ROBERT F. KENNEDY A Case of Mistaken Identity

...Let me quickly acknowledge that I recognize that the company of his critics includes men of highly estimable motivation as well as such dreary species as the many hired hands of James R. Hoffa and that eternal blunder-boy, Roy Cohn...

...There is widespread agreement among attorneys whose judgments seem wholly disinterested that he served with distinction...

...Yet, in retrospect it has a quality of prescience...

...If that were not the case, this exercise would hardly seem worth the effort...

...He does not now derogate other forms of protest, but he clings to the stand that emancipation lies at the polls...

...in one of his final moves before resigning, he set up an