Bobby Watching

...has an inborn streak of pessimism...

...On occasion Miss Laing demonstrates a naivete that can only be explained by her unfamiliarity with the American political scene...

...She says coldly, "I'm wondering how often you make your wife cry...

...She apparently is also unaware of the coolness and skepticism with which many Democrats viewed John Kennedy as candidate (remember Arthur Schles-inger Jr.'s Kennedy Or Nixon: Does It Make a Difference...

...At its most pretentious, it is a melange of tabloid psychoanalysis a la Rose Franzblau and character probing a la some syndicated horoscope writer...

...On an airplane, she asks Kennedy why he spent half a million dollars during his Senatorial campaign to improve his image...

...The profile, her own observations buried amid the feminine interpretation of past history, is by far the freshest part of the exercise...

...she is playing the game both ways...

...This is women's journalism, having almost a soap opera quality, yet it is strangely touching...

...is fearful "that he is somehow inferior to other people around him...

...Not that The Next Kennedy includes the above paragraphs, it does not...

...he calls her a liar...

...He was launched as a national figure...

...Miss Laing is obviously unaware of the legions of passionate Stevensonians who threw themselves heart and soul against the Eisenhower steamroller in 1956, and who tried to snatch the nomination from John Kennedy in 1960...

...She spent about three weeks in 1966 observing Kennedy, his staff, his family and his public...

...The reader cannot help but feel a deep sense of sympathy for Kennedy: At one moment he is being assailed by tough questions from a journalist, only to find, the next moment, that his equally tough answers have hurt the journalist's feelings because she is a woman...

...But this is the technique employed by the author in her effort to expose every facet of Robert Kennedy's life to textual analysis...

...The answer to the question is that Robert Kennedy is loved by some, hated by others, but to most people he is complex and mystifying...

...An admirer of Bobby's, who has known him since Harvard days, sees this aspect of his character in a different light: "I have never seen this man do anything for a selfish reason, to win public approval or avoid criticism...

...attempts feats of physical daring in order to assert masculine superiority, a pattern begun when he was a "fragile" boy...

...Since the book is subtitled "A Woman's View of Robert F. Kennedy as Prospective President," these frequently gratuitous insights are necessarily the raison d'etre of this book, and usually its weakest points...

...She says that in 1953, while Kennedy was working for Senator Joe McCarthy's committee, he wrote a report on East-West trade which exposed forbidden intercourse with Red China, and, as a result, "The country was astounded, and Robert Kennedy's name was blazoned in headlines from coast to coast...

...She has him attacked and defended from both flanks, then summed up and "understood" in the light of feminine insights...

...but another considers him imperious, a man who gives quiet orders with the implicit understanding that they will be unquestionably obeyed...

...Anyone who presses impatiently through the book's 310 pages of assorted pro-and anti-Kennedy statements, to reach, at last, the author's summation, will find . . . just what the publisher promised: the question, without any resolution...

...No American journalist would suggest that a national career was launched on the basis of a lowly assistant counsel's report to a Senate Committee...

...He calms down, becomes "gentle again," and asks, "What are you thinking...

...contributor, "Urban Review" Bobby Kennedy usually orders cornflakes for breakfast...

...Faithful Kennedy fans will find the going familiar through most of the book, but those who are not already thoroughly sated with Kennedy tales will meet with a few new ones along the way...

...despite the heralded demonstrations of masculinity, "he still has a few slightly feminine characteristics, among them a transparent vanity and a habit, when his hair grows particularly long, of fluttering his fingers through it...

...In an unguarded moment, Rose Kennedy revealed that Joe Kennedy too had been partial to cornflakes, and that it had been a family ritual to eat cornflakes together while debating foreign policy...

...What he does, he does because he thinks it is right...

...Kennedy, stunned by the realization that he has hurt this woman, responds, "I don't think I've ever made my wife cry...

...She is not playing fair...

...of seeing a bandwagon without the fanfare of 'roll up, roll up' or the subtle magic of a fairy - tale presentation, complete with Prince Charming, was born the blueprint for the brilliant campaign of 1960...

...The strikingly attractive author of The Next Kennedy, Margaret Laing, is editor-in-chief of a British women's magazine...

...The book reads as though Miss Laing had intended to write an in-depth magazine profile of Robert Kennedy, then decided to expand it...

...Then we realize that the American public is no fairer...

...Her description of Robert Kennedy's staff work during the 1956 Stevenson campaign suffers the same affliction: "From 50 days of watching a losing campaigner fail to make basic emotional contact with the people whose votes he wanted (Stevenson often failed to make physical contact too, for he could fight shy of the insincere handshake), of seeing the press left uncaptured...

...One waitress who has taken this order finds in him a pathetic quality, "almost a little boy lost...

...Another antagonistic Bobby-watcher views Robert F. Kennedy's noted preference for cornflakes with more than a grain of skepticism: "It's a carefully calculated ploy to make the little bastard seem like a regular guy...

...In a shy, twanging whine, he mumbles, "Cornflakes, please...

...Robert Kennedy "needs love because he is deeply vulnerable in himself, in spite of the almost impenetratable shield of protectors surrounding him...

...More angry words are exchanged, and she is cut, wounded, silenced by his sharpness...

...To such depths, it is sad to report, has Bobby-watching sunk...

...To quote the jacket, "Miss Laing's ultimate question—the question that supplies the basis for her character study—is summed up in the final section of the book: Does Robert F. Kennedy possess the necessary qualities to be the next President of the United States...

...What is there in a woman's view which is distinctive enough to merit a new biography of well-traveled anecdotal history...

...Miss Laing has blended her impressions with a thorough research job, leaning heavily on published comments and stories, though usually without attribution—giving a false sense that time and again she was there at the right second to receive the frank revelations of public figures...

...in its apparently insatiable demand for trivial information about present and prospective leaders, it expects a man like Kennedy to endure every kind of indignity with dignity...

...Says one observer, "Bobby's just like his father in all the essentials...

...Woman's view or not, this is exactly where I came in...

...Robert, we are also told, needs reassurance...