign policy speech their candidate was slated to deliver later at Louisiana State University when they were interrupted by a secretary, who told them civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot in Memphis, Tennessee. Later, while at dinner, they heard that King had died.

Kennedy’s staff scrambled to decide if the candidate should cancel his schedule, which included the opening of his downtown campaign headquarters and a speech at an outdoor event at Seventeenth and Broadway Streets in a predominately African American neighborhood. In a squad car at the curb near the Marott, Martin came across an Indianapolis police inspector and asked his advice about whether or not Kennedy should appear at the rally. “I sure hope he does,” Martin remembered the policeman fervently saying. “If he doesn’t, there’ll be hell to pay. He’s the only one can do it.”

The policeman feared that a race riot might break out in Indianapolis when African American citizens learned of King’s death, and Kennedy was one of the few white politicians blacks would listen to. Martin suggested to the officer that he call headquarters, which he did, learning that Kennedy was on his way to the rally. “The inspector said he’d go there,” Martin remembered. “Walinsky went with him to be sure Bobby knew [about King’s death]. Greenfield and I went to our rooms to draft a statement on King’s death for Bobby.”

Arriving at the rally, Kennedy, wearing a black overcoat once belonging to his brother, John, climbed onto a flatbed truck located in a paved parking lot near the Broadway Christian Center’s basketball court. After asking for those waving signs and banners to put them down, he informed them that King had been killed. The audience packed in tight near the makeshift stage had been anticipating a raucous political event,  and, for the most part, were unaware of the shooting, responded to the announcement with gasps, shrieks, and cries of “No, No.”

Facing the now stunned and disbelieving audience, some of whom were weeping at their loss, Kennedy gave an impassioned, extemporaneous, approximately six-minute speech on the need for compassion in the face of violence that has gone down in history as one of the great addresses in the modern era, saying, in part: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.” Hearing about the candidate’s moving words from campaign aide Fred Dutton, Martin and Greenfield threw away the statements they had so carefully written for Kennedy. “What he had said was so much better than anything we had written,” Martin remembered.

Kennedy’s dramatic speech was the just the opening salvo in a whirlwind two-month campaign that saw Martin exert great influence because of his knowledge of the Hoosier State. “It was tough. Indiana is not Kennedy country,” Martin recalled. “It was fun, too, because it was so helter skelter. And because, since I knew the state, I exerted influence.”

When he decided to enter the primary there, Indiana marked the first test of Kennedy’s longshot effort at wresting the Democratic presidential nomination from incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as fellow U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who had been the first to challenge the president. In addition to Indiana, Kennedy looked to primaries in other states, including Nebraska, Oregon, South Dakota, California, and New York.

Martin sensed that the time might be right for a candidate such as Kennedy because of the country’s mood. “The people didn’t want programs. They wanted leadership,” he said. “They had programs running out of their ears and look at the mess they were in. They wanted a man. This is what ignited the Kennedy crowds.” The primary campaign in his old home state was, in many ways, Martin noted, the “climatic event” in his life, bringing together “writing, politics, and Indiana,” and yet the entire matter had “rather sneaked up” on him.

In the Indiana primary Kennedy faced off not only against McCarthy, but also the state’s popular governor, Roger D. Branigin, who was running as a stand-in for the president. Kennedy knew the difficulties that faced him in Indiana, and other primaries to come. There were not enough delegates at stake in primary states to secure the Democratic nomination (only 966 delegates were available, and 1,312 were needed to win), but Kennedy believed strong showings in the primaries would demonstrate his electability to powerful Democrats such as Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley and grassroots workers.

Warned by his advisers that entering the Indiana primary would be a gamble because of the state’s well-earned conservative reputation, Kennedy replied, “The whole campaign is a gamble.” He likened his first primary test to the one his brother faced in 1960 when he attempted to prove to disbelieving political pundits that a Roman Catholic could win the trust and support of Protestant voters by running in the West Virginia primary. “Indiana is the ball game,” said Robert Kennedy. “This is my West Virginia.”

