Newspapers: Reaction to Bobby

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More Hesitant. Bobby fared no better on the campaign trail: "demagogic" was a charge frequently hurled at him by correspondents. "He has repeatedly misstated facts about the war in Viet Nam," wrote Washington Post Reporter Richard Harwood, "the most notable being his claim—which he has now amended—that the South Vietnamese do not draft their young men to fight. He has incorrectly blamed the South Vietnamese government for developing the Khe Sanh bastion and has refused to acknowledge that South Vietnamese troops are fighting there."

For all their beefs about Bobby, however, the press seemed to feel he had a fair chance of wresting the nomination from Johnson. But by week's end, some were beginning to have doubts on that score. Columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak noted that Bobby was in danger of losing the youthful support he has so assiduously cultivated because he had toned down his revolutionary rhetoric. The Kennedy campaign organization in Washington, reported New York Daily News Columnist Ted Lewis seemed to reflect hesitant middle age rather than headstrong youth. "One gets the feeling in the Kennedy operating centers here that those most in charge are loyally rallying around a ghost. The most vital inspiration is the man who lies buried in Arlington rather than his brother. It is a strange new cause they are involved in, even more incomprehensible because of individual uncertainties that John F. Kennedy would have wanted his brother to do what he is now doing."