Tribune of the Underclass

...The Mafia...

...Castro...

...Jack Kennedy was cold, self-absorbed, hyperattuned to his public image and, his fabled charm notwithstanding, a pedestrian Chief Executive stirred less by the "art of the possible" than by the allurements of power...

...But he would never grasp, as his more sensitive brother did, that the great domestic crisis of the day was the civil rights struggle...

...His chances of victory had always been slight...

...Thomas, a longtime editor at Newsweek, is an insider too, as attested by the Kennedy loyalists thanked in the Acknowledgments for having read his book in manuscript...

...He might have been rash, he might have tried to do too much, and he might have blundered...

...And it is more or less true...

...Richard Wade and Frances FitzGerald were with us...

...Or was he, as Ronald Steel maintains in In Lore with Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy, published this past January, an opportunist whose patched-together program "was not so much conservative or radical as destined to pick up support wherever" he could find it...

...And yet it was the drama of the 1968 campaign that would seal his legend...

...Was RFK the last creative liberal, as Schlesinger proposed9 Was he, as Michael Knox Beran argues in The Last Patrician (1998), an advocate of "Emersonian self-reliance' whose repudiation of the Welfare State anticipated Reaganism...

...THOMAS is on firmer ground describing the pivotal period in his subject's life, the traumaof November 22, 1963, and its aftermath...

...the devoted brother, chastened by JFK's assassination, who was transformed into the haggard "tribune of the underclass," in Schlesinger's phrase...

...It was an inspiring performance, all the more so given that Kennedy had never liked or trusted King...

...This formula, as Thomas knows, was inaccurate...

...But he would surely have tried to tackle the problems of poverty and discrimination, and he would have tried to end the killing in Vietnam long before President Nixon did...

...He "walked through the mud and sewage, children clinging to his leg, in a transport of fellow suffering...

...I heard the California returns at Saul Bellow's apartment in Chicago...

...Critics, such as I. F. Stone, accused him of careerism...

...Elected to the Senate from New York in 1964—amid charges of carpetbagging far fiercer than any Hillary Clinton has withstood (and more unfair...

...Bobby, the survivor, "literally shrank, until he appeared wasted and gaunt...

...So many enemies, so many potential assassins: Southern bigots...

...But Kennedy's anguish, visibly etched on his angular face, made him beloved in worlds others avoided...

...Thomas, no political analyst, is not much interested in these questions...

...But Thomas' RFK retouches, without much recasting, the portrait in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s massive biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times, published in 1978, a decade after its subject's murder...

...The Robert Kennedy legend flourishes not because of his ideology, whatever it really was, but because of the drama of his quest, which at a desperate moment in our history elevated politics to a theater of discovery and redemption...

...Back at his hotel, he caustically told a young aide that the martyr's death was "not the greatest tragedy in the history of the Republic...

...Jimmy Hoffa...

...Was this what the nation wanted in 1968...

...Jack was the visionary, Bobby the enforcer...

...Probably not...

...Jack was noble, Bobby was tough...

...Daley, the party's top boss, and in the Indiana primary pursued white "backlash voters...

...Schlesinger's summings up are both lyric and incisive: His RFK is a "divided man," in his heart an "incorrigible romantic," in his head "a realistic political leader" for whom "the ethic of responsibility prevailed over the ethic of ultimate ends...

...Once again we see the overlooked "third son" in an insanely competitive family...

...He was a humbled Coriolanus, unashamed to bare his cicatrix, gratefully returning the mob's affection...

...Although marked for assassination, as he and many others assumed, he heedlessly plunged ahead, the one figure in American politics who might conceivably unite the nation's warring factions...

...In the next years RFK would gradually master the uses of pain as he constructed a new political life...

...He probably would have been devious in some ways, and it is not impossible to imagine him abusing the power of his office...

...the pious zealot who worked for Joe McCarthy and bent the law to "get" Jimmy Hoffa...

...Kennedy's "escorts stayed in their cars to avoid the stench...

...But diligence and insiderism don't generate literary strength...

...To the horror of his young staff, he assiduously courted Chicago Mayor Richard .1...

...Kennedy had grown up in New York)—he immersed himself in the complex problems of poverty and saw, ahead of most others, that the solutions were economic, not bureaucratic...

...His finest moment came in a speech he delivered to a black audience in Indianapolis hours after Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder in April 1968...

...Even during offstage moments, Schlesinger enjoyed a courtier's front row seat along with a celebrity intellectual's passport to zones of high privilege...

...The story line is irresistible...

...He would have pushed some ambitious programs, like national health care and a gargantuan jobs bill that might easily have been blocked or badly distorted by lobbyists and lawmakers...

...Still he struggled with his brother's ghost and also with the specter of the sitting President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, whom he loathed as a usurper, unfit for Jack's mantle...

...His clothes no longer fit, especially his brother's old clothes—a blue topcoat, a tuxedo, a leather bomber jacket with the Presidential seal—which he insisted on wearing and which hung on his narrowing frame...

