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.”

  

Reporting from Shangri-La: Richard Tregaskis and the Doolittle Raiders

International News Service correspondent Richard Tregaskis had been eager to test his courage in combat when he was sent by the wire service to report on U.S. Navy task forces sailing for missions from Pearl Harbor against the Japanese. He finally got his chance in early April 1942, but he and the other Americans onboard the USS Northampton (CA26) could not know that they were on their way to be a part of an audacious attempt to strike back at the Japanese and gain a measure of revenge for the attack at Pearl Harbor.

The cruiser was part of Task Force 18, which included ships under the command of Vice Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey Jr., and they were sailing for a midocean rendezvous with Task Force 16, which included a newly commissioned carrier, the $32 million, approximately 20,000-ton USS Hornet. The Hornet and its escorting ships sailed from San Francisco Bay on April 2. Once the two task forces rendezvoused, the ships set course on a secret assignment to bomb Japan. Instead of its usual complement of Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bombers, Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo aircraft, and Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters, the Hornet had crammed on its narrow flight deck sixteen twin-engine B-25B Mitchell army bombers of the Seventeenth Bombardment Group under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle.

The Seventeenth had been the first group to receive the new bombers, named for military aviation pioneer Major General William “Billy” Mitchell and designed and built by North American Aviation, the firm responsible for the development of such successful aircraft as the T-6 Texan trainer and the P-51 Mustang fighter. The bombers and their small, five-men crews (pilot, copilot, bombardier, navigator, and engineer/gunner) had been ordered to hit industrial and military installations—steel factories, gas and chemical plants, and power stations—in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe, and Nagoya. If they survived their bombing run, the crews were supposed to land at airfields hurriedly being prepared for them in China.

Since the destruction at Pearl Harbor President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been seeking a mission against Japan that would bolster morale in the United States and in other Allied countries. According to Lieutenant General Henry “Hap” Arnold, the head of the U.S. Army Air Forces, the president had insisted that his military commanders “find ways and means of carrying home to Japan proper, in the form of a bombing raid, the real meaning of war.” To meet Roosevelt’s goal, Captain Francis Low, an officer on the staff of Admiral Ernest King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, came up with the idea to use the Hornet as the launching platform for army bombers to raid the Japanese mainland.

Low worked with Captain Donald Duncan, King’s air officer, to develop a plan for the mission, which received approval from both King and Arnold in early 1942. Arnold tasked the mission to Doolittle, who titled the assignment “Special Aviation Project No. 1” and selected the B-25B bomber, with a cruising range of 2,400 miles, as the aircraft best suited to meet the demands of the mission. The plane’s 67-foot wingspan was barely wide enough to be able to take off safely from the carrier’s narrow, 114-foot-wide deck. Although Doolittle realized the Mitchell’s 2,000-pound bomb load could do “only a fraction of the damage the Japanese had inflicted on us at Pearl Harbor,” its main purpose would be psychological, both boosting American morale and causing “confusion in the minds of the Japanese people and sow doubt about the reliability of their leaders.” He also hoped that the shock might nudge the Japanese military to “divert aircraft and equipment from offensive operations to the defense of the home islands.”

Commanded by Captain Marc Mitscher, the Hornet proved that a Mitchell bomber could take off safely from a carrier with two trial flights off Norfolk, Virginia, in early February. The carrier set out in early March for the West Coast to await delivery of the sixteen modified B-25Bs and their crews at the Alameda Naval Air Station on San Francisco Bay. The planes were loaded by a crane onto the carrier on April 1. Mitscher noted that when all the army bombers had been arranged on the Hornet, the last plane in line “hung far out over the stern ramp in a precarious position. The leading plane [to be flown by Doolittle] had 467 feet of clear deck for take-off” from the 824-foot-long flight deck.

The bombers had been modified to better accomplish their mission, but the airmen knew they faced perilous odds as the Hornet sailed off on April 2 to join Halsey’s task force. Second Lieutenant Chase J. Nielsen, navigator on the bomber nicknamed the “Green Hornet,” figured that his crew had a 50-50 chance of taking off from the carrier without crashing. “If we got off, there was a 50-50 chance we’d get shot down over Japan,” Nielsen recalled. “And, if we got that far, there was a 50-50 chance we’d make it to China. And, if we got to China, there was a 50-50 chance we’d be captured. We figured the odds were really stacked against us.”

