American Lives and Letters / Bobby Kennedy's Crying Game

...You can use your enormous privilege and opportunity to seek purely private pleasure and gain...

...RFK's erstwhile administrative assistant, John Seigenthaler, was likewise aware of the tensions between the vice president and the attorney general...

...If you want to give star billing in the missile crisis, I think you rank the president first, then Robert Kennedy, then McNamara...

...Information Agency, Murrow regarded Bobby as "a young whippersnapper who didn't have the experience or the background to be president...

...For instance, the matter of placing microphones on leaders of organized crime in Las Vegas...

...Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination, agrees...

...In the judgment of the Rev...

...According to Donald Wilson, who was Edward R. Murrow's deputy at the U.S...

...at San Jose, "an old woman tried to hug him and a young woman ruffled his hair...

...In the contrary view of former senator George Smathers of Florida, a lot of Bobby's friends nowadays are putting him "at a level he was not ever at...

...For striking numbers of people in the nineties, Bobby's kind of liberalism has become the only social bond that holds them together, in the absence of any other kind of community...

...Whereas Reagan and the others left office "defeated, discredited or disgraced in the eyes of millions of Americans," a Robert Kennedy presidency would "surely" have been free from corruption, deception, and deadlock...

...We never asked ourselves the question, 'What's right?' " Morris Abram, emeritus president of Brandeis University and a former member of the U.N...

...That is the kind of thing that occurs...

...Is it not plausible to conclude that in 1967 and 1968 his public displays of grief, from the Delta to Harlem, were ruled by a burning desire to make the White House's war on poverty seem woefully inadequate and thus delegitimize the social leadership of Lyndon Johnson, the uncouth usurper, whom people like Father Hesburgh persisted in admiring...

...Specifically I mean an atmosphere," Sullivan explains, "in which young men are 'taught' by their fathers, if they have one, and older brothers to refer to women as 'ho's' ('whores') who need abuse...

...His] eloquence stands in the company of Churchill's and Lincoln's," Edwin 0. Guthman and C. Richard Allen declare without batting an eye in the preface to RFK: Collected Speeches.1 He had "a sort of St...

...The answer is clear...

...Joseph R. McCarthy, his brutal coercion of Gov...

...Jobs, education, health care, housing—all must be provided for the poor wherever they live or want to live," he insisted...

...and where women are mistrusted and detested...

...Robert Kennedy never would have been nominated in 1968...

...I analyzed that very closely...

...During his tenure as undersecretary of state, George Ball had to deal with the fact that "Bobby was primarily interested in rather recondite things...

...Something profound—as if, after the despair and scourging, a different chord possessed him, another kind of vibrant music, sounds he had never heard before, cantatas and chorales of Selma and Saigon...

...Inevitably, he would have won the Democratic nomination for president in 1968, and the ensuing election...

...One night in upstate New York, he drove Bobby from Auburn to Syracuse and en route undertook to suggest that the campaign take a different approach to certain foreign-policy issues: When I was midsentence of making [my] argument, [Bobby] reaches out his hand and turns on the transistor radio full blast so it was impossible to have a conversation...

...Only on the matter of extramarital sexual activity are the Strobers disappointing, for they mistakenly decided not to initiate questions about it...

...Lyndon didn't think of Bobby as a competitor eight years hence, he "just disliked him...

...I think he probably would have been a very dangerous president...

...Embassy, Saigon, never forgot that "Bobby came out [to Vietnam] once—in the middle of the night—just at the airport...

...William Sullivan, a political affairs officer in the State Department, came to believe that "Bobby probably forced [President Kennedy] to take decisions at times when the president would have preferred to defer them...

...But like a good many other reporters, he overestimated Bobby's appeal to the country because of the uncontrollable emotionalism of the crowds that surrounded him virtually everywhere he went during his quest for the nomination...

...Bobby Kennedy's muscular interventionism, backed by big-government spending and informed by the noblesse oblige outlook of a multimillionaire's son, lies at the furthest remove from Sullivan's philosophy...

...Baker adds, "I've never seen two human beings hate the way Johnson and Bobby did...

...he knew nothing of foreign cultures...

...On the other hand, when Dean Rusk joined the Kennedy administration, he was appalled by the wild ideas that this combative young man kept proposing: I mean, for example, [he] came up one time with the idea that we should organize American businessmen in foreign countries to lay on demonstrations in support of the United States on political matters...

...to donate blood plasma to the North Vietnamese...