Martin advised Kennedy to tone down such remarks, as “they risked too much on a doubtful state.” Kennedy argued that Hoosiers should be reminded that as president his brother had never forgotten the boost West Virginia had given him, hinting at favors to come for Indiana if he won the primary. “I said he could say this privately to politicians but not publicly,” Martin recalled. Finally, the candidate, upon the advice of Ted Sorensen, one of his campaign directors, decided to include a line in his speeches informing Hoosiers that they had a chance to pick a president. “I liked this—Indiana’s presidential primary had never before been important,” Martin recalled. “He [Kennedy] began saying in almost every speech, ‘Indiana can help choose a president.’”

If he had been consulted, Martin said he would have advised against entering the Indiana primary, as the state was “redneck conservative country.” In a March 29 memorandum to Kennedy, Martin warned that Indiana was a state “suspicious of foreign entanglements, conservative in fiscal policy, and with a strong overlay of Southern segregationist sentiment.” There was some hope for Kennedy, he added, as Indiana might respond “to a new and strong hopeful leader in time of trouble.”

To this mix had been added in recent years “a new, liberal, partly Jewish, managerial, upper middle class in the northeastern Indianapolis suburbs,” but the candidate, Martin said, should not forget the “hillbilly backlash of production line workers in southwestern suburbs and such manufacturing towns as Muncie, nor the Polish backlash in Gary suburbs.” (White backlash voters believed African Americans were pushing too hard and too fast for equality and feared the gains made by blacks meant harm, economically and otherwise, for them.) 

Martin later described Hoosiers to Kennedy staff members as “phlegmatic, skeptical, hard to move, with a ‘show me’ attitude.” These were the voters Kennedy counted upon to give him enough of a mandate to knock McCarthy out of the race for good. A defeat in Indiana would be disastrous for Kennedy’s fledgling presidential effort. Campaign aide William Haddad remembered realizing, “if we lose Indiana we lose everything.”

Just two days after Martin’s memo, the political world was turned upside down when Johnson, in a nationally televised address, made the shocking announcement: “With American sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office—the Presidency of your country. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

Anticipating Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s entrance into the presidential contest (he officially announced his candidacy on April 27, too late to enter any of the primaries), Kennedy acted quickly, calling several Democratic Party leaders poised to play important roles at the August convention. He failed, however, to receive any firm pledges of support. “I have to win through the people,” Kennedy said. “Otherwise I am not going to win.” Martin did not see Johnson’s withdrawal from the race as benefiting Kennedy’s cause, as it cost him two of his best issues—“the unpopular president and the unpopular war.”

Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election had also failed to dislodge Branigin from the race in Indiana, as the deadline had passed for his name to be removed from the primary ballot. The governor decided to campaign as a favorite-son candidate. From the beginning of the contest in Indiana, Martin had considered Branigin, not McCarthy, to be the toughest foe to beat in the primary. “I figured Governor Branigin would come in first; what we had to do was beat McCarthy in the three-way contest,” said Martin.

On Wednesday, April 3, Ted Sorensen called Martin and asked him if were free to travel with Kennedy the next day to campaign in Indiana. Martin agreed, and the next morning he met Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, at Washington, DC’s National Airport for a flight to Indiana on a chartered Lockheed Electra prop jet jammed with about forty-three reporters and twenty Kennedy staff members. “Bobby looked fine and relaxed. He always looked slight, slender, even thin, with a wry grin. But he no longer looked boyish,” said Martin. “He had aged a great deal since his brother’s murder five years ago. He aged even more as this spring campaign wore on.” Kennedy’s regular speechwriters, Greenfield and Walinsky, both seemed unhappy at Martin’s presence—an attitude he viewed as natural, as permanent staff people were always possessive when it came to their candidate.