Having the 134 army pilots and crewmen sharing cabin space engendered plenty of questions about their purpose, with some navy men believing the bombers were meant for delivery to Hawaii or an isolated American base somewhere in the Pacific. The Hornet crew only learned about their destination after the ship had passed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and was well out to sea.

Lieutenant Commander Oscar Dodson, the Hornet’s communications officer, responsible for all confidential messages, met daily with Mitscher. On April 3 Dodson remembered going to Mitscher’s cabin and seeing the captain seated at his desk holding a document and smiling. “Without a word he passed the papers to me,” Dodson said. “It was a CNO [Chief of Naval Operations] order for HORNET to launch the B-25s for an attack on Tokyo and other nearby cities. He said quietly: ‘As soon as we are well clear of the shore line, I will announce our mission to the ship.’”

Mitscher spoke to the crew on the ship’s bullhorn, announcing the details about their mission. “In the ship there was a moment of stunned silence,” Dodson noted, “followed by wild cheers which rang throughout the ship.” Still thinking of secrecy, Mitscher, Dodson added, cautioned his men to avoid throwing overboard any “identifying material,” including magazines, letters, daily schedules, or the ship’s newspaper.

Tregaskis remained unaware of the Northampton’s destination during the early days of the voyage. He found the ship’s wardroom a comfortable place to relax after they had reached the open sea, as it had leather-upholstered chairs, some dog-eared magazines, and a continuous supply of hot coffee. “It can be had at almost any time of night or day—replacing old-fashioned (and banned) spirits to warm up cold stomachs,” noted Tregaskis. An officer told the correspondent that on the average four-and-a-half cups of coffee was consumed every day by each person on board.

At dinner, Tregaskis tried to get some of his tablemates to conjecture about where they might be headed. There were plenty of guesses, including Australia and the Indian Ocean to relieve the British fleet. Some sailors anticipated a repeat of former raids on the Marshall and Gilbert Islands. “We’re going on a polar expedition to engage the icebergs,” one sailor joked. When questioned by Tregaskis, Captain Chandler would only say: “You know, when you’re on a ship, there’s no use worrying about where you’re going. It just makes the trip seem longer. How good are you at relaxing?”

Accepting the captain’s mild rebuke, Tregaskis decided to spend part of his time looking for the best spot to be during any action to “watch the fireworks,” as well as investigating the pastimes of the more than 1,000 men onboard the Northampton. One place he investigated as a possible perch was on the bridge, which gave him a good view of the ship. A crew member, however, warned Tregaskis that he had to watch out for the number two turret, as during the raid on Wotje it had caught him unawares and knocked him “ass over teakettle.”

An officer pointed out that a newsreel cameraman who had accompanied the cruiser on its previous raids had set up his camera on the derrick forward of the ship’s after mast, which gave him the opportunity to take cover in a nearby room if the going got too tough. “The only disadvantage of this spot, said my informant, was that when the guns went off, great clouds of soot were knocked loose from the stack and covered the area,” Tregaskis remembered.

Discouraged, the correspondent climbed two levels higher to an open, if precarious, platform upon which, at least, he would be clear of the concussion blasts from the big guns and the resulting showers of soot. “Here I consulted a seaman who laughed and said that the thought this would be as good a place as any. ‘But,’ he pointed to the yard arm, ‘you have to watch out for strafing [aircraft]. On the Wotje trip, we had a bullet in there.’”

The men and ships of Task Force 16 had the answer they were waiting for about their mission on April 12, when, northwest of Midway Island, aircrews from the USS Enterprise were sighted by the approaching Hornet. Soon thereafter, Tregaskis heard the “electrifying news” that the now combined group, designated as Task Force 16, had as its mission a bombing strike against Japan. “We’re four months late, but we’ll give it to ’em now,” Tregaskis heard a gunner exclaim as the news reached the Northampton’s crew.

There was another wave of excitement when he trained his binoculars on the Hornet as it moved closer to the cruiser. He could see a high, irregular mass on the carrier’s deck, which marked the presence of “much larger aircraft than the usual carrier planes. As the ship drew nearer, we could make out the double tails, wide wings, and tricycle landing gears of B-25 army bombers.” Tregaskis believed there must have been “exhaustive” tests done in secret to prove the feasibility of launching such a large plane from a carrier. “Our force was told they will approach to a point about 400 miles from Tokyo. There the bombers will take [to] the air, and we will hightail our way home,” Tregaksis said.

