Robert Kennedy - A Reassessment

Ten years after the assassination of Robert Kennedy his career is examined in the light of a newly published biography by Arthur Schleisinger Jr. 

ON a July night last year the lights of New York City went out. Utility officials, cocking an eye at the insurance adjusters, disclaimed human responsibility and said it was an act of God. That night the tumult and menace of the Sixties enjoyed momentary rebirth. From the slums of Bedford Stuyvesant, Bushwick, and Harlem the blacks poured onto the streets to loot and occasionally to burn.

Secure in their Manhattan sanctuaries, politicians and pundits at once saw fit to denounce the "wanton and senseless destruction." They deplored, and when the lights went on again they swiftly forgot. Seventy-five per cent unernployyment in the ghettoes is not a pleasant statistic to remember. Bur in the immmediate aftermath I got a telephone call from the director of the Bedford Stuyyvesant Restoration Project. He pointed out with some irony that amid all the handdwringing over the unseemly riot, not one newspaper had reported that this entire block had been left untouched by the rioters.

This project, a small piece of urban renewal in a large hunk of urban wasteeland, was conceived by Robert Kennedy back in the mid-Sixties when politicians thought it meet to confront the problems of the underclasses. It stands as a small monument of sixties-style good intention amid a more spacious zone of seventiessstyle disregard. These days the "biggspending" programs of the Great Society are in disrepute, even if the whole of the budget for the Model Cities program never matched the price of a couple of aircraft carriers. I went out, a couple of days after the blackout, to look at the project and it was true what its black director had told me. Not a window was broken. Bobby, dead for nine years, had at least this modest testament.

Robert Kennedy, shot down on June S, 1968 in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel, is not a particularly fashionable historical figure. The decade has soured and the geography of reform, with its New Frontiers and its Great Societies, has transmuted into a meaner cartography of "fiscal conservatism" inflated with the evangelical hot air of "trust" or spurious compassion. To put it more bluntly, the blacks, Hispanics, Chicanos, poor whites to whom Bobby Kennedy addressed himmself in the last years of his life are as badly off as ever and the only spirited spokesman they have in the Carter administration, UN Ambassador Andrew Young, decried as an irresponsible flap-jaw.

Not that Kennedys are ever forgotten. Earlier this summer, I sat in Martha's Vineyard, a scarce five miles from Chapppaquiddick, and heard talk of Teddy's hopes and intentions as presidential candidate in 1980. On the same island Jackie had must bought 300 acres ata cost of some millions of dollars. In Washington a congressional committee was and is still excavating the mysteries of what happened in Dallas. And on almost every desk of that summer resort so frequented by Kennedy liberals there reposed an immense volume intended by its author as the literary-historical monuument to Bobby himself.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has often been termed, with malicious intent, the court historian of Camelot. He was one of the New Frontier intellectuals who went to work in Jack Kennedy's White House. A Thousand Days was his' prejudiced record of that time, and now Robert Kennedy and His Times has arrived as a sequel, or rather, a companion volume. Here is not the wisdom and detachment of unsentiimental hindsight, but a statedly passsionate sermon on the excellent of Bobby in almost all his works and the huge loss suffered by the United States with his assassination.

Interesting histories of the past are always propaganda for the present and Schlesinger's book is no exception. A cold war liberal intellectual, with all the blemishes of that species, he sets out to argue that the best aspects of the Sixties owed much to the Kennedys and we can be sure that if Teddy does ever make a bid for the White House, Schlesinger will be-just as he was with his brothers-by his side.

The book was construed by most reviewers for what it often is, propaganda. At once the arguments that were swirling around Bobby up until the day he died were exhumed.

For Schlesinger there are very few warts on Bobby. The admirer of Joe McCarthy, who took the trouble to go to his funeral, is almost lost in cautious revisionism of Kennedy's role as Democratic minority council on the Senate Investigations subbcommittee. Yet Kennedy confided to his diary in 1957, when Tailgunner Joe died in disgrace and obscurity, "I feel that I have lost an important part of my life."

Part of Schlesinger's tolerant attitude here may be ascribed to his own political predilections. In 1947 that old isolationist Joe Kennedy recommended to an interrviewer that the United States should "permit Communism to have its trial outtside the Soviet Union if that shall be the fate or will of certain people ... The dangers at home are far more real to me." (The dangers Kennedy Sr. meant were budget deficits, high taxes, inflation, depression, socialism.) The young Schlesinger denounced in that year "the death wish of the business commmunity ... The great refusal to take on the Russians today is perfectly typical. That doyen of American capitalists, Joseph P. Kennedy, recently argued that the United States should not seek to resist the spread of communism ... ")

Inattention to blemishes in the Kidding remained the favorite Kennedy form of communication. Early in the adminisstration, Robert noticed that "Jack had on his desk, 'Profiles in Courage' and the Bible. I asked him ... if these were the books of the world's two great authors. " When Life described the Attornlry General as the number two man in town, the older brother said darkly, "That means there's only one way for you to go, and it ain't up!" Robert was delighted by a photograph showing two of his children peering from under the presidential desk; the President's inscription was: "Dear Bobby: They told me you had your people placed throughout the government. " Thiry talked kiddingly even about matters on which they felt seriously; and always calked in the cryptic half sentences that bespoke perfect understanding.

In 1963 Ben Bradlee asked John Kennedy why-"never mind the brother bif'-he thought Robert was so great. The President replied: "First, his high moral standards, strict personal ethics. He's a puritan, absolutely incorruptible. Then he has this terrrific executive energy. We've got more guys around here with ideas. The problem is to get things done. Bobby's the best organizer I've ever seen." ("Management m Jack Kennedy's mind," Chester Bowles once commmented, " .... consisted largely of calling Bob on the telephone and saying, 'Here are ten things I want to get done."') John Kennedy added to Bradlee: "He's got compassion, a real sense of compassion. Those Cuban prisoners weighed on his mind for eighteen months His loyalty comes next. It wasn't the easiest thing for him to go to (Joe) M cC arthy' s funeral."

John Kennedy used Robert in part as Franklin Roosevelt used Eleanor-as a lightning rod, as a scout on far frontiers, as a more militant and somewhat discountable alter ego, expressing the President's own idealistic side while leaving the President room to maneuver and to mediate. At the same time, the Attornlry General was John Kennedy's Harry Hopkins, Lord Root of the Matter, the man on whom the President relied for penetrating interest and objectives. Robert Kennedy, McNamara said, "recognized that his greatest contribution to the President would be to speak candidly, to contradict him if he felt he was wrong and to move him to the right course if he felt he was not on that course. The President never hesitated to turn down Bobby's advice, but many, many times he took it when, initially, he, the President, was in favour of an opposite course. They had an extraordinarily close relationship: affecction, respect, admiration."

I do not think Richard Goodwin overstated the case when he wrote years later that "Presiident Kennedy's most impolitic appointtment ... also made the greatest contribution to the success and historical reputation of his Administration. "

McCarthy episode persists throughout Schlesinger's prolonged excursion. As one reviewer remarked, "His Camelot has no outhouse." There was an outhouse, and its existence was stressed with great freequency in the debates among liberals in 1968 on the question of supporting Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy in the challenge to Johnson or his epigone in the form of Hubert Humphrey.

His detractors claimed that Bobby was a ruthless McCarthyite who never accepted the evil of McCarthy. Bobby was a ruthless political operator for his brother, and superintended some of the dirtiest political campaigning in historical memory (in 1960). He conducted a crusade against
Jimmy Hoffa, head of the Teamsters, which had more the tone and actuality of a maniacal vendetta than a disinterested search for justice. As Attorney General he authorised more than 500 wiretaps, often in the interests of "national security," against such people as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and journalists on Newsweek and the New York Times. As Attorney General he appointed racist judges in the south, appointments which even Schlesinger has- to conclude lamely were not worse than those under President Eisenhower.

And more, Bobby was the most zealous member of his brother's administration in the attempts to overthrow Fidel Castro. Schlesinger spends some time arguing the neither of the Kennedy brothers knew of the CIA's attempts to murder Castro. His bid is unconvincing. As we now know, at the very moment Jack was shot in Dallas, a CIA officer was handing a Cuban double I agent in Paris a lethal hypodermic to be I transported and used in Havana. Friends of Bobby often discuss the possibility that, knowing of many such attempts, Bobby blamed himself in some way for the retribution of his own brother's death.

No. Wholesale whitewash of the Kennedys, a la Schlesinger, simply will not do, however manful Schlesinger is in his attempts. The Kennedys, with their brisk approach to problem-solving, pracctically invented counter-insurgency, preesided over the assassination of Diem, and raised the ante in Vietnam (even if, as Schlesinger proposes, Jack was intending to lower it, after the 1964 elections). The Kennedys did not get the Great Society laws and programs through Congress (even if, .in the Schlesinger thesis, JFK could have done as well as LBJ, given Congresssional temper and the spirit of the times).

In his sojourn as Attorney General Bobby picked the relatively safe targets of mobsters or union corruption at the expense of a more perilous assault on American corporate power. Apart from a brief stand-off against the steel bosses (against whom RFK launched a full press investigation with wire taps, grand juries, and subpoenas in a successful bid to get them to roll back prices) the anti-trust division of the Justice Department was a tranquil place in the early 1960s.

*** Excerpt 1:  "The next day he presided over an organized crime meeting. Federal attorneys came from across the country to consider the next phase in the campaign against the syndicates. The meeting continued on Friday, November 22. Shortly after noon the Attorney General sugggested a recess. He took Robert Morgenthau and the chief of Morgenthau's criminal diviision, Silvio Mollo, out to Hickory Hill for a swim and luncheon.

It was a sunlit day, unseasonably warm for November. ThethreemensatwithEthel Kennnedy around a table by the swimming pool, eating clam chowder and tuna fish sanddwiches. Shortly before quarter to two, the Attorney General said they had better get back. Fifty yards away workmen were paintting the new wing of the house. Morgenthau abstractedly noticed one of them, a painter's hat jammed over his ears, a transistor radio in his hand, run abruptly toward the pool. He was shouting. No one understood what he said. Then a telephone extension rang across the pool. Ethel went to answer it. "She said J. Edgar Hoover was calling," Robert Kennedy remembered later, "so I thought something was wrong because he wouldn't be ... calling me here. " Suddenly Robert Morgenthau realized what the workman had cried: "They say the President is shot." On the phone Hoover said, "I have news for you. The President's been shot", or "I have news for you" and I might have said, "What?" and he said, "The President's been shot." And-well, I don't know what I said-probably "Oh" or something-and I don't know whether he then-I asked him or got into whether it was serious, and I think he said, "I think it's serious." ... He said, "1' II call you back ... when I find out more." I don't remember anything more of that conversation. Morgenthau saw Robert Kennedy turn away and clap his hand to his mouth. There was a look of "shock and horror' 'on his face. Ethel saw too and rushed to his side. For a few seconds Robert could not speak. Then he almost forced out the words: "Jack's been shot. It may be fatal."

They walked dazedly back to the house.

Ethel led Morgenthau and Mollo to a teleevision set in the living room, then accommpanied Robert upstairs. Morgenthau wanted to leave but felt he could not until others arrived. "I went off," Robert remembered; and called Kenny (O'Donnell, with the party in Dallas), I think. I never got through to him ... Then I talked to the Secret Service and I think I talked to Clint Hill (as ecret Service man with the party) ... but I don't know who it was ... in the hospital down there and they said that .... it was very serious. And I asked if they'd gotten a priest, and they said they had ... Then, I said, will you call me back, and he said, yes, and then he-Clint Hill called me back, and I think it was about thirty minutes after I talked to Hoover ... and he said, "The President's dead." Robert walked downstairs, put his head in the living room and told Morgenthau, "He's dead."

