Schlesinger's Case for Robert Kennedy

...More, he has been around and knows politics and politicians...

...Hoover would have had a field day...

...In his early years, he was like an attack dog thirsting to be loosed on the enemy, any enemy...

...Why, then, should his new book Robert Kennedy and His Times (Houghton Mifflin, 1,066 pp., $19.95), be so unsatisfying...

...And no historian ought to be an attorney for anybod...

...Bobby starts out as the tough little rich kid—fiercely loyal to his family, ferociously unforgiving to his enemies...

...Setting down the transformation so baldly makes it seem less plausible than in fact it is...

...That he has carried friendship too far may be a tribute to his character...

...Nevertheless, in defending the Kennedys the author is, uilly-nill\, in the position of defending himself, and everybody knows thai no man should try to be his own attorney...

...Bui the desire to defend, no less than the desire to attack, can lead historians into committing inferior historv...

...If, for example, Robert Kennedy is engaged in something disagreeable, there is always an explanation for it that has nothing to do with personal advantage or unwholesome intent...

...He could be himself at last...

...His reputation for toughness notwithstanding, Robert Kennedy did apparently call up protective feelings among those who were close to him...

...If the older brother had been a different sort of politician, loyal Bobby's passions might well have channeled into causes less congenial to liberal historians...

...Discussing the 1968 Democratic primary, when Eugene McCarthy criticized J. Edgar Hoover by name and Robert Kennedy did not, Schlesinger writes: "J...

...c ^Schlesinger, sensibly I think, does not speculate on what difference it would have made to the country had Robert Kennedy lived and won the nomination, in 1968 or later...

...There are some odd passages in a similar vein...

...He uses testimonials wherever he can find them, from New Frontiersmen who, like himself, have their careers tied to the Kennedys, and from New Leftists, who would surely dismiss Schlesinger as a prototypical Establishment liberal intellectual...

...Of the celebrated wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr., undertaken by the FBI with the approval of Attorney General Kennedy, Schlesinger writes: "If Robert Kennedy refused a tap on King and anything went wrong...

...And if he had then failed to fire J. Edgar, would not this biographer have found reasons why it would have been counterproductive...

...Edgar Hoover would not have lasted thirty seconds in his [Robert's] administration, but he thought it cheap for McCarthy to seek easy cheers from academic audiences by promising to fire him...

...he seemed peculiarly vulnerable...

...The qualities he had so long subordinated in the interest of others—the concern under the combativeness, the gentleness under the carapace, the idealism, at once wistful and passionate, under the toughness—could rise freely to the surface...

...For all of its sophistication, the reader is left with a feeling of having been worked over by an attorney...

...Professor Schlesinger was part of the John F. Kennedy Administration, and has been defending it and himself from critics ever since...

...Years after this momentous event, however, when the concern and idealism were presumably at their crest, it was not Robert Kennedy but Eugene McCarthy, the dilettante, who put himself on the line against Lyndon Johnson, only to have Kennedy enter the race after McCarthy proved that success was possible...

...It would have been unrealistic to expect anything except a friendly treatment b\ Arthur Schlesinger of a subject to whom he was bound, politically and emotionally...

...Experience, touching deep responses in him, turns him from a combative political operator into a public figure who is able to feel for, identify with and appeal strongly to the poor, the black, the young...

...at the minimum, simplifications of hard choices...

...Still, as Schlesinger recognizes, Robert's development came largely in response to John's needs...

...The reason is not hard to locate...

...Schlesinger, like an infatuated secret service man, remains at thejobof protection...

...His career spanned barely a decade and when he was killed in 1968, at age 42, his character, though still unformed, was indubitably an improvement over that of the young bully who had worked for Senator Joe McCarthy's investigations committee...

...With his father stricken, his older brothers dead, he was accountable to himself...

...from that point on, his entire life is an education and a sort of redemption...

...There are too many imponderables, not least about the man himself, despite all that has been and continues to be written about him...

...When persons less admiring of Bobby are quoted, it is usually with puzzlement that such a nice young fellow could have aroused such dislike...

...Robert Kennedy, a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist...

...The record is complicated, the personality complex, and although Schlesinger takes care to omit no controversial episode of a most controversial career, his sympathies repeatedly betray him into explaining away the less savory actions and rhapsodizing on the others—a favor he does not do for his hero's equally complex adversaries, like Lyndon Johnson and Eugene McCarthy...

...Now if Kennedy had in fact made such a promise during the campaign, would not his biographer have found courage in the act...

...Back to the carapace...

...Some were outright tracts, either of Left or Right, powered by ideological predilection or revisionist cant and determined to pin every manner of sin on the Kennedys—wiretaps of civil rights leaders, assassination attempts on foreign leaders, the beginnings of the tragedy in Vietnam...

...But is it necessary to regard him as something of a saint...

...Life rarely accomodates the needs of a faith...

...The picture presented here is not, by now, unfamiliar...

...Why, King should have been grateful to the Attorney General for the favor...

...Whereas John, he tells us, mistrusted passion and attacked injustice because it offended his sense of the rational, Robert, who seemed able to learn only from direct contact, went out among the suffering and identified with them...

...This biography demonstrates that he is still at it...

...Now and then, when Kennedy does something Schlesinger especially deplores—say, taking a win-the-war line in the early years of Vietnam—we are told that, after all, practically everybody respectable was doing it and, alter all, Robert had other things on his mind...

...The Kennedy Administration, like all administrations, has a burden of guilt and error to bear through history, yet typically, works of that kind have been neither fair nor persuasive, and one may sympathize with Schlesinger's desire to lay to rest what he deems to be slanders or...

...Most of the other books have not been as adulatory as this one...

...An intelligent attorney, to be sure—too intelligent to ignore the devil in the central character or to indulge in overly shrill advocacy—yet an attorney nonetheless...

...John and Robert were studies in contrast, yet in practice the brothers complemented each other...

...Sure, if Professor Schlesinger says so...

...Schlesinger is shrewd about this: "John Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic...

...The chapters on the civil rights battles of the period are the book's most affecting...

...In his foreword, Schlesinger tells us that "if it is necessary for a biographer of Robert Kennedy to regard him as evil, then I am not qualified to be his biographer...

...He began his tenure as Attorney General as the implacable prosecutor using the full powers of office, and perhaps more, in a vendetta against the likes of Jimmy Hoffa, and ended in anguish over what blacks were experiencing in the South and how limited his powers were to help them...

...Generally, too, readers of liberal bent find his views compatible and his way of treating issues reasonable...

...On the other hand, a tap might end the matter by demonstrating King's entire innocence, even to the satisfaction of the FBI...

...Political leaders in our country do undergo dramatic changes as they grow into leadership, and that was assuredly true of Robert from the time his brother became President and elevated him to the headier reaches of American politics...

...Such is the spirit of partisanship that our author allows himself to be carried away into women's magazine psychology: "He [Robert] was now head of the family...