As the airplane made its way to South Bend for a Kennedy speech at the University of Notre Dame’s Stepan Center, the candidate, dressed in a gray, plaid suit, his standard garb on the campaign trail, got up and sat beside Martin and asked, “Do you think it can be done?”  Martin said he thought so, and the two men discussed what speeches might be needed. Kennedy requested that Martin stay with him on the entire eight-day trip, which included stops in Indiana, Ohio, Louisiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Michigan, Alaska, and South Dakota. He also reminded the veteran speechwriter that what he produced could not be “Stevensonian, [it] had to be simpler, suggested I travel the whistlestops with him for a few days and listen, ‘to get the rhythm.’”

Martin shared a draft of an earlier speech he had sent Kennedy with a statement saying the question before the country was whether there would be one nation or two or none. “He especially liked three or four sentences in it, one quoting Adlai Stevenson as saying that self-criticism is the secret weapon of democracy,” Martin noted. Kennedy liked the line so much he told Martin to give it to Greenfield to include in his talk before Notre Dame’s students. Unfamiliar with the campaign staff, Martin gave the quote by mistake to Walinsky, who could not believe Kennedy wanted to use a Stevenson quote in his speech and left it out. Martin later noted that after the speech Kennedy grew angry with Walinsky and Greenfield for cutting part of his speech without first informing him. “This campaign promised to be like others I’d been through,” said Martin.

Following his appearance in South Bend, Kennedy transferred to a small plane to fly to Muncie for a talk at the Men’s Gymnasium at Ball State University. Martin and most of the other Kennedy staff stayed aboard the Electra for a flight to Indianapolis. That evening, after Kennedy had calmed the crowds at the outdoor rally in Indianapolis with his poignant remarks following King’s death, he returned to the Marott.

Kennedy staffers discussed what the candidate should do, with some arguing he should cancel his appearances, while others believed he should stick to his schedule. Martin remembered Kennedy saying, “There’s a lot of people who just don’t care.” Finally, they decided to cancel the rest of the trip except for a Kennedy speech the next day at Cleveland’s City Club, a sober address crafted by Sorensen, Walinsky, and Greenfield on the “mindless menace of violence in America,” which, Kennedy said, “again stains our land and every one of our lives.”

On Sunday, April 7, Martin attended a strategy meeting at Hickory Hill with Kennedy’s campaign team, including Dutton, Sorensen, Richard Goodwin (who had switched to Kennedy after being with McCarthy for a time), and those responsible for television advertising. The meeting lasted from 4:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. with the advertising people doing much of the talking, with little of what they said making sense to Martin. A frustrated Kennedy finally agreed with Martin’s assessment that “everybody ought to go to Indiana,” and overruled a request by the advertising representatives to stay in New York. “He was decisive. He ran a meeting hard. When he decided something, that ended it,” recalled Martin.

Before he left, Martin gave Kennedy two speech drafts he had been working on, including one on foreign policy (part of which was later used in a talk at Indiana University) and another on leadership. Martin recalled that the candidate said he had to start spending more time giving substantive speeches and less time in wild motorcades with huge crowds. “I’ve got to stop looking like Frank Sinatra running for president,” said Kennedy.

While Kennedy returned to Indiana and other states for campaign visits, Martin spent the next week at home in Princeton. On Sunday, April 14, he received a call from Sorensen, telling him that Kennedy had requested he talk to Martin and urged him to give his fulltime effort to the campaign. “Kennedy had told Sorensen he wanted me to do for him in Indiana what I had done for his brother in 1960 in various states—editorial advance,” said Martin. He left the next day, stopping in Chicago to have a tooth fixed before going on to Indianapolis, where he stayed until primary election day on May 7.

During his time back in his home state, Martin stayed at his mother’s house on Kessler Boulevard with Fran, who joined him on the campaign, working with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s wife, Marian, speaking to the wives of college professors “who favored McCarthy and managed to move some of them over to our side, especially in Bloomington,” Martin noted. John W. Douglas, a former State Department official and a troubleshooter for the Kennedy campaign in Indiana, said the two women “did a wonderful job” in the state, concentrating their efforts on universities and the suburbs. “They were impressive personalities,” said Douglas, “spoke very well and, as a result, were able to eliminate or soften hostility to Bob among these groups.”