...Approximately 140 cabinet, subcabinet, and administration officials, congressional colleagues, journalists, personalities on the international scene, and others agreed to speak with them...

...Rats and roaches were darting everywhere...

...We called it the Trollope ploy, after the novel where a guy squeezes a girl's hand and she looks at him and says, `I accept your proposal of marriage.'" Robert McNamara's deputy, Roswell Gilpatric, was also very impressed by Bobby's missile-crisis performance...

...As New York magazine's TV critic John Leonard put it last August in the final paragraph of his denunciatory review of USA Network's much denounced "Marilyn & Bobby: Her Final Affair": And what, then, happened to Bobby after the death of his brother...

...What is most needed to combat this environment, in Sullivan's opinion, is "moral leadership—from within...

...When Thompson said it, no one paid much attention, but the one they listened to was Bobby Kennedy...

...In the same way that I thought he was a snotty little bastard, I think Lyndon thought to himself: 'He's a snotty little bastard.' " As for Bobby's animus, Seigenthaler says that Bobby told him it stemmed from Johnson's remark at the 1960 convention that his father "never carried Neville Chamberlain's umbrella...

...Nevertheless, he lacked the stamina to raise America's consciousness of tragic dilemmas...

...Our nation must be told the truth about this war," he trumpeted on February 8, 1968...

...But history will judge you, and as the years pass, you will ultimately judge yourself, on the extent to which you have used your gifts to lighten and enrich the lives of your fellow man...

...He was unschooled, basically...

...at Sacramento, "the crowd was so dense there was danger of panic...

...turned people off" If he had been made secretary of state, as some people said he was going to be, "that would have been terrible—he was too much of a hip-shooter...

...Yet he was never able to confess that admitting the Vietcong to what he called, in a mealy-mouthed formulation, "a share of power and responsibility" in South Vietnam would inevitably lead to a Communist takeover, a horrific bloodbath, and boat people drowning in the South China Sea...

...To Leonard and company, it would be the most contemptible heresy to suggest that Bobby adopted a new persona as deliberately as Benjamin Franklin did when he decided that wearing a mask of humility was the way to get ahead in colonial Philadelphia...

...Former governor John Patterson of Alabama asserts that "if you were out having a drink of whiskey with Robert Kennedy he was just a hell of a fine fellow...

...He said, `Let's take out of the Khrushchev message . . . the thing that we want.' It was brilliant...

...As far as Jack Kennedy listening to Bobby, Jack Kennedy was ten times smarter than Bobby...

...The clearest indication, though, that Bobby is threatening Jack's primacy of place in the liberal imagination comes, surprisingly enough, from Jack's slavishly admiring lawyer, adviser, speechwriter, and special counsel, Theodore Sorensen...

...indeed, I think it likely that he was in a state of shock, given his encapsulated, rich-kid upbringing...

...Undeniably, though, there were political advantages for Bobby in presenting himself, with the aid of media myrmidons, as a lonely, frail, vulnerable figure ascending Mount Kennedy in the Yukon or walking a sweep of beach seemingly without companionship, but borne down as always by the cross of his concern for poor, suffering humanity...

...Yet at the same time, says DeLoach, Attorney General Kennedy "mightily" encouraged, "sometimes much to our sorrow," the FBI's investigations of various heads of organized crime...

...A nd if Bobby had lived...

...William Trueheart, onetime deputy chief of mission, U.S...

...For five minutes, with tears running down his cheeks, Bobby caressed and spoke to the child, as the cameras rolled...

...where physical violence is a common means of ending verbal disputes...

...He believed in covert operations and in counterinsurgency, which I thought was totally obnoxious...

...Today in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York, where in 1966 he initiated a neighborhood revitalization effort with outside largesse and alleged expertise, the neighborhood atmosphere "fosters a very vicious form of domestic violence," according to a piece in the Wall Street Journal last July by an Amherst undergraduate, Shawn Sullivan, who grew up in Bed-Stuy...

...On the other hand, the moment Johnson was in there, he had the commission come over and he sat us down and told us he wanted to do something about poverty...

...By coming to this school," Bobby told the students at Berkeley in the fall of 1966, "you have been lifted onto a tiny, sunlit island while all around you lies an ocean of human misery, injustice, violence, and fear...

...In saying that, was he moved by a compassion so profound that it extended even to an exceptionally vicious enemy of the United States—or by a determination to become the paladin of the rising anti-war movement on the campuses, on the chance that he might be able to ride that wave of loathing (as Bill Clinton has taught us to think of it) right into the White House...

