RFK: Ruthlessness Reconsidered

...With Ford it seemed to be all rhetoric, with nothing special at all inside trying to get out...

...The editor was Bob Orben, also Gerald Ford's chief speechwriter...

...Bill Steponkus, a former speechwriter who had gone back to work on the Hill but retained close ties to the Ford people, called to tell me I would soon be getting my walking papers because "someone over there" didn't like me ("over there" was the West Wing of the White House...

...And yet this is the man Schlesinger mentions in the same breath with his two other heroes, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt...

...In the mid-sixties he was torn between the demands of his intense moral concern and the demands of party loyalty...

...He also said that "a constitutional President had to be aware of what Whitman called 'the never-ending audacity of elected per-sons....' " Robert Kennedy, of course, was not even elected to office, but his conduct as Attorney General was audacious indeed...

...And when Kennedy was outraged, Schlesinger says over and over again, he wanted to do something...

...Some said Hartmann...

...But whatever the reasons, it made no difference...

...But they were cool-headed, not hot-blooded...

...Despite Schlesinger's strenuous efforts to convince us otherwise, one finishes Robert Kennedy and his Times with a sense that Kennedy never completed his education—and perhaps never would...

...Finally, he took up the cause of the underclass and of youth in general because he wanted to build a new political base...

...Steel affair is but one example among many...

...Nixon may have been searching for the self he wanted to be in the eyes of others...

...Unfortunately, Schlesinger is so intent on refuting the dark view of Kennedy that he lards his text with far too many vignettes of Kennedy hugging children, Kennedy reading poetry, Kennedy making rousing speeches to college students, and Kennedy barnstorming around the world talking about youth, revolution, and the challenge of the future...

...But you can't call a man who accomplished what he accomplished dumb...

...A law professor wrote in the New Republic that "it was dangerously wrong for an angry President to loose his terrible arsenal of power for the purposes of intimidation and coercing private companies....Congress has given the President no power to fix the price of steel...

...Since he was such a devoted friend, one can understand why he is at pains to convince us that Joseph Alsop was right when he said that so many people have Robert Kennedy "absolutely wrong...

...their expense accounts and where they'd been and what they were doing...

...In short, he was cold, calt-ulating, ruthless...

...But Ford never seemed able to decide on what self he wanted others to see...

...But that is by the way...

...In The Imperial Presidency, Schlesinger warned that the "Presidency has got out of control and badly needs new definition and restraint...

...Some things Kennedy did lit los picture of him as a wolf in sheer ()tithing, As chid s. vo:o;r to Iron Kennedy in the 1960 ramp •ign...

...The "education" may have broadened his sympathies, but otherwise the new Kennedy and the old Kennedy seem very much the same: emotional, impatient, intense, subjective, recklessly impulsive...

...And its actions had nothing to do with Congress...

...It is puzzling to see a discriminating historian like Arthur Schlesinger reduced to sounding like Richard Nixon—puzzling until we realize that Schlesinger finds it difficult to write about the Kennedys with his eyes wide open...

...it was not fixing the cost of living, though the cost of living may have been affected by its actions...

...He would, I suspect, have been the kind of imperial President Schlesinger warned us about in The Imperial Presidency—a man without "the discipline of consent," to use Schlesinger's own words in that book, a man who would have succumbed to the intoxications of the office...

...Hence, his terrible image-building problem during the primaries, when the same Ford never seemed to appear twice...

...There were outcries in the press of Gestapo tactics, and even the President himself, according to Schlesinger, was disturbed by the conduct of the Attorney General...

...In general, Kennedy steered clear of politicians, preferring to consort with his band of loyal advisors as well as intellectuals, movie stars, poets, and foot-ball players...

...The American Spectator December 1978 11 virtues that all great Presidents have had: patience, flexibility, judgment...

...The U.S...

...No wonder he was not popular with his colleagues when he served as the junior senator from New York...

...Ford was a smart and successful man...

...If one wanted to indulge in psychological speculation, one might say that somewhere in the recesses of Kennedy's psyche the knowledge that he too was a politician gnawed at him, troubled his conscience, and drove him to be ever more vehement about his moral concerns...

...Actually, he is hot-blooded, romantic, compassionate...

...And he added that "there aren't ten politicians in the whole state I like and trust...

...The ad read: "We are looking for funny, performable one-liners, short jokes, and stories that are related to happenings in the news....The accent is on comedy, not wit...