Obviously, Tregaskis noted, the bombers could not return to the carrier deck to land, as there was not enough room nor did the aircraft have the necessary arrester hooks that carrier planes possessed to catch the wires stretched across the flight deck. Spruance suggested to Tregaskis about the possibility of the planes landing in China after their mission. “The admiral was not over-optimistic about our chances of getting away unscathed from the expedition,” the correspondent reported. “He spoke of the long range of the Jap patrol aircraft which might spot us; also of the hundreds of small patrol vessels known to operate along the Jap coast. He spoke of the need for lightning withdrawal after we had made our thrust.” At dinner that evening, a marine captain, crossing the fingers on both of his hands, spoke for many of the crew when he exclaimed: “Oh, oh, oh, God, may they [the bombers] get there.”

On April 17, after refueling, the Enterprise, Hornet, and their supporting cruisers, including the Northampton, sped away from the slower destroyers and oilers to make their final dash to the launching point east of Japan for the Doolittle Raid. The bombers, each of which had been equipped with four 500-pound bombs, were set to take off on the afternoon of April 18.

The afternoon before the scheduled launch, Tregaskis noted that the skies had darkened and the seas were rougher. “The other ships were following in close, but they were barely distinguishable in the heavy, driving mist,” he remembered. “It was perfect weather for our raid—for no Japanese ‘eyes’ could be flying on such a day as this. And so we hurried on to make the most of the weather, rising up over the high combers, rolling and pitching, and shivering from one end to the other, but always crowding on full steam.”

That evening on the cruiser, Tregaskis observed no more “nerves” than usual. Officers read books and played cribbage to pass the time, and one aviation officer entertained others by speaking “earnestly on the subject of airplane armament.” Below decks, the sailors and marines, except for those on watch, had turned in for the night. Tregaskis came upon a veteran petty officer standing alone near the edge of the mess hall and asked him where everyone was. “They’re all squared away for the night,” the man told the correspondent, shrugging his shoulders toward the sailors’ sleeping quarters. “These days when they’re not on watch, they’re so tired they turn in.”

Tregaskis awoke at 4:00 a.m. on April 18 not wanting to miss anything, as there was the possibility the army bombers might take off at dawn, but they did not, remaining firmly tied down. He did uncover a rumor—“scuttlebutt” in navy jargon—that at about 3:00 a.m. the Northampton had detected an unknown ship approximately twelve miles away. When the cruiser turned off course, the mystery vessel turned in the same direction and followed until the Northampton’s superior speed dropped the other ship astern.

At about 7:00 a.m., as he was sitting down to breakfast, Tregaskis heard that a scouting plane had spotted an unidentified ship, but quickly avoided it. Later that morning came a report that the cruiser running behind them had sighted a Japanese patrol boat, the No. 23 Nitto Maru, a modified fishing trawler. These small vessels, dubbed “spitkits” by American sailors, were part of Japan’s early warning system. The Nitto Maru had identified the approaching ships as hostile and radioed a warning home—“enemy carriers sighted. Position 650 nautical miles east of Inubo Saki.”

Fighters and dive-bombers from the Enterprise attempted to sink the Japanese boat, but were unsuccessful, so the cruiser Nashville was sent by Halsey to destroy the vessel. “We could see her streaking towards the horizon, where the Japanese ship was only a faint smudge of gray on the horizon,” Tregaskis recalled. “At last, we had met the enemy.”

Although the Nashville was about four miles away from the Northampton when it opened fire, Tregaskis could plainly see the “brilliant flashes” from the cruiser’s six-inch guns. “Clouds of dirty smoke, with a yellowish hue, were rising over the cruiser. And near the horizon we could see tall narrow geysers like a line of white columns, springing into existence,” he observed. “Then the small popping sound of the gunfire came to us from the distance. Sound is slow to travel in such vast spaces. Almost immediately, the bright flashes of a second salvo burst along the cruiser’s deck. And then the bright little sunbursts of color came in rotation, rolling up and down the length of the ship.”

