Free Daring by Gail Sheehy Page A

mouth dangled a burned-out cigar. A pretty stewardess brought him a scotch and water. He sat on the armrest in the aisle and asked for “We Shall Overcome” and then “Hymn to Young People.” He kept drawing on the dead cigar, sometimes singing, sometimes leaning his head on his hand. His sad blue eyes seemed to rove planets away. Later he asked the folksinger Buffy to sit on the floor, beneath him. Now and then his hand absently picked up a strand of Buffy’s long taffy-colored hair. It was a characteristic moment—the melancholy flitting through joy, the distance and the need for closeness, the complete Irishness.
    On our third day in Oregon, Dutton let me know the senator was taking a very small plane to hop up and down the Cascade Mountain Range—probably twenty stops or more. “A nail-biter. You won’t have any competition for a seat.”
    We flew over the Cascade Range of pine-studded mountains. When we landed in Roseburg, Ethel froze. Her husband had to walk through a mob of angry, rifle-toting Oregonians to debate the gun-sale issue. Rain started to fall. John Birchers were out in force, waving professionally printed signs: PROTECT YOUR RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS .
    A woman holding a McCarthy sign stopped him; “I hear your dog bites.”
    â€œHe only bites children.” Kennedy’s quick wit usually melted hecklers, but in this place it was not working. The woman grew surlier. “They say you’re ruthless.” He flashed his big, blunt, uncontainable eighty-eight-keyboard smile. “Now, can anybody with a smile like this be ruthless?”
    A young man tapped him on the shoulder. “I’ve been waitin’ two hours to tell you, I’ll shoot somebody before I see a Nazi like you in the White House.” Kennedy pretended not to hear. Now the senator climbed halfway up the steps of the Douglas County Courthouse. He turned, and in full unprotected view, he looked down the rifle barrels of this mostly hostile crowd and tried to engage them in a friendly debate. This was courage.
    â€œI hear the local radio station said, ‘Vote against Robert Kennedy because he’s going to take your guns away,’” he said. “I’d like one of you to come here and explain that issue to me.”
    A young man approached him. Kennedy looped his arm over the man’s shoulder. “I know some of you are volunteers with the sheriff’s posse. Did you know that 90 percent of the policemen who’ve been shot and killed in the United States in the last two years have been shot by people who shouldn’t have guns—people with criminal records or judged insane?” Murmurs of surprise. “All the law requires is that when someone purchases a gun by mail order, he must be competent to handle it.” Kennedy wound up with his favorite George Bernard Shaw quote, which seemed to tame the crowd. “‘Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and ask why not?’”
    Ethel Kennedy, unnerved by crowds like this, had been dropped off for the rest of the day. Only a few Oregon reporters climbed back into the little DC-3. The senator sat in front, the seat beside him empty. After takeoff, he leaned over the back of his seat. “Would you like to sit up here, New York?”
    I stepped over Freckles, the beloved cocker spaniel who always dozed at Kennedy’s feet. The senator was shivering from the last rain-soaked stop. He asked Dutton to hand him Jack’s overcoat. For me, this was a poignant moment. Five years after his brother’s assassination, Bobby was still mourning Jack’s death, still wearing his brother’s clothes.
    The only question I remember asking Bobby is how he reconciled his attacks on Johnson’s Vietnam policy with his earlier support of his brother’s war. “I was involved in the decisions about Vietnam in ’63 and ’64 and