On April 17 Martin went to the Kennedy campaign’s headquarters, located in a loft upstairs over the old Indiana Theater downtown, “surely one of the dreariest places in dreary Indianapolis,” Martin noted. He met with Joe Dolan, a Kennedy aide in charge of scheduling the candidate, and two young staff writers and researchers, P. J. Mode and Milton Gwirtzman, to help map out strategy for the rest of the Indiana campaign.

The frantic nature of Kennedy’s early days on the campaign trail should be avoided at all costs in Indiana, Martin counseled.  He sensed that the ordinary Hoosier watching television at home each night was “tired of excitement and, after watching pictures of killing in Viet Nam and rioting in the cities, doesn’t want to watch pictures of kids pulling your [Kennedy’s] clothes off.”

Instead of competing with McCarthy for young college students who opposed the Vietnam War, Martin wanted Kennedy to appeal to a broader constituency, including blue-collar workers. “The people, I thought,” said Martin, “did not want to be excited.” He reasoned that the 1968 election resembled 1952, the year of Stevenson’s first presidential campaign. Then, the electorate, weary after years of the New Deal and two wars, sought calm and had turned to Eisenhower. After eight years of what Martin called Eisenhower “do-nothingism,” the voters were ready to follow a fresh, exciting, young leader, and had turned to John Kennedy. “Not in 1968—once more they [voters] wanted change,” said Martin, “change from Vietnam and from riots, but change and calm, not a summons to great adventures.”

To eliminate the frenzied pace that had marked Kennedy’s campaign to that point, Martin urged the senator to change his style to appear “sober and responsible” to Hoosiers.  “For the middle-aged voters, and to be contemplative, Bob should try to identify with Indiana’s past greatness,” Martin wrote Sorenson. Martin wanted Kennedy, accompanied by some of his children, to visit the George Rogers Clark and William Henry Harrison memorials in Vincennes, followed by a visit to the grave of Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, where he could “walk around and kick leaves and muse about saving the Union, the house divided, kids, etc.”

Later, Martin advised and Kennedy agreed to visit the Indianapolis home of one of the state’s greatest icons, the Hoosier Poet, James Whitcomb Riley. To avoid being identified too closely with the concerns of Hoosier African Americans, Martin also wanted Kennedy to schedule stops at industrial communities he labeled as “redneck backlash factory cities,” including Kokomo, Muncie, and Marion. To play to Hoosier nostalgia, the Kennedy staff came up with the idea for an old-fashioned railroad whistlestop trip to several cities using the route of the Wabash Cannonball, including Logansport, Peru, Wabash, Huntington, and Fort Wayne.

Others on the Kennedy staff recognized the worth of what Martin did for the candidate. “John Martin made a real contribution in Indiana,” said Douglas. “He made suggestions about topics and places that would appeal to the Indianans as Indianans and just as members of the larger national community. John was trying to take the candidate’s approach, his personality and his views on issues and placing them in some kind of historical setting or geographical context that would be attractive to Indiana voters.” 

Martin spent most of his first week in Indiana seeking support for his ideas with Goodwin, Ted Kennedy, and Larry O’Brien, who had resigned his job as postmaster general in Johnson’s administration to help run Kennedy’s campaign, and working on scheduling with Dolan. “Most of the stuff in the briefing sheets came from interviewing I did from my book on Indiana [Indiana: An Interpretation], and from Indiana fact books and the world almanac,” said Martin. Kennedy later praised the Hoosier journalist for the documents, claiming they were a lifesaver, giving him a sense of confidence anywhere he appeared in Indiana. “When he came to a strange town,” Martin noted, “he knew what to expect—what kind of town it was, who was in his audience, what kind of people they were, what was on their minds, and so on.”

