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The diverse crew is not without its frictions. There is something of a generation gap between the veterans and the youngsters, a certain amount of resentment that "Adamant Adam" Walinsky gets the last word so often on rhetoric. O'Brien and O'Donnell "speak to each other, but don't communicate," as one colleague puts it. O'Brien has been assigned to the primary states, O'Donnell to delegate work in the non-primary states. Goodwin is somewhat out of favor; he worked for both Johnson and McCarthy. Greenfield keeps on permanent display a college newspaper editorial he wrote criticizing Jack Kennedy's Viet Nam policies.
Filling the Lenses. But the team functions. Virtually all the advance scheduling through June 4—the last primary—was blocked out in late March. Special aides are called in for specific situations—Sorensen's brother Philip, former lieutenant governor of Nebraska, was summoned from his present job in Indiana to work his old home state. Jerry Bruno, who had run Kennedy's office in Syracuse, N.Y., supervises the candidate's advance work, attempting to get the widest possible exposure with as much drama as possible. Kennedy and entourage roll up to a small-town school. No one is in sight. Will he be photographed being greeted by no one? Hardly. At the proper moment, kids stream on cue from every door, engulfing the candidate, filling the lenses. After stumping a city, the staff sometimes prepares an exhaustive written critique on what went right—and wrong.
Kennedy did not get off so smoothly in the beginning. During his first days as an announced candidate, particularly before Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the race, he wobbled a bit. His attacks on Johnson sometimes bordered on the demagogic, as when he accused the President of appealing to the nation's "darkest impulses." He realized his error and soon pulled back. He also ceased invoking Jack's memory. His very presence is enough to evoke the old mystique anyway, and the press, which had given Bobby a bad time for the way in which he entered the race, was quick to pick up his obvious use of New Frontierisms.
"There is such a thing as evocation of the great dead," wrote Columnist Murray Kempton, "and there is also such a thing as the exploitation of corpses. Senator Kennedy seems appallingly far from recognizing the difference." In Salt Lake City, the candidate was actually introduced by a memory-haunted supporter as "the Honorable John F. Kennedy."
Pablum & Tranquilizers. Bobby rapidly developed his own style, blending hard proposals, double-edged wit and a tough platform manner. The Johnson dropout deprived him of his prime target, but Hubert Humphrey soon provided another. Kennedy seized on H.H.H.'s "politics of joy" slogan to offer his own contrast: "If you want to be filled with Pablum and tranquilizers," he said in Detroit's John F. Kennedy Square last week, "then you should vote for some other candidate." Again: "Let's not have tired answers. If you see a small black child starving to death in the Mississippi Delta, as I have, you know this is not the politics of joy." Dramatic pause. "I'm going to tell it like it is."