Yesterday's Hatchet Job

...Only Robert Kennedy is no longer in the campaign...

...Except for his liking the outdoors, Lasky explains in a typically discerning aside, Bobby "was like any other rich kid who never had to worry about creature comforts...

...Although the brief final chapter ends with Robert Kennedy's murder (and a hint that the author has already hired somebody to start collecting clippings about Teddy), most of the book was written before June 1968, and neither author nor publisher seems to have taken the trouble to scrutinize what began as an attack on a living man for its propriety as an attack on a dead man...

...On the few occasions when he apparently is unable to find an appropriate line from Dean Acheson or the Village Voice, Lasky tries an interpretation of his own...

...the latter must in time prove dangerous...

...Lasky details, with relish, the distrust that Kennedy inspired...

...Every politician is vulnerable to this kind of attack, and even Everett Dirksen deserves better...

...Sometimes, to be sure, Lasky stretches a bit for an unfavorable citation...

...Kennedy obtained political power very early, at little personal cost, and that may be one reason why it took him so long to find his own voice, his own strength...

...He puts Kennedy down for not writing his own jokes, for sending his children to private instead of ghetto schools, for flirting with pretty girls, for wearing his hair long and for cutting it, for being rude and for being shy...

...He indicts him for being careless about his dress and for liking the outdoors...

...Lasky's Kennedy is true to himself only when he does bad things, like hound Jimmy Hoffa and push around lesser politicians...

...Lasky gives us a Robert Kennedy who has all the unpleasant characteristics we have heard about?ruthless ambition, brashness, hypocrisy—without a single redeeming trait...

...He was, after all, writing about a monster, not a human being...

...Now, six months after his death, we have this special type of campaign document...

...he is as ready to borrow from the New York Review of Books as from the National Review...

...unquestionably Lasky would have been just as tough on him for being tidy and sedentary...

...He warned that bombing the sites would create a 'Pearl Harbor in reverse' and would 'blacken the name of the United States in the pages of history.' Acheson patiently pointed out that a 'surgical' strike would not only eliminate the missile bases but would lead to the toppling of the Castro regime and rid the Western Hemisphere of a major Communist threat...

...He knows all the old magazine writer's tricks, such as rewarding people who did not like the Kennedys with positive adjectives: An anti-Kennedy audience becomes '"a spirited group," a New York legislator becomes "spunky little Joe Zaretski...

...Moreover, he had to do his growing up in public...

...After quoting a cbs interview in which Kennedy confessed that he was unable to explain his reputation for ruthlessness, our author proceeds: "Obviously Bobby was not one for engaging in public self-analysis...

...Reviewed by WALTER GOODMAN A uthor, "The Committee" Not the least of the indignities to which a man opens himself when he chooses the public life in America is that he will be written about...

...To rebut Kennedy's attack on the president of General Motors for assigning a snoop to Ralph Nader, Lasky relies on a newspaper publisher in Pontiac, Michigan, which is rather like quoting the Afrikaans press on Kennedy's 1966 visit to South Africa—but Lasky does that too...

...This tolerance pays off...

...He is intriguing both as a man and a myth, and some future biographer will surely find him a rich subject for study...

...What died with him was his brother's past and his own future...

...he passes over the loyalty he inspired...

...The writer may even turn out to be Victor Lasky, a prospect that is enough to drive a man of sensibility off the platform and back to his study...

...Yet on balance the hit-and-miss processes of our democracy are undoubtedly better served by impositions on the private lives of public men than by constraints on the right to impose...

...Since he lacks any style, reading Lasky is painless but wearisome, like plowing through 400 pages of Leonard Lyons...

...Even the man's feeling of pain and loss at the death of his brother John becomes somehow discreditable in Lasky's telling...

...He is tolerant of opinions from all sources, however, so long as they can be used critically...

...Even those, like myself, whose admiration for Robert Kennedy knew distinct bounds can find little satisfaction in such a job...

...In this manner Lasky traipses over all the familiar high and low points of the Kennedy career—his early association with Joe McCarthy, his role in his brother's 1960 campaign, his activities as Attorney General, his winning a Senate seat from New York, his entrance into the 1968 primaries—pausing but briefly and never for the purpose of elucidating...

...Obviously...

...The former may be offensive...

...it enables him, for example, to attack Kennedy's changing position on Vietnam at every phase, without troubling to go very deeply into the Vietnam controversy itself, the changes in the nature of the war since 1965, or the shifts in feeling throughout the country...

...I assume that Lasky's animus toward Robert Kennedy and his relatives, living and dead, is fueled from the Right rather than the Left...

...While that much is certain, it is less certain that those who do the writing will be just, sensitive or competent...

...Thus, future tense predictions jar: "But if the dynasty is restored it will be Ethel Kennedy . . . and not Jackie who will occupy the center of the stage...

...Lasky's method, as those who opened his book on John F. Kennedy will have noticed, is not complicated...

...when he does good things, like appeal to college students or Negroes, his motives are invariably and entirely ulterior...

...Then by quoting from C. L. Sulzberger and Nikita Khrushchev, Lasky gives us to understand that taking Kennedy's "passionate warning" instead of Acheson's "patient counsel" resulted in a victory for world Communism...

...It's bargain-basement stuff...

...Nor is it likely that he ever spent much time analyzing himself privately...

...Here is Lasky's treatment of Robert Kennedy's role in the Cuban missile crisis (as a member of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council): "Much to the amazement of his fellow consultants, Bobby argued with passion against former Secretary of State Dean Acheson's proposal for blasting the missiles out by a series of air strikes...

...In another reference to Ethel Kennedy, the book contains what will stand for some time as the most unfeeling line in contemporary political polemic: "The size of her family—and when it will stop increasing nobody really knows—delights Ethel...

...Inadvertent no doubt, but worthy of Lasky...

...Obviously, he considered self-analysis unmanly, and therefore bad...

...He accumulates all the unfavorable press comment he can find on his target, sorts the clippings chronologically, and ties them loosely together with a snide, sketchy narrative...