...Today RFK's most faithful heir seems to be Bill Clinton, another master of empathy who has similarly defied the standard calculus of ethnic conflict on the hunch that the electorate could be realigned along the axis of converging economic interests...

...In California, the last primary he entered (and won), he demagogically accused McCarthy, in debate, of threatening to "take ten thousand black people and move them to [lily white] Orange County...

...Those who wonder at the sleight-of-hand that enabled Clinton to "end Welfare as we know it" without losing his strong minority support will find clues in Robert Kennedy's Senate career, marked by odes to "free enterprise' and attempts to bring corporate giants together with ghetto leaders...

...Writers & Writing Tribune of the Underclass By Sam Tanenhaus By now it is clear that the most compelling member of the Kennedy clan was not John, the slain President, but his younger brother, Robert, the slain Presidential aspirant...

...Possibly, the clash of politics, of trying to seek radical solutions in a country that was more conservative than liberal in 1969, would have paralyzed Kennedy or made him more timid in deeds than words...

...They were mistaken...

...To an aide "he appeared to be in physical pain, like a man with a toothache, or on the rack...

...Jack's job was to move forward, Bobby's to cover his back...

...Begun in 1951, when Robert assumed control of Jack's first Senate campaign, it climaxed a decade later, in the "thousand days" of the Kennedy Presidency...

...Kennedy's awkward first phrases—"I can only say that I feel in my heart the same kind of feeling"—led him to a magnificent passage from Aeschylus: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God...

...On television RFK seemed "hysterical, high-pitched, hair blowing in the wind, almost demoniac, frightening," wrote Theodore White at the time...

...So different were they, as men and politicians, that we sometimes forget the extent of their unique collaboration...

...Then again...

...And perhaps they don't matter...

...Some found the newBobby grossly false, the pampered rich boy touring the Mississippi Delta and South African shantytowns in between pool parties and touch football at Hickory Hill, his Virginia estate, and dates with Marilyn Monroe...

...Thus, despite his growing disillusionment with the Vietnam War and despite the pleas of the liberal chorus, Bobby was slow to lead an insurgency against LBJ...

...Some of the suspects, as Bobby well knew, bore a deeper grudge against him than against his brother...

...The young might thrill to his improvisatory "new politics," but others were repelled...

...RFK feared that LBJ, calling on the services of J. Edgar Hoover, would retaliate with nuggets from the secret dossiers on Jack Kennedy, whose bed mates over the years had included Nazi and Soviet Mata Haris, not to mention Mob-connected "party girls...

...Two months later Bobby Kennedy was killed too...

...When Kennedy jumped in, days later, he looked like a spoiler, the "ruthless" Bobby of yesteryear...

...Even as RFK juggled constituencies, however, he met the big questions head on, unlike the donnish McCarthy, who floated above them in the manner of his role model, Adlai Stevenson...

...RFK could be cautious, out of prudence, cunning, or fear...

...This was not mere sorrow, but guilt...

...When Bobby did at last declare his candidacy, LBJ did indeed strike back—with revelations about the candidate himself, who as Attorney General had cooperated with Hoover in wiretapping Martin Luther King Jr...

...Bobby was his brother's Attorney General and most trusted adviser, "the administration's 'Number Oneand-a-Half" He helped avert a nuclear showdown with the Soviets, over the protests of trigger-happy generals, and marshaled the Justice Department's crucial intervention on behalf of black demonstrators in the South...

...Thomas' musings, at once labored and hedged, smack of the editorial page: "We will never know what kind of President Robert Kennedy might have been...

...Sam Tanenhaus, our guest columnist, is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and is writing a biography of William F. Buckley Jr...

...again, cowed by Hoover's secret files...

...On a visit to Latin America, "he rarely missed a barriada," Thomas writes...

...It was a fraternal partnership like no other, the result of careful design...

...So Bobby hung back, watching helplessly as Senator Eugene McCarthy, the paladin of the antiwar movement, buried Johnson's re-election chances in the New Hampshire primary...

...The two brothers had distinct roles to play, defined in large measure by their father," Evan Thomas writes in his new book, Robert Kennedy: His Life (Simon & Schuster, 509 pp., $28.00...

...In his last days, though, he seemed to be inching toward a reassessment of the thinking that had positioned him to the right of Richard M. Nixon in 1960, when he had warned of a nonexistent "missile gap" and accused the Republicans of being soft on Fidel Castro...

...Despite its subtitle, Thomas' book is best read as apolitical chronicle...

...Bobby, who had guided his brother to a razor-thin victory in 1960, well knew he needed the backing of the Democratic machine...

...an example repeated just months ago by Bill Bradley, the latest retailer of well-bred squeamishness trimmed out as idealism...

...The nearest he came to a political vision was his tentative embrace of Daniel Bell's "end of ideology" thesis...

...Schlesinger's reverent attitude may have undermined his objectivity, but it did not weaken his special access to the President in whose Administration he served or blunt his keen firsthand observations (reinforced by the journals he kept...

...It offers fresh material gleaned from interviews, from documents newly released by the Kennedy Library, and from the ever-expanding secondary literature...