...Former special assistant to the president, Ralph Dungan, also remembers Bobby as "a sucker for that kind of stuff [i.e., Special Forces and Green Berets...

...I didn't come away with a very warm feeling for him...

...ambassador to NATO and president of the University of Hawaii), provided the Kennedy campaign in 1960 with a long memorandum on his area of expertise...

...Francis dimension," the Washington Post's Ben Bradlee would have us believe, and Irish-American girlhood's gift to the New York Times, Anna (Herself) Quindlen, trumps that moral comparison with an invocation of Christ' It was Bobby who became the greatest single representative of [the] idea that God and the greater good called us to serve the disenfranchised...

...At the heart of his strategy lay his crying game...

...I thought to myself, Hey, I am trying to get his brother elected president...

...Seeing the photographs and footage of him in clapboard shacks, with those endlessly sad eyes, bending to speak to children in rags, I always thought of Christ's words: "If you did it for the least of my brethren, you did it for me...

...Harlan Cleveland, a foreign policy expert (who later became U.S...

...writes in the peroration of A Thousand Days, still lives in the minds of the faithful...

...The Strobers' admirably detached presentation of the testimony allows readers to make up their own minds about the fabled Thousand Days, and in the case of Bobby, "Anew" offers especially revealing commentaries...

...the poor would have had in the Oval Office someone who listened and cared...

...William Y. Smith, who was GeneralMaxwell Taylor's special assistant at the time, somewhat dissents from these views...

...At Stockton, Robert Donovan told the readers of the same paper, "he was pulled off a car by crowds of admirers...

...He then would have been an extraordinary President . . . more passionate, more committed and more effective than any of the six Presidents who served between the time of his death and the time [December 1992] this is written...

...Had Robert Kennedy not been suddenly, senselessly taken from us, the world would be a better place," we are told for starters...

...In his capacity as secretary of the Senate majority, Bobby Baker became aware that the attorney general had tapped Vice President Johnson's telephone lines...

...It was-1 thought—his total preoccupation with the domestic political aspects of what was going on...

...The Kennedys, he says flatly, "were entirely political" on civil-rights issues...

...From beginning to end, Sorensen gives himself over to fantasies about Bobby...

...From high above in the press section," wrote Jules Witcover, "it looked and sounded like some overly done scene from a Hollywood movie of a presidential campaign—the jumping girls, the screams ricocheting off the distant field house walls...

...Hoover said that it was the wrong thing to do—many of these same people were the people we were investigating, particularly Sam (Moe) Giancana in Chicago...

...Theodore Hesburgh, "Robert Kennedy looked upon [civil rights] as his private domain, and he was very cautious about backing [those of us on] the Civil Rights Commission on anything, because he wanted the Kennedy Administration to get credit for any progress that had been made...

...he doesn't have to do something like that...

...Michael V. Di Salle into throwing Ohio behind Jack in the 1960 presidential nomination contest, his carpetbagger run for the Senate from New York (which particularly offended the New York Times), and his ruthlessly opportunistic announcement of his candidacy for the presidency a scant four days after the stunningly large vote for Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary...

...But every decision that he made about anything was based upon what was best for them politically...

...From his vantage point in the State Department's bureau of intelligence, Roger Hilsman regarded Bobby as the "hero" of the Cuban missile crisis...

...People today talk about Jack and Bob's sex life...

...A week later, the Los Angeles Times's Carl Greenberg characterized the receptions that Bobby received at Stockton, Sacramento, San Jose, Monterey, and Los Angeles as "uproarious, shrieking and frenzied...

...Francis would not have...

...Yet when Louis Martin, a former deputy director of the Democratic National Committee, brought up the subject, they didn't exclude what he had to say...

...Bobby was very, very hawkish," Dungan further remembers, and "he had no subtlety at all...

...You'd say, 'How do you like those ladies?' The reply would be, 'I like them prone [sic].' " Philip Kaiser, a career diplomat, worked for several political candidates in his younger days...

...Wicker was right about Bobby and the Democratic Party...

...and the sense of despair that bred demonstrations and riots in our inner cities and on our college campuses would have been transformed into a sense of hope...

...Edgar Hoover "expressed great outrage when Bobby came over one day and briefed him concerning the use of organized crime individuals for the purpose of getting at Castro...

...But in the year in which 18,000 loyalists headed by President Clinton foregathered in Arlington Cemetery to mourn and remember Bobby Kennedy and listen—with eyes tightly closed, in Clinton's case—to Aretha Franklin singing "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands," it is Bobby's myth that is inspiring the really breathtaking claims...

