In Love With Nizht: The American Romance With Robert Kennedy
Steel, Ronald
Bobby Without Tears In Love With Night: The American Romance With Robert Kennedy Ronald Steel Simon & Schuster / 220 pages / $23 REVIEWED BY Mark Faleoff F or many years now we have...
...Steel reminds us that he was an energetic, not to say fanatical, opponent of Communism in the Third World and an ardent advocate of what became known as "counter-insurgency," particularly in Southeast Asia...
...Before that test could be met, Sirhan Sirhan's bullet met its mark...
...was killed in World War II and the family mantle passed to Jack, Bobby did what he knew he must do--he became Jack's alter ego, his bad cop to Jack's good cop, and helped his brother into the presidency...
...Kennedy left the McCarthy committee not because he objected to the senator's objectives or methods, but because he found himself at a disadvantage in competition with another ruthless young man by the name of Roy Cohn, who became the senator's chief counsel...
...Bobby Without Tears In Love With Night: The American Romance With Robert Kennedy Ronald Steel Simon & Schuster / 220 pages / $23 REVIEWED BY Mark Faleoff F or many years now we have been assaulted by an apparently endless cataract of books on the late Senator Robert Francis Kennedy, victim of an assassin's bullet 31 years ago last June...
...But From shows, too, that the 7o's also marked the beginning of a loss of trust in the other large institutions that had shaped the nation for decades, including big corporations and trade unions...
...Prior to surfacing to broad public attention Kennedy had also served on a Senate subcommittee investigating criminal activities of organized labor--in this case, the Teamsters, then under the leadership of Jimmy Hoffa...
...He did not even reject the antiCommunism that had gotten us into Vietnam...
...Is this merely a scrupulous historian's unwillingness to jump to conclusions in the absence of convincing evidence, fear of a lawsuit, or something even worse...
...And besides, America has experienced "the most total social transformation...since the coming of industrialism...
...It is difficult to think of any other figure in American history, particularly one whose public career in its major phase lasted less than a decade, who was responsible for no major legislation, and who never attained the presidency in his own right, meriting such continuous and copious attention...
...Rather, it was wholly of a piece with his upbringing and the values of his parents- his father's rigid conservatism and his mother's dogmatic Catholicism- with perhaps a bit of Irish-American ressentiment thrown in for good measure...
...He reminds us that Bobby was originally cast in a rather minor role in the Kennedy family drama, since he was the third brother and it was his elders who were expected to accomplish great things...
...ics like the relationship of the Kennedy brothers to Marilyn Monroe, or even the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death, Steel draws back from any hardand-fast conclusions...
...California, on the other hand, with its large black and Mexican-American population, was perceived as an electoral and psychological pot of gold...
...But the Reagan majority itself arose, as Frum shows, in response to certain events and trends: exploding criminality (which "utterly discredited the liberal ideas that had governed American public life" since World War II...
...Like many crusades in search of righteousness," he writes, Bobby "showed a disturbing tendency to justify whatever behavior he found useful...
...No wonder they miss him...
...Politics in a democratic society," he soberly observes, "is about interest groups and deals, not salvation...
...the genocide in Cambodia (which proved to be the death of"liber66 Mar c h 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator...
...More to the point, although a legend has grown up that in Indiana Kennedy proved that he alone of Democratic politicians could attract the support of both urban black voters and the white working class (many of whom were drawn to the maverick candidacy of Alabama Govemor George Wallace), in fact in the entire state he carried only 11 of 7 o predominantly white precincts, and in many of those the whites who voted for him discounted his civil rights-cum-abolitionist rhetoric, perceiving him as a "tough guy who would keep them [blacks] in check...
...When it comes to dealing with even touchier topOne cannot but admire the tenacity with which Steel attacks his subject...
...He was quite literally all over the map...
...He was critical of welfare and opposed to school busing to achieve integration, a guaranteed income, national health insurance, or job preferences...