On Saturday, April 21, Martin and Dolan had finished the schedule and briefing sheets for campaign stops at the Hoosier historic sites to begin at the start of the week. On Sunday, Martin traveled to Washington, DC, and then on to Kennedy’s Hickory Hill  home where a number of his key staff had gathered. That evening at dinner, Martin told Kennedy about the schedule for the next week, and the senator expressed little enthusiasm for visiting the historic sites and balked at taking any of his children along. With the help of Dutton, Martin convinced the candidate to include his children on the ground that “every Hoosier takes his wife and kids to visit the Lincoln sites.”

Kennedy also expressed his dislike for Tuesday’s schedule. Martin explained that the white backlash vote in the central Indiana factory communities differed in composition from the Poles and other ethnic groups that had settled around Gary. In cities like Kokomo the white backlash vote consisted of workers who had come to Indiana from Kentucky and Tennessee (“red-necks and Klansmen,” Martin called them) during World War II to find jobs in the war industry. “Why am I going there then?” Kennedy asked. Martin replied: “Because there are a lot of Democratic votes there and you’ve got to convince them.”

After reviewing Martin’s briefing sheets, Kennedy agreed to the schedule, and even decided to take three of his children, David, Courtney, and Michael, and his pet dog, Freckles, to visit the Hoosier historic sites. “When we first started talking, he was quite sharp and irritable with me,” Martin recalled, “and didn’t like the ideas or the schedule. As we went on, however, he accepted them.” Staff members could get Kennedy to do something he did not like if they could convince him it was important. “He would take advice if he trusted the advisor’s judgment and knowledge,” Martin added. “He still made the decisions—too much so, probably—but he could be persuaded.”

To attract the support of Hoosiers voters, Martin also argued that Kennedy had to alter his message, speaking out against rioting and violence and emphasizing his law enforcement experience as attorney general. At the same time, Martin and others on the staff stressed, Kennedy should not neglect to include statements that injustice could also not be tolerated. Gwirtzman noted that the candidate was trying out a few phrases along these lines and he suggested that instead of saying attorney general—a government position a number of people have little understanding about—Kennedy should just say he was the former chief law enforcement officer of the United States. Kennedy liked the recommendations, nodding and saying: “I can go pretty far in that direction. That doesn’t bother me.” According to Gwirtzman, Kennedy “just wanted to point out the fact that he had faced these kinds of problems in 1962, in 1963, even in 1964, that he had had some experience with it and that it was perfectly possible to preserve civil liberties . . . while enforcing the law.”

Martin also urged Kennedy to talk more about government working with private enterprise, along the lines of his effort as senator to revitalize New York City’s largest ghetto, Bedford-Stuyvesant, by working with white business leaders. On the issue of Vietnam, Martin wrote for Kennedy a line indicating that the senator wanted to end the fighting and stop spending money in Vietnam and use it instead for programs in the United States, including some in the Hoosier State. “This played to Indiana’s natural isolationism and chauvinism and penny-pinching,” Martin said. “It always got applause.

Kennedy’s decision to emphasize a more conservative tone in his stump remarks for the Indiana campaign caused some dissension among his staff, particularly with Walinsky and Greenfield. Martin remembered finding the young men one night working together to compose limericks about Kennedy coming to Indiana and becoming a member of the KKK. Douglas noted that some on the staff believed Kennedy spoke too strongly on law and order and not enough on social justice. An article by New York Times reporter Warren Weaver Jr., titled “Kennedy: Meet the Conservative,” observed that Martin and Goodwin (who was not involved) had seemingly turned the liberal Kennedy into a Democratic version of George Romney, the Republican governor of Michigan who had dropped out of the presidential race.