Tregaskis, who called the action an “impersonal introduction to the art of war,” learned that before the Nitto Maru went under, it had charged at the much larger ship, firing its “three-inch deck gun, until it was blown apart.” Mitscher had briefed Doolittle on the encounter with the Japanese picket boat, telling him, “It looks like you’re going to have to be on your way soon. They know we’re here.”

With secrecy compromised and other enemy patrol craft dotting the sea, Halsey decided to proceed with the mission twelve hours ahead of schedule and 150 nautical miles farther away than planned. The admiral sent a message to the Hornet that read: “Launch Planes. To Col. Doolittle and Gallant Crew: Good Luck and God Bless You.” At 8:03 a.m. the crew on the Hornet heard the announcement: “Now hear this! Now hear this! Army pilots, man your planes.”

Because the Northampton had moved into a position to protect the Hornet, Tregaskis had a “marvelous view of the activity on her flight deck. If the demonstration had been arranged for our benefit, we could not have had better ‘seats.’” Sailors and marines busy on the cruiser’s deck snatched seconds from their duties, despite the constant danger of an enemy air raid, to watch what was happening on the carrier, entering into the action “as wholeheartedly as a great football audience,” Tregaskis reported.

The correspondent could see small figures hurrying around on the Hornet’s deck starting the B-25B’s engines. At about 8:20 a.m. the first of the bombers, piloted by the mission’s commander, Doolittle, with Second Lieutenant Richard Cole as his copilot, “waddled forward” to begin its takeoff. At that moment Tregaskis noticed that the wind had increased to “almost gale force” and he could see the Hornet varying its speed to find a moment at which the least pitching would occur in the raging seas. “I could hear the motors now as the bomber inched forward gaining speed,” he remembered. “Soon the craft was airborne, lifting gradually from the deck of the carrier as a great shout rang out on our deck from the sailors and marines who were awaiting this sight for many days.”

Doolittle’s plane staggered into the wind, leveled off, “moving steadily but low, over the waves and gaining speed,” Tregaskis observed. The B-25B eventually swung over the ships in a slow circle, accompanied by “great cheers” from the crew of the Northampton. “Nobody spoke of the great dangers facing this intrepid crew,” Tregaskis recalled.

All the remaining army bombers took off successfully from the Hornet, but some just barely. The fourth bomber in line appeared to almost stall, Tregaskis recalled, and “it hung sluggishly over the sea its nose pointed upward, but the plane fell forward toward the high waves.” The concerned crew on the Northampton groaned in anticipation of a crash and cried “Up, up” as the bomber staggered down a few feet more to almost hit the waves, gained altitude for a moment, and bogged down again. “The plane was sinking, but finally gained speed, power and height, and streaked off into the stormy sky,” Tregaskis reported, adding that a nearby marine commented, “That makes me feel good all over.”

As the bombers continued to streak off the Hornet, the weather worsened and the seas grew even rougher, breaking over the carrier’s bow. “It’s the first time in my life I ever saw that happen; I probably will never see it again,” one of the Northampton’s officers said to Tregaskis. “Waves breaking over the flight deck of a carrier.” Green water also crashed over the cruiser’s bow, with the water reaching as high as the ship’s navigation bridge. “Steel uprights on our midship deck were bent like bows,” Tregaskis noted. “The captain’s coat was soaking wet and our stacks were dripping with salt water.”

During all this, lookouts on the Northampton received a report that Japanese aircraft had been spotted at a range of 30,000 yards, but later learned what they had seen was an American plane. Tregaskis continued to watch as the final B-25B prepared for its take off. “The last plane wobbled down the deck and paused, waiting for a giant swell to pass by,” he noted. “While the bomber paused, a second gigantic wave rolled into the carrier and crashed high over the flight deck. With field glass[es], I could see the spray sweeping through the propellers of the plane.”

The aircraft’s motors, however, did not stall and after a few seconds the bomber moved slowly into the wind, steadied itself, and rose abruptly into the sky. Picking up speed after it was airborne, the B-25, nicknamed “Bat Out of Hell,” made a slow turn over the Northampton and its crew could see the star insignia on its fuselage and the large words “U.S. Army” on the underside of its wings. “I could make out the black silhouetted figure of a gunner in one of the plane’s transparent ‘bubbles’ or turrets,” Tregaskis reported. “I wondered then if this one man—the [only] one whom I had seen as an individual since the planes began to take off—would survive.”