...On the other hand, who knew what the crowds wanted, Steel asks, except for emotional catharsis, or "whether this raw emotion could be transferred into votes for a Kennedy presidency...
...The American Spectator _9 Ma r c h ~ o o o 65 ety" have been discredited in actual practice, and few politicians anxious to win election or re-election wish to revisit them) As it is, the first Democratic president to be re-elected to a second full term since Franklin D. Roosevelt has presided over a far-reaching reform of our welfare system--without regret and without apology...
...It is a tribute to Kennedy's dexterity (and also the capacity for wishful thinking on the part of antiwar liberals) that he was able to pull this trick offwithout much difficulty...
...What Steel does, in the first place, is to walk us through the various episodes of Kennedy's life...
...Even so, Kennedy did not come forward with a clear anti-war position until another Democrat, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, had found it a winner in the New Hampshire Democratic primary...
...Many years have passed since the 1968 Democratic primaries, and memories have grown a bit stale, allowing others to cover them with a film of nostalgia and outright fiction...
...A Part from spinning out this narrative with a considerable richness of detail, Steel has much of interest to say about Kennedy's evolving political style...
...Indeed who...
...64 Ma r c h 2 o o o The American Spectator erably to the left of Kennedy's...
...When his oldest brother Joe, Jr...
...When McCarthy died several years later, censured by the Senate and languishing in deep disgrace, Kennedy took the matter deeply and personally...
...We're going to do it in the streets," he told one of his speechwriters...
...On Vietnam, Bobby was even more cynical and manipulative...
...Steel puts this project under a microscope and finds it far from radical, and I suppose he is right...
...has been blurred beyond all recognition by Kennedy's adoring followers...
...Of course, for some people in this country-not many, to be sure, but some-politics is (or ought to be) precisely about "salvation...
...And indeed, as Steel writes, "his rhetoric was emotional and heart-moving...
...Steel reminds us that Bobby would have been perfectly happy to have served as vice president to Lyndon Johnson, a man he held in the utrnost contempt...
...This was no casual affair, a youthful indiscretion based on innocence or naivet6, as so many apologists (and Bobby himself) would later tell us...
...Those "parts" of America actually reduce themselves to a rather small province, whose principal inhabitants are Harris Wofford, Jack Newfield, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, and Richard Goodwin, but whose importance has been artificially magnified by liberal activists of a certain age and an echo chamber of epigones in the media...
...And he much too briefly treats technology, giving it just a few paragraphs despite its obvious importance...
...In a broader sense, there is no leader in sight capable of building a majority constituency which unites both the satisfied and dissatisfied components of our society...
...While there were very real malfeasances worth investigating (the misallocation of union funds, intimidation of dissidents, collusion with gangsters, rigged union funds), Kennedy did so with The American Spectator _9 Marc h 2 o o o 63 an absolute minimum of respect for due process...
...And two, to address the question of why what he calls the Bobby Myth has endured as long as it has...
...Fate, however, intervened...
...He covers the rise of investigative journalism but doesn't report other key media developments- such as dying newspapers and the advent of cable television and the quantum leap in programming it would offer...
...Steel's account calls us clearly to order...
...But Americans are not satisfied with all they have...
...and actor Warren Beatty, have each chosen not to run for the presidency this year...
...The social experiments associated with LBJ's "Great Soci2Steel reminds us that McCarthy did not actually win the New Hampshire primary, but he did gamer 42 percent of the vote to LBJ's 49...
...Though this organization effectively conveys Frum's perspective on the 7o's, it is not always apparent why he treats material in one part of the book that would seem to fit as well or better in another...
...Steel's opposition to this sort of thing is based not merely on admiration for Castro himself (which he has the good grace and candor to put right out in front of us) but also on more prudential groundsthat the war against Castro "unleashed forces that it could not control...
...To his mind being liberal meant being weak, and there was nothing he held in greater contempt...
...According to Steel, shortly after his re-election President Johnson was giving serious consideration to pulling out of Indochina...