Although some in the media and on Kennedy’s own staff viewed these changes as a struggle for the candidate’s soul, Martin “conceived of it as an effort to win the Indiana election.” He said that Kennedy could not hope to achieve a victory in the Indiana primary by making speeches pleasing to the ears of liberals on the East Coast, something Martin said his friend, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., understood. (Schlesinger did call Martin during the campaign to tell him that the speeches made “curious reading in the East.”) Only Kennedy had the moral authority to take a firm stand against violence and rioting before white backlash voters because he stood as one of the few white men in America trusted implicitly by African Americans, noted Martin. “They knew that in his heart he was for them,” he said.

Kennedy also always followed his statements about intolerance for violence and rioting with pleas to end injustice. “This may be viewed as a cynical effort to have it both ways; it may also be viewed as an effort to heal the country’s wounds, to bring us together again,” said Martin. There was nothing the candidate said in Indiana that he would have to later take back if elected, insisted Martin, and nothing Kennedy would have to disavow in other primary states. Martin added that Kenendy “said and did what was essential to win Indiana.” Douglas noted that in the light of the political rhetoric that followed the 1968 primary campaign, Kennedy’s statements “were models of moderation and good sense.”

Martin made sure to gauge what effect the ideas he presented to Kennedy had on Hoosiers. During the candidate’s stops at county courthouses around the state, Martin often wandered around the edge of the crowds. There always seemed to be a group of young girls screaming at the front rows, but most of the townspeople hung back with their hands in their pockets, as though they were daring Kennedy to make them respond. “He emphasized that violence could not be tolerated; and got big applause; then when he went on and said injustice could not be tolerated either and everybody was entitled to job and schools, they didn’t applaud but they didn’t mind—they had heard what they wanted to hear, that he was against violence in the streets, and that was enough,” said Martin.

During these campaign stops, Kennedy usually climbed onto the trunk of the convertible he rode in before speaking. “Previously he had been using a bullhorn; I objected that the bullhorn had become a symbol of southern sheriffs during the civil rights troubles and of Lyndon Johnson,” said Martin, “and a small microphone was substituted.” When he finished, Kennedy tossed the microphone back to Martin, and then came the difficult task of maneuvering through the massive, “savage crowds,” as Martin described them, who tore off Kennedy’s cufflinks and ripped his clothes.

One of the hardest tasks for the campaign staff during these mob scenes involved getting Kennedy’s car moving again after the speech, which became, Martin said, a “bruising business.” He noted that usually Dutton placed himself in front of the convertible, faced it, and then inched his way backward into the crowd. The car’s driver slowly moved forward as Dutton beckoned, and Martin made it a habit to tell children in the crowd to be careful to not get their toes run over.

The grim specter of another assassination was always on the minds of Martin and other Kennedy staffers that spring. Even before Kennedy had decided to enter the primaries, his family and friends worried about his safety. Martin remembered that Jacqueline Kennedy had told Schlesinger of her brother-in-law, “If he gets in, they’ll kill him, just as they did Jack.” In the days before the Secret Service provided protection for major presidential and vice presidential candidates, Kennedy depended upon a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, Bill Barry, as sort of a one-man security detail. “He only accepted as much protection as he got because he liked me,” remembered Barry. “He wouldn’t have had anybody if really left to his own choice.”

All that spring, as his candidate rode, exposed, in the back of an open convertible while campaigning, Martin found himself scanning the windows of surrounding buildings and watching people in the crowds, trying to anticipate any signs of trouble. If he did spot a potential threat, Martin was prepared to knock Kennedy down, away from any danger. “I wanted to talk to Kennedy about it, and did talk to Barry and Dutton, but it was no use—he [Kennedy] had a fatalistic view that if he was going to get killed he was going to get killed and there was nothing to be done about it,” Martin recalled.

Kennedy tried to put a brave face on the hazards he faced, paraphrasing a quote from French author Albert Camus, “Knowing you are going to die is nothing.” Martin argued that there were measures to cut down on the odds of anything happening, including putting the candidate in a closed car during motorcades, having more police on hand to precede the campaign caravan and search buildings on the route, and avoiding publicizing the route ahead of time. “It was no use,” he said. “They were all for it but they knew he [Kennedy] wasn’t, so nothing was done.”