As the correspondent pondered the army crewman’s fate, the Northampton and the Hornet made sharp U-turns and, with the Enterprise and other escorting cruisers, headed for home “at our greatest possible speed,” twenty-five knots (approximately twenty-nine miles per hour). On the Hornet, a relieved ensign, Robert Noone, reflected that after the last bomber had left the carrier there was “a physical let down all over the ship. Everyone was exhausted from the nervous tension of watching them take off. We mentally pushed every plane off the deck.”

Although the Japanese military had intercepted radio traffic that hinted at a possible U.S. fleet attack, they expected any such mission to be launched from closer to land, approximately 200 miles, the expected range of a carrier plane. They had no expectation of being attacked by long-range army bombers. Doolittle’s raiders used their high explosive and incendiary bombs to hit their targets, receiving scattered opposition from antiaircraft batteries and Japanese fighters.

With their fuel exhausted, the bombers, fifteen in all, had to either bail out or crash land in China. The sixteenth, flown by Captain Edward J. York, went off course and had to land near Vladivostok in the Soviet Union. Although treated well, its crew was interned by military authorities, but managed to escape from the country in May 1943. Doolittle, looking at the thousands of pieces of shattered metal that had once been his plane, sat down on a wing at his crash site in China and felt as “dejected as a frog’s posterior. This was my first combat mission. I had planned it from the beginning and led it. I was sure it was my last.”

As he sat there, Doolittle saw his gunner/flight engineer, Staff Sergeant Paul J. Leonard, snap his picture. Trying to cheer up his pilot, Leonard asked him what would happen when they got back to the United States. A dejected Doolittle predicted that he would be court-martialed and sent to prison at Fort Leavenworth. Leonard had a different fate in mind for his commander, telling Doolittle he would be promoted to general and given the Medal of Honor.

Leonard’s prediction came true, but what brought tears to Doolittle’s eyes was his staff sergeant’s comment that when Doolittle was given charge of another airplane, he wanted to serve as his crew chief. “It was the supreme compliment that a mechanic could give a pilot,” Doolittle said. “It meant he was so sure of the skills of the pilot that he would fly anywhere with him under any circumstances.” 

The weather remained overcast and windy as Task Force 16 sped away from Japan’s home waters. An officer confided to Tregaskis that they would probably not have to worry about the Japanese fleet, but still faced danger from patrolling submarines, on the lookout for the Americans. One morning the cruiser tested its guns and the sudden “blasting and banging, without notice, set jittery nerves to jumping,” Tregaskis recalled.

Because the ship’s course had changed sharply during the night, and it seemed to be heading directly for a hostile island base, Tregaskis and others wondered if the task force might be headed for another attack on the enemy. “It was obvious many of the officers wanted to do that,” Tregaskis remembered. One officer told him: “Wild Bill Halsey’s going to hit ’em again before he hauls out of here.” The correspondent, however, could uncover no confirmation for such a plan. He talked to an officer higher up the chain of command, who admitted they knew nothing official but were willing to bet him that the task force was headed “straight home.” Later that day the matter was settled when the ship’s course reverted to its former direction. “And thus more scuttlebutt was laid to rest—as it usually is,” wrote Tregaskis.

During its high-speed run to Pearl Harbor, the Northampton picked up a news report from Los Angeles that quoted Japanese shortwave broadcasts indicating that Tokyo had been bombed by American aircraft. One of the cruiser’s lieutenants reported that the Japanese had claimed they had shot down one of the U.S. planes and gave a purported interview with one of the pilots in which he had confessed that he had been forced to make the flight against his will. “Which gave a good laugh to all of us who had witnessed the unfaltering bravery with which the bombers took off,” Tregaskis wrote. “A good laugh, and a twinge of sadness when we thought some had not come through.”

At lunch, a marine officer had cut through the table chatter with something that was on the minds of several of the crew: “I can’t believe it,” Tregaskis remembered him saying. “Can’t believe what?” he was asked. The marine responded: “I can’t believe that we got over there and back, and sent out our planes, without even a bomb falling on us. It’s impossible.”