...the special pleaders and PACs would have wielded far less influence in Washington...

...The New York Times's Tom Wicker maintains that "it is a fallacy [to think that] the Democrats would have nominated him for president and he would have won, and the whole history of the world would be different...

...At the end of the video-op, however, Bobby and his entourage left that scene from hell, as St...

...For the attorney general's investigatory zeal "caused the FBI to do certain things...

...It appealed to him as an adolescent fantasy...

...As attorney general, says Dungan, Bobby did lots of wonderful things, but in other areas, especially foreign affairs, his "judgment was not very good," and "h4 brusque manner...

...he former assistant director of the T FBI, Cartha DeLoach, recalls that 1...

...The proposition that political advantage inhered in simulations of a radically transformed personality also casts light on his astonishing declaration at a press conference at the University of Southern California on November 5, 1965, that he thought it would be a "good idea" for the U.S...

...He remembers Bobby in 1960 as "the best campaign manager I ever saw," and another veteran of the campaign, Bernard Boutin, exults in the memory of Bobby's combativeness...

...Let us embrace the memory of Robert Kennedy," President Clinton intoned at Arlington Cemetery, "by living as he would have us live...

...Bobby was] a deeply religious man, the only one I ever can remember who combined theology and political ideology in a way that was nothing but good...

...Unlike the myth-drunk Sorensen, Gerald S. and Deborah H. Strober deal objectively with both Jack and Bobby in their fascinating compendium, "Let Us Begin Anew": An Oral History of the Kennedy Presidency.3 On discovering that the oral-history materials in the Kennedy Library in Boston were compiled for, the most part in the months and years immediately following the assassination in Dallas, the Strobers concluded a few years back that the time had come to seek new perspectives...

...On counterinsurgency it was Robert who was driving the president...

...In the tiny back room of an all-butroofless shack, he encountered a two-year-old black child, wearing a filthy undershirt that could not conceal her swollen stomach, sitting on the dirt floor...

...While it was "common wisdom" for a while to say that Bobby had figured out the way to respond to Khrushchev, the State Department's Llewellyn Thompson was later named as the first one who mentioned it, and "I bet if you went far enough, there would be some third person who mentioned it...

...During Bobby's tenure as attorney general, political considerations had dominated every one of his responses to black America's cries of grievance...

...But they were Irish: they liked liquor and they liked women...

...In domestic affairs, his proposals for dealing with poverty made sense to many sensible people...

...I often thought he was a loose cannon...

...T ragedy struck all around him before it struck him, too, and he sprinkled his speeches with quotations from Aeschylus...

...In 1969, Sorensen published The Kennedy Legacy, wherein he saluted the political achievements of all three Kennedy brothers, but dwelled on Jack's...

...Had he been nominated, I think he could have beaten Nixon...

...At the huge field house of the University of Kansas on March 18, 1968, Bobby drew the largest throng in campus history...

...With a TV crew and a sympathetic writer, Nick Kotz, in tow, Bobby journeyed into an abysmally poor district of the Mississippi Delta in the spring of 1967...

...Hence the modishness of the Bobby myth...

...Whether he spoke to the crowds of ending American involvement in battered and bloody Vietnam or of "dissolving" inner-city ghettos, the common threnody in his rhetoric was suffering, and the keepers of his myth are sure they know why: with the martyrdom of his brother, he had changed, his hard edges had softened, and in a miracle akin to an infusion of God's grace his soul had been flooded with a boundless compassion for the pain of others...

...He was undoubtedly the rudest man I have ever encountered in public life, and I am surprised, in a way, that he got as far he did...

...I'm really sorry to say," Ralph Dungan confesses, "that on the civil rights side, we were not very good...

...I do not doubt that the child's plight upset him...

...Well, I thought that was a very bad idea because it's not the business of business to undertake that sort of thing, and American business in foreign countries would be thrown out of the countries in many situations if they had tried to do that...

...On the other hand, he raised false expectations about the efficacy of such provisions by failing to acknowledge that they might not touch the pathologies of the poor and could well make them worse...

...Bob was always looking for decisions rather than letting things ride for a while...

...Yet in the new foreword he has contributed to a re-issue of Legacy,2 he mentions Jack only in passing...

...In other words, he would do better in the country than within the Democratic party...

...T o begin with, the new persona offered an antidote to left-liberal distrust of him—as evinced, say, in the demonic portrayal of Robert the would-be killer of the king in Macbirdfor his lifetime history of personal nastiness, his professional association with Sen...