...In the first place, although Kennedy won the Indiana primary, his victory at 4 z percent was far from conclusive, all the more so since the remainder was split between two other candidates...
...Whatever it is, perhaps the author is well counseled to take a pass...
...Wholly characteristic ofth~s state of affairs is the fact that the two Democrats who remain unapologetic advocates of semi-socialism, Senator Paul Wellstone (D-Minn...
...He and his people threw themselves into the race there with all they had...
...Steel says that Bobby Kennedy "became a hero to millions of people looking for a hero," but he properly warns that "we should be wary of such a yearning...
...Along the way he worked for a Wisconsin senator by the name of Joe McCarthy...
...The next primary in Oregon was a clear disaster for Kennedy, since it was, as one of his campaign workers complained at the time, "one big white suburb...
...In spite of the same legal skills and elastic scruples which made him a valued member of the McCarthy team, in the end Kennedy failed to nail Hoffa...
...They include Gore Vidal, Paul Newman, the late Richard Hofstadter and James Baldwin, as well as journalist Robert Scheer and cartoonist Jules Feiffer...
...This book is bound to be a very uncomfortable experience for a great many members of our cultural elite...
...But, he adds, Kennedy and his people "had to do it through the street because that was the only way that this angry, emotional politician, lacking Jack's debonair cool, could reignite the Kennedy legend...
...However that may be, he clearly ties the Kennedy brothers to policies that today would strike horror in the hearts of their admirers, particularly involvement in various covert attempts to assassinate the Cuban dictator, and to mount an exile invasion to depose him...
...It is perhaps also worth observing-one of the very few omissions in Steel's book-that Kennedy's political career coincides with that final moment in the history of American liberalism in which white males could pretend to speak for the disinherited without fear of contradiction or embarrassment from within their own ranks--a golden age which still knew not Jesse Jackson, A1 Sharpton, or Patricia Ireland...
...Moreover, these were the days before black Americans' access to the ballot box was protected by federal law, and the Kennedy brothers understood that in order to win re-election in 1964 they were going to have to placate segregationist interests...
...repeated acts of terrorism...
...As if that were not enough, his sudden death saved them from the disillusionment and despair of practical politics...
...How We Got Here does not treat the 7o's chronologically but thematically, and Frum's themes evince his interest in human character, for they concern "trust," "duty," "reason," "desire," "rights," and "regeneration...
...They feel "less content, less secure, less proud" of their country than they did a half century ago...
...This is not to say that the Kennedy brothers could not be energetic when an issue showed promise of political gain, as in the case of their confrontation with top executives of the steel industry over pricing...
...In California, as in Indiana, he won a technical victory (46 percent) but it was not the 5 ~ percent or more he had hoped for, and more to the point, McCarthy was close behind with 4z...
...That myth has acted as a repository for some of their more garish political fantasies, and it is not difficult to see why...
...Nonetheless, Frum has managed to include most of the big stories of the 7o's, and he is right to see the decade as one that produced an upheaval in the habits, beliefs, and morals of Americans of every station in life...
...is individualist, permissive, emotional, enterprising, garrulous, rebellious, hedonistic, and guilt-ridden...
...Again, Steel reminds us that even those who agreed with the objective found the methods disturbing...
...No doubt similar yearnings exist just beneath the surface in some quarters of the United States...
...With Bobby Kennedy, affluent whites could feel adventurous and compassionate, self-righteous and unthreatened, all at the same time...
...What has happened...
...While a technical loss, the psychological impact was enormous, since it suggested a deep dissatisfaction with a sitting president within his own party, and was obviously very influential in getting LBJ to retire from office...
...This put Kennedy in a very difficult situation, and for some time he was unsure of which way to turn...
...This is a clever way for a liberal to win a conservative argument, but it begs the question of what the United States was supposed to do when faced with a freshly-minted Soviet satellite ninety miles from its border, armed to the teeth and determined to spread its influence throughout the Caribbean and beyond...