...You still are not as disciplined a politician as President Kennedy...

...The man may have postured to would-be voters, even to reporters, but he could not have played the demagogue with friends and advisors...

...As soon as Rumsfeld arrived, they said, he did a thorough staff review and was appalled to find notjust a Nixon holdover but an Agnew holdover still on the staff...

...Immediately...

...As late as 1967, a close advisor said to Kennedy: "At times, you are almost compulsive in your decisions, dislikes, etc...

...Yet we always knew there was something struggling underneath...

...And judged not as a memoir by a devoted friend but on—shall we say—"public" grounds, the book is utterly unconvincing...

...When they found them, they frequently also found that they were former Nixon staffers whom they had purged when they first came in...

...The rhetorical overkill is not only cloying, it is also a sign of a serious error in judgment—the most serious error in the book...

...And this intoxication may in the end damage Kennedy's reputation more than redeem it, for some readers will think Schlesinger protests too much—a sign that he himself doesn't completely believe the argument he is making, a sign that he is trying to convince himself as much as convince others of the rightness of his claim...

...The time was ripe for a new synthesis, a new context, and the old establishment politicians like Ford had had their day, a day that will probably never come again...

...They think," Alsop continued, Stephen Miller is a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...

...He conveyed acute impatience and urgency...

...But he lacked some extra dimension...

...And his sly maneuverings against Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 campaign do not bespeak a man of courage and conviction but, rather, a timid politician afraid of losing the Democratic party's support...

...M y departure came in the winter of 1975...

...He tapped Martin Luther King's phones...

...During the primary campaign of 1976, several reporters with whom I had been traveling were passing around an ad, photocopied from the 1976 Writer's Market, a publication that solicits free-lance material...

...He once said to Schlesinger that George McGovern was "the only decent man in the Senate...

...One can argue that Kennedy's brand of commitment and compassion made him a poor politician, one temperamentally incapable of winning the support and trust of other politicians...

...Arrogant, impatient, and—as he himself admitted—"bored with politics," bored with the endless small tasks and courtesies that a politician must perform, Robert Kennedy was not a man who in times of turbulence could have held the country together...

...Everything had become trivialized, and now it was all equally important or equally banal—messages to Congress, WIN buttons, bikini panties...

...That may be unfortunate, but it's a fact of American life...

...One thing is clear: Schlesinger suffers from a severe case of the Kennedy mystique...

...In his sonnet on Robert Kennedy, Robert Lowell is right to say that he is a figure out of Plutarch"(the same cannot be said of his two brothers...

...he is cold, calculating, ruthless...

...In this book, he himself admits that "many of us who came to Washington with the Kennedys did suppose that reason could serve as an instrument for social change," as if before the Kennedys came to town Washington was a miasma of irrationality...

...In one sense, Schlesinger succeeds at his task...

...Schlesinger's remark makes no sense...

...Perhaps the most revealing thing Robert Kennedy ever said--revealing, that is, in the way it gives us a clue as to what he thought of the political life----is a speech he made to his staff barely a month after President Kennedy was assassinated...

...Nor did he ever successfully convince people that there was any-thing very much beneath the surface...

...He did not have to do this in order to gain votes, nor did he have to go into a black ghetto in Indianapolis in 1968 and announce to the crowd that Martin Luther King had just been assassinated...

...Stephen Miller RFK: Ruthlessness Reconsidered When does a passion for the poor leave off and the passion for power begin...

...He was forever approaching his maturity—and never quite reaching it...

...I picked up all their records....I told the FBI to interview them all...

...His opinion of those who composed the United States Senate was just as negative...

...Steel in 1962 raised steel prices six dollars a ton, going against President Kennedy's wage-price guideposts, the impulsive and emotional Attorney General went into action...

...It is to Schlesinger's credit that he faces this difficulty squarely...

...As Victor Gold, Agnew's press secretary, used to say, the elastic in my brain just wouldn't stretch any further...

...And in 1976, this was a distinct political liability...

...Indeed, the Schlesinger of Robert Kennedy and his Times is intoxicated himself—so dazzled by his friend that he has written a book whose central argument borders upon the incoherent...

...In this regard, he was very different from his two brothers...

...Intoxicated, then, is an appropriate word to apply to the author of this book...

...It is clear that Robert Kennedy lacked the * Robert Kennedy and his Times, Houghton Mifflin Company, $19.95...