Martin believed Kennedy turned the corner in the campaign with his visits to the Hoosier historic sites in southern Indiana on Monday, April 22, and backlash factory cities in the central part of the state on Tuesday, April 23. “Before then it had lacked direction, had been all razzle dazzle and high pressure, had not been in tune with the Hoosier voters,” Martin recalled. “On those days, and thereafter, he got on the same wave length with the Indiana voters, he felt at home with them, and they with him. He started an upward surge on those days that continued until the end.”

For all the resources at his disposal—his fortune; a large, dedicated staff devoted to ensuring his success; and the mystique of his family’s name—Kennedy worked harder than anyone else to capture the hearts and minds of Hoosier voters. Douglas observed that probably no national candidate in modern times worked as hard as Kennedy did. “He came across as authentic, direct, and straightforward—a person in whom people could have confidence,” Douglas remembered.

Martin could see firsthand the effort Kennedy had made in the state, turning voters attitudes around to his cause through the passion of his words and the depth of his commitment to bettering the lives of those who needed help. Martin noted:

 

He went yammering around Indiana about the poor whites of Appalachia and the starving Indians who committed suicide on the reservations and the jobless Negroes in the distant great cities, and half the Hoosiers didn’t have any idea what he was talking about; but he plodded ahead stubbornly, making them listen, maybe even making some of them care, by the sheer power of his own caring. Indiana people are not generous or sympathetic; they are hardhearted, not warm and generous; but he must have touched something in them, pushed a button somewhere. He alone did it.  

On Tuesday, May 7, all of Kennedy’s hard work paid off and he won the Indiana primary. The final returns had Kennedy winning with 42.3 percent of the 776,000 votes cast. Branigin finished second with 30.7 percent, and McCarthy trailed the field at 27 percent. In winning nine of eleven of Indiana’s eleven congressional districts (losing only the Fifth and Sixth Districts to Branigin), Kennedy captured fifty-six of the state’s sixty-three delegates to the Democratic National Convention, with Branigin winning the remaining seven. Kennedy swept fifty-seven of the state’s ninety-two counties, and also captured the majority of Indiana’s largest urban centers, including Indianapolis, Gary, Hammond, South Bend, Kokomo, Muncie, Fort Wayne, Terre Haute, and East Chicago. “I’ve proved I can really be a leader of a broad spectrum,” Kennedy observed to a staff member. “I can be a bridge between blacks and whites without stepping back from my positions.”

Kennedy’s victory in Indiana failed to knock McCarthy out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, but Martin remembered being satisfied that his candidate had not only beaten his fellow U.S. Senator but also a popular incumbent governor in his home state. “Going home to my mother’s house, Fran and I said it was nice to win one. It seemed so long since we had,” Martin said.

For the first time since 1963, he and Fran felt good about the future, as they were both involved in something they thought important, were doing it together, and it had worked—they had won. Kennedy offered people hope, he noted. “Somehow with him, you really felt it didn’t all have to be race riots at home and war in Southeast Asia and crap from the White House and the rest of the government,” said Martin. “The United States could become again what it ought to be, a great nation able to live with itself and with the rest of the world.”

Kennedy was not attempting to return to the solutions of the 1950s and 1960s, as they would not work in the late 1960s and 1970s, and he was not his brother, according to Martin, but unique. Liberals might have believed Kennedy had repudiated Democratic programs from the New Deal era when he discussed in his speeches returning government to the people and restoring local control over federal programs, but they had forgotten that the best of the New Deal—rural electrification and soil conservation—had been locally controlled, Martin said. “The button he [Kennedy] was trying to push,” he said, “was individual worth and importance; the enemy he fought was the feeling of helplessness so many Americans have come to have about problems big beyond their grasp.”