...The speech, of course, was never given, because Johnson eventually opted for a different course-bombing raids against North Vietnam and the dispatch of zoo,ooo American troops, a major step towards converting that conflict into an American war...
...As attorney general in his brother's administration Kennedy showed no great interest in the issues that energized the more advanced sectors of the Democratic Party, particularly civil rights in the American South...
...One, to correct the record, which, as he shows, MARK FALCOFF is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a frequent contributor to TAS...
...When It All Bega n to Go Very Wrong-- and Right HowWe Got Here: The 70's: The Decode That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse) David Frum Free Press/4~8pages / $25 REVIEWED BY TerryEastland J J ~ hese are America's best days," writes David Frum, "its high I I noon of empire...
...But he was the master of the art of the personal gesture...
...That disastrous campaign ultimately can be said to have succeeded when Ronald Reagan was elected in 198o...
...While some of Steel's individual observations periodically irritated this reviewer, as indeed I suppose they would many readers of this journal, one cannot but admire the tenacity with which he attacks his subject, the ruthless clarity of his argument, above all the uncompromising intellectual courage he brings to his task...
...Quite the contrary...
...He hastily and I think too facilely links that effort to both the genesis of the missile crisis and even, arguably, to President Kennedy's own assassination...
...Wholly typical in this regard is the remark of one journalist that "the yearning for Robert Kennedy--or somebody like him--is an open wound in some parts of America...
...At times this loss of trust took the form of rebellion, which Frum says was one directed against the central planning and control that the public and private collectives alike required...
...It was only when LBJ ruled out Kennedy as a running mate in 1964 that he embarked upon an independent political career as Democratic senator from New York2 While the Democratic nomination was his for the taking, the election itself was far from a cake-walk, and in the end the loathsome Johnson's margin of victory in the state was three times that of the carpetbagger from Massachusetts...
...2 Ironically, McCarthy had entered the race only because Kennedy, unsure of how the new dispensation would play, had held back...
...Once there, he broke with precedent and risked considerable public criticism by taking a major cabinet position- that of attorney general, a curious appointment given that he had himself never practiced law...
...His narrative sparkles with descriptions of events that one might think were Tom Wolfe's, and the confidence of his judgments could remind readers of Paul Johnson...
...E vidently Robert Kennedy did not confine his interests to matters judicial during his brother's presidency...
...All too many Americans," he writes, "had felt like cogs in the wheel...
...A new individualism erupted, taking diverse political manifestations...
...President Kennedy himself did not regard the subject as one worthy of great emotional expenditure-indeed, part of his charm, ifI may say so, was his lack of passion on any political issue...
...They were brought to the issue, gingerly, only through the workings of our independent judicial system...
...More than once while reading this book I thought of both Jean Daniel and Jean Lacouture...
...A people once collectivist, censorious, calculating, conformist, taciturn, obedient, puritanical, and selfconfident has mutated...into a people that TERRY EAST~ND is publisher and president ofTAS...
...The three decades since Robert Kennedy's death have not been particularly happy ones for the more dogmatic variety of American liberal-zo years of outright Republican rule and nearly eight years of a Democratic president who has had to share power most of the time with a Republican Congress...
...It was, of course, the assassination of President Kennedy that marked the end of the "old" Bobby and the emergence of the "new...
...Indeed, each of these words titles one of the book's six parts...
...I have lost an important part of my life," he wrote in his journal...
...The next primary--in New Yorkwas a matter of days away and in a state where McCarthy's support among Democratic primary voters was unusually broad and deep...
...This is evident in the book's organization...
...When the corporate moguls-pompous, tactless, and easy to caricat u r e - dug in their heels, Bobby let them know he would go after their income tax returns, and audit every business lunch right down to the last martini...
...Every anniversary of his death provokes a ritual outpouring of articles in the press, typically bemoaning his loss and calculating the hypothetical costs to our nation of his premature disappearance...
...The need to follow, to serve, and to worship is not a healthy thing in a people...