...A remark that could serve as an epigraph to Kennedy's public career is a comment Schlesinger makes on a report the young Kennedy wrote as an aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy: "the animating tone was moral outrage...

...In response to this comment, Schlesinger says: "It could be responded that Congress had not given U.S...

...Steel power to fix the cost of living...

...Other senators resented his moral intensity, which they saw as arrogance and self-righteousness...

...Most likely, he would have made the stormy times even stormier...

...The ultimate criteria [sic] is, `Will this line get a laugh if performed in public?' Material should be written in a conversational style....We are particularly interested in material that can be used by speakers and toast-masters...

...The implication is that those who know all about politics are by their very nature incapable of knowing anything about human beings...

...Schlesinger conceives of Kennedy's life as a Bildungsroman: the education, we might say, of a prince...

...But Schlesinger's book is not simply a memoir of Robert Kennedy as he and others knew him...

...they also resented his outspoken manner, which they felt violated the traditional courtesies of the institution...

...FBI agents, Schlesinger says, "thereupon visited them at their homes in Philadelphia and Wilmington before dawn the next morning...

...What can we say of a historian who seems to have forgotten his own work...

...It was time to go...

...The American Spectator December 1978 13...

...call them what you will...

...On a visit there, without reporters, he went into one of the dirtiest, filthiest, poorest black homes and held a baby who had open sores...

...People had had enough of politicians saying one thing and doing another...

...Though plausible, this dark view of Robert Kennedy is not per-suasive...

...The problem with Agnew and perhaps Nixon was the great gap between rhetoric and reality...

...Nor was it his fault that he inherited an administration in disarray and disrepute...

...He not only began to read widely—Aeschylus and Camus are cited as favorite authors—but he also widened his moral vision, so that by the mid-sixties he came to see himself as "the tribune of the underclass," the champion of blacks, Chicanos, and American Indians...

...And Robert Kennedy, though slightest in size, was the largest of them all, a figure whose intensity and passion bring to mind Alexander Hamilton...

...When he embarked upon his massive study of Robert Kennedy, * Arthur Schlesinger must have had his doubts...

...This is what counts, the new fellow [as if he co.3ldii 1:::o mention Lyndon 1 ran;`:l (toe n't get .Ails...

...Outraged at first by the threat of a Communist conspiracy, Kennedy then became outraged in turn by racketeers, by CastrO's Cuba, by the steel executives who defied President Kennedy's price guideposts—and, finally, out-raged about the condition of the underclass...

...It is an ambitious work of historical and political analysis, one in which Schlesinger labors to substantiate his claim that Kennedy was "the most creative man in American public life when he was killed," someone who had the makings of a great President...

...He wanted to get things done, not "play politics...

...The name of the organization was Orben's Current Comedy and Orben's Comic Fillers...

...That is, if we accept his argument that Kennedy was a hot-blooded, romantic idealist, we will have no trouble accepting the argument that Kennedy was a creative politician...

...My brother barely had a chance to get started- -and there is so much now to be done--for the Negroes and the unemployed and the school kids and everyone else who is tint g to ring a dccera break in (n...

...The writing operation is only a small part of the whole White House operation, but it can be an extremely important one, especially when the man you write for has no words of his own...

...But others in a better position to know said it was Donald Rumsfeld, Ford's chief of staff...

...he plat ed sine, or Haber Humphrey...

...But the latter point does not, in fact, follow from the former...

...The moral outrage was real, yet Kennedy of course was an ambitious politician—which we should not damn him for—and he did not want to stray too far from traditional Democratic lines...

...But they had also had enough of politicians whose rhetoric and actions had nothing much to do with anything at all...

...According to this view, Kennedy joined Senator McCarthy's staff because, like Nixon, he saw a chance of riding early to political fame on the wings of rabid anti-Communism, only to drop McCarthy when he realized that being a McCarthyite was a political liability...

...Schlesinger summons up too much evidence to show that Kennedy was a man of genuine moral concern, some-one who truly thought that Jimmy Hoffa betrayed the interests of workers, someone who truly was outraged by the poverty he saw in the Mississippi Delta...

...The clubhouse politicians of New York, he once told Richard Goodwin, "were not interested in issues...

...Then, it is argued, he became a prosecutor of racketeers because he thought such crusading would quickly put his name in the headlines...