End of excerpt 1"

*** Excerpt 2: "Most of all Johnson resented Robert Kennedy: "I'd given three years of loyal serrvice to Jack Kennedy. During all that time I'd willingly stayed in the backkground ... Then Kennedy was killed and I became the custodian of the Kennedy dream, some kind of rightful heir to the throne." "That upstart's come too far and too fast," he told Eric Gooldman, the Princeton historian who had a short and unhappy time in the Johnson White House. "He skipped the grades where you learn the rules of life. He never liked me, and that's nothing compared to what I think of him." "If Bobby Kennedy's name came up even by accident," recalled Kenneth O'Donnell, who stayed on for a season in the White House, " .... he'd launch into a tirade about what a son of a bitch Bobby Kennedy was. Ninety-nine perrcent of the things were untrue. And it'd get back to Bobby Kennedy, and Bobby'd say something about Lyndon Johnson ... These two men just didn't know each other; and they built up this picture of each other which was just incredible."

For Kennedy, staying in the administration at all was a major effort. Yet he saw himself as yoked with Johnson in the execution of a legacy and the preservation of a party. Others might go; "but if I go," he told Murray Kempton, pausing and searching for a word, "if I should, uh, desert, that would be harmmful." In public he was as meticulously loyal to Johnson as Johnson had been to John Kennnedy. But everything was different. "What makes me sad is that I see a problem ... and I can't do anything about it. There was this time when if people had something and couldn't see my brother, they could always see me and I could pick up the phone and call him ... It's strange to think that you can't just pick up the phone."

Nor could he, any more than Johnson, conntrol his resentments. If the new President, enveloped in insecurity, was preternaturally sensitive to comparisons with his predecessor, Robert Kennedy, enveloped in grief, was preenaturally sensitive to slights to his brother. Walter Heller sent him a copy of a memoorandum to Johnson saying that "under your budget and tax program" the net fiscal stimulus to the economy would be the greatest in peacetime history. Kennedy circled "your" and scribbled in the margin: "I thought this was Pres. K. program." "I though that an awful lot of things that were going on that President Kennedy did," he said in May. "(Johnson) was getting the credit for and wasn't saying enough about the fact that President Kennedy was responsible." He encouraged others to stay-"If anyone of us is in a position to keep him from blowing up Costa Rica or something," he told Richard Goodwin in March, "I guess he had better do it"-but he became unhappy when they seemed to embrace the principle "the king is dead, long live the king." He really felt," McGeorge Bundy thought, "that ... if you were fully in the Kennedy administration you had a continuing allegiance that should, in certain circumstances, be more important to you than your allegiance to the existing Preesident. And I couldn't feel that way."
End of excerpt 2"

BUT Bobby did change and here is the great dilemma for hagiographers and all but the most hostile memorialists (who think that he did not change at all). Some, with bows to Camus and the frail construct of the existential hero, hold that with the murder of his brother, the horrors of the war, the riots in the ghettoes, Bobby became a new man and was cut down in the full vigour of rebirth.

Schlesinger, in a more sedate form of mythography, presents a person who practically from ur-birth on November 20, '1925 had twin strains of good and bad in him; that the "nasty, brutal, humorless little fellow" recalled by one school chum was also the anguished and sensitive soul warped by old Joe's obsessive determinaation for all his children to succeed and, above all, to win.

You can argue that, in fact, it would have been odd for someone of intelligence and political determination not to have been changed by the Sixties, not to have responded to assassination and horrifying war at home and abroad. From his time as the junior Senator in New York to his death, Kennedy did make himself a spokesman for the poor. In 1966 he went to South Afnca and gave a speech which IS still pinned to the walls of slums there:

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or strikes out against injustice, or acts to improve the lot of others, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and ... those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resisttance."

He returned and bided his time. He was not the first into the primaries against Lyndon Johnson. It was Eugene McCarthy, shabbily treated by Schlesinger, who won the votes in New Hampshire that prompted Johnson tostand down. Bobby paused and then, with an opportunism that revived all the old talk of Kennedy ruthlessness, jumped in.

*** Excerpt 3: "
Harwood suggested that the crowds were deliberately formenied as part of a "a strategy of revolution, of a popular uprising of such intensity and scale" that the convention would not dare tum Kennedy down. There was something to that. A candidate without organization or delegates had no choice but to demonstrate irresistible popular appeal. "Our strategy," Walinsky said, "is to change the rules Of nominating a President. We're going to do it a new way. In the streets." "I have to win through the people," Kennedy told Helen Dudar of the New York Post. "Otherwise I'm not going to win."

Jimmy Breslin described a day on the Caliifornia trip. Kennedy talked about Vieinam. "Our brave young men are dying in the swamps ·of Southeast Asia," he said. "Which of them might have written a poem Which of them might have cured cancer? Which of them might have played in a World Series or given us the gift of laughter from the stage orhelped build a bridge or a university? Which of them would have taught a child to read? It is our responsibility to let these men live ... It is inndecent if they die because of the empty vanity of their country." His listeners "shrieked," wrote Breslin. " ... They lost control and began pushing forward ... It took a half hour to get Kennedy out a/the place. A halfhourof police pushing and the crowd pushing back and Kennedy trying to smile while they pulled his hair and scratched his face. Women screamed thattheirchildren were being crushed to death. Kennedy had to pick up a small child who fell down between policemen."

It went that way all day. At the end Breslin asked where Kennedy thought he stood. "What about Daley?" "He's been very nice to me personally," Kennedy said. "And he doesn't like the war. You see, there are so many dead starting to come back, it bothers him." But it's hard for him, Kennedy continued. "He has been a politician for a long time. And party allegiance means so much to him. It's a wrenching thing for him. We'll have to win the primaries to show the pols." "If you get Daley," he was asked, "where do you stand?" Kennedy said, "Daley means the ball game. "

And he had to have the crowds to win the primaries. BUf there was, I believe, more to it than that. He had gone ahead that Saturday morning at Hickory Hill surrounded by advisers exuding gloom. He had thereafter been savagely' attacked, in many cases by people he respected and liked. Now the crowds reassured and sustained him. He told one associate, "I'm beginning to feel the mood of the country and the people and what they want." He did not mind the tidal wave surgging over him. Let people seize his cuff links, grab his hands, reach out to touch him. "They loved to touch his hair for some reason," said a California advance man. "He loved it. He seemed to sort of thrive on touching people back." Bill Barry, his old friend from the FBI, took leave from his job as a bank vice president to travel with Kennedy. At the beginning, looking at his own and Kennedy's bleeding hands, he said, "I wish these people would be more courteous." Kennedy said, "They're here because they care for us and want to show us." "After that," Barry said later, "I never had any trouble adjusting to crowds. I found they wanted not just to touch a celebrity; they wanted to convey their feelings to him, and he accepted it for that." Alan King said, "They're going to hurt you." Kennedy said mildly, "Well, so many people hate me that I've got to give the people that love me a chance to get at me. "

On March 23 the Gallup poll showed Democrats preferring Kennedy to Johnson by 44-41 (and Johnson to McCarthy by 59·29). After a canvass of prospective delegations, Newsweek concluded at the end of the month that Lyndon Johnson "may be in real danger of being dumped by his own party. "

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

*** End of Excerpt 3.

Would Bobby have won the Democratic nomination in Chicago? By early June he had won primaries in Indiana, Nebraska, and Washington DC. He died amidst victories in South Dakota and California. Half an hour before Sirhan fired a .22 Into his head Kennedy had spoken to Mayor Daley who allegedly promised him the machine vote in Illinois-a vote that Nixon always claimed had corruptly thrown the election to Jack in 1960. With Daley's suppport, it is possible that Bobby would not have had organized labour in the form of George Meany adamantly against him.

He could have won the nomination and the Presidency. And then what? Would he, as they say, have been "a good presiident"? This is not difficult to answer, since literally nobody within the realms of reasonable speculation could have been as bad as Richard Nixon. Nixon invaded Cambodia; Nixon bombed Hanoi; Nixon presided over a corruption of judicial standards which made RFK's Justice Department look like a temple of chaste achievement; Nixon took bribes; Nixon, by his appointments, left his most endurring and noxious legacy-a Supreme Court tilted to reaction for the next decade. Nixon presided over benign neglect of the blacks and superintended the transmutaation of Johnson's "Great Society" into a couple of despised words.

Bobby might have made little diffference. American corporate power would have remained undiminished. The "bad" Bobby-who did not scruple to use code words about the fear of "crime" in his last campaigns-might have re-emerged. But Bobby would not have done all that.

A friend of mine, shortly after Bobby's murder, was covering George Wallace's residential campaign in Massachusetts. He discovered that many of the people who planned to vote for Wallace were preeviously supporters of RFK. He concluded, with some persuasiveness, that Kennedy was the last liberal politician who could communicate with members of the white working class. And he had made the blacks his constituency too. No politician, subsequently has managed that particular trick. Populism has become the evangelical spasms of Jimmy Carter, who in 1976 could sing "We Shall Overcome" with Martin Luther King Sr. and talk in code to blue-collar whites about "ethnic purity" almost in the same breath.

You have to take Bobby whole, accoutered with warts. By hagiographical excesses, Schlesinger and the claque sabotage his memory as much as they honour it. But you do not have to wander very far through the slums of New York to realise that something has gone rotten in the American seventies and that, at the least as a symbol, an enduringly bad thing happened ten years ago in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

*** Excerpt 4: "THE same audacity brought him to Marilyn Monroe. We both met her the same night after she had sung "Happy Birthhday, Mr. President" at a Madison Square Garden celebration of John Kennedy's fortyyfifth birthday. It was May 19, 1962, at a small party given by that loyal Democrat Arthur Krim of United Artists. Adlai Stevennson wrote a friend about his "perilous enncounters" that etening with Marilyn, "dressed in what she calls 'skin and beads.' I didn'i see the beads! My encounters, however, were only after breaking through the strong defenses established, by Robert Kennedy, who was dodging around, her like a moth around the flame. "We were all moths around the flame that night. I wrote;'

"I do not think I have seen anyone so beautiiful; I was enchanted by her manner and her wit, at once so masked, so ingenuous and so penetrating. But one felt a terrible unreality about her-as if talking to someone under water. Bobby and I engaged in mock competiition for her; she was most agreeable to him and pleasant to me-but then she receded into her own glittering mist."

There was something at once magical and desperate about her. Robert Kennedy, with his curiosity, his sympathy, his absolute directtness of response to distress, in some way got through the glittering mist as few did. He met her again at Patricia Lawford's house in Los Angeles. She called him thereafter in Washington, using an assumed name. She

was very often distraught. Angie Novello talked to her more often than the Attorney General did. One feels that Robert Kennedy came to inhabit the fantasies of her last summer. She dreamily told her friend W. J. Weatherby of the Manchester Guardian that she might get married again; someone in politics, in Washington; no name vouchsafed. Another friend, Robert Slatzer, claims she said Robert Kennedy had promised to marry her. As Weatherby commented, "Could she possibly believe that Kennedy would ruin himself politically for her?" Given the desperation of her life, this idea, Norman Mailer suggested, perhaps became "absolutely indispensable to her need for a fantasy in which she could begin to believe." In other moods she spoke more reasonably. She once mentioned the rumours about Robert Kennedy to her masseur Ralph Roberts, with whom according to Mailer she had a "a psychic commmunion that is obviously not ordinary." "It's not true," she said to Roberts. "I like him but not physically." On the weekend of August 4 Kennedy was in San Francisco at a meeting of the American Bar Association. She killed herself through an overdose of sleeping pills, probably by accident, perhaps by intent, on the night of August 4. This was less than three months after they met. I doubt whether they had seen each other more than half a dozen times.

*** End of excerpt 4.

The excerpts are from Arthur Schlesinger's book, Robert Kennedy and His Times, Published by Houghton Mifflen, 1978.