...Much that happened in the 7o's (think of the creation of Ethernet, the forerunner of the Internet) brought us modern digital life...
...Steel makes the whole business clear...
...He was obsessed with getting rid of Fidel Castro in Cuba--a worthy cause, one might have thought, though Steel does not think so...
...The capacity to manipulate crowds has propelled men to limitless power in societies less firmly rooted in institutions than our own-say, Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, Per6n in Argentina, or Castro in Cuba...
...At first its political content was unclear beyond the capacity to exploit widespread national guilt, nostalgia, or celebrity appeal...
...He points out with perverse relish that President Richard Nixon's subsequent economic program, which involved a minimum national income, was consid1Somewhere in NewYork State there should be a plaque honoring those principled liberals who came out against Kennedy and in favor of his moderate Republican opponent, Senator Kenneth Keating...
...Although an American, Steel writes with the distance and detachment one might well expect from a European writer, someone who, like himself, is at once a sophisticated and iconoclastic man of the left, an admirer of Third World revolutions (or at least of Third World revolutionism), and a firm anti-anti-Communist...
...And the end, alas, is not yet in sight...
...Frum also leaves out or scants subjects worthy of treatment in this popular history...
...They already know...
...Kennedy returned the favor...
...For example, he persuaded some of his friends on Wall Street and in the private foundations to finance a development project in Bedford-Stuyvesant based on job training, housing rehabilitation, and attraction of light manufacturing to the area...
...Kennedy's actual campaign proposals--as opposed to his rhetoric-were far from radical...
...They are often nostalgic for those days, he says, but there is never any going back...
...One of the reasons [he] professed such scorn for liberals," Steel writes, "was his belief that they desired the end but got squeamish about the means...
...Resentment against the crimping and cramping of the individual personality inspired not only the New Left...but also the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign...
...What the unfortunate Nixon lacked was Kennedy's (or probably, his speechwriters') "intellectual nimbleness," as Steel calls it, "to pitch to [both] radical leftists and centrist conservatives," criticizing LBJ's big govemment approach while at the same time pandering to emerging black nationalists with talk of "community control...
...The Kennedy brothers were terrible enemies to have, and for all we can know, still are-beyond the grave...
...But eventually his "hatred for Johnson...
...Kennedy got wind of the fact and ordered his aides to draft a speech denouncing any withdrawal as a betrayal of American interests...
...Once in the Senate, Kennedy showed no great interest in the affairs of that body, though he did dabble in some issues that showed important political potential, such as "community development" in the black areas of New York City...
...But the reckless zeal with which he pursued his prey horrified many liberals and civil libertarians...
...Whatever else one might say about him, Ronald Steel, author of In Love With Night, assuredly is not of their number...
...In this book he has set himself a two-fold purpose...
...It is in these circles that the Bobby Myth has been hatched and nurtured for so long...
...Like those two, Frum is a moralist, his abiding interest being human conduct and the ideas and rules and conventions that affect it...
...made it easier for him to reverse his course...once he had persuaded himself"-and more importantly-"could persuade others that it was now LBJ's war and not his brother's...
...He was perhaps the first major politician to use the evening network news as a theater for psychodrama...
...In many ways this was to be expected...
...Frum finds the answer to how we so mutated, of "how we got here," in a generously defined 7o's, which starts around 1965 and runs through 198o...
...Frum proves a mostly reliable guide to these years...
...Once the results were in, Kennedy (who had assured his Minnesota colleague that he would not ran) immediately double-crossed him and threw his hat in the ring...
...He reports little about sports, but the 7o's saw the advent of free agency in professional sports (recall Andy Messersmith's case) and their increasing commercialization (consider the Super Bowl...
...The conduct of the Vietnam War and then the Watergate scandal damaged Americans' trust in the federal government-a loss of trust codified in the 1978 independent counsel law...
...These people do not need to read Steel's book...
Vol. 33 • March 2000 • No. 2