...About Kennedy in 1962, Schlesinger says: "If there was a problem, there had to be a solution...

...he cultivated the injured and the innocent with empty promises while carefully maintaining his connections with ram bosses...

...The point is that Kennedy, who had what Schlesinger calls an "experiencing nature," changed slowly but dramatically after the death of his brother...

...But that is not the point: The point is that the worst thing Kennedy could say about a man was to accuse him of being political...

...Then he wangled the job of Attorney General out of his brother, although most of President Kennedy's advisors thought it was a bad idea to put a young and relatively inexperienced brother in such an important position...

...The address of the organization placing the ad was Washington, D.C...

...F,iil-G' tht' v. A;nit , Gee tiiidunder President Kennedy, he recommended the appointment of several racist federal judges in order to pay back some old political favors...

...Then, as if uncomfortable with this nonsensical explanation, Schlesinger resorts to that old chest-nut, one that he berated Nixon for continually using: "Weighty national interests were involved...

...We were going to go for broke," Kennedy said...

...They were masters of tact, patience, and prudence...

...Call these remarks a sign of Schlesinger's intoxication, smugness, obtuseness, arrogance...

...One such protest beggars belief that it was written by the same man who wrote The Imperial Presidency...

...People were hungry for character and intelligence, with those qualities precisely reflected in rhetoric and a program for the nation...

...any writers, of course, take quite a different view of Robert Kennedy's character and conduct...

...But there was something lacking, something we have come to look for in our Presidents...

...And no clear-eyed historian could say, as he does, that "the time will surely come when the richest nation on earth will overcome its indifference to the degradation of its citizens," implying that without Robert Kennedy around to prod our conscience, we no longer care about the problems of the underclass...

...This compulsion to be at one with individuals in extreme situations," Schlesinger says, "was increasingly the key to his politics...

...From the outset of his career to the end of his life," Walter Karp said in a recent issue of Harper's, "the fixed stars of all Robert Kennedy's political calculations were the interests and opinions of Democratic party leaders...

...Such a change presumes that the early Kennedy and what we might call the post-Dallas Kennedy were quite different, yet throughout the book Schlesinger continually applies the same adjectives to describe Kennedy's character and conduct...

...A man of intense energy and moral concern, Kennedy was also a man preoccupied with testing himself, with proving to himself that he was tough...

...Which is, to some degree, understandable...

...Kennedy was not...

...I never found out who it was...

...r j and t)f~ ; (i" .. speech was made at a very difficult time in his life, when he was filled with bitter resentment towards the new President...

...in the foreword he "declares an interest," confessing that he was "a great admirer and devoted friend of Robert Kennedy's...

...The temptation, of course, is to blame Ford for the banality of his administration and to laugh along with those critics who liked to call him "a dumb Nixon...

...As a close friend of the Kennedy family, he must have wondered whether he was the right man for the job—knowing, among other things, that many readers would dismiss him as a court historian, regarding the twists and turns in his argument with more than a modicum of suspicion...

...When U.S...

...These are Schlesinger's words, not mine...

...Whatever we think of their personal character or political conduct, the Kennedys are—or, rather, have become—larger than life, perhaps because they have suffered both inordinate success and inordinate tragedy...

...lines for beginning a speech, ending a speech, acknowledging an introduction, specific occasions...

...Their minds brimming with grand plans, both Hamilton and Kennedy found the daily compromises of "regular" politics distasteful...

...Kennedy, it is clear from Schlesinger's account, was ill-at-ease among politicians, and distrustful of the civilities and accommodations of political life...

...More often than not, Kennedy's conduct was governed by his impulsive, hot-blooded temperament...

...Toward the end, Ford's advisers seemed to realize this, and began to search out talented people to help Ford get reelected...

...Schlesinger assumes that once he has convinced us that Kennedy was not cold, calculating, and ruthless, then he is home free...

...If it was a public relations liability for a Ford speechwriter to have written for Red Skelton, it was even worse to have worked for Agnew...

...Even though Schlesinger, as a master of extenuations, continually weights the evidence in Robert Kennedy's favor, the evidence overwhelms the general argument...

...The poem ends with: I miss you, you out of Plutarch, made by hand—forever approaching your maturity...

...this reader at least ends up liking Robert Kennedy...

...They argue that Kennedy's moral outrage was quite calculated—a selective out-rage that furthered his intense ambition...

...Steel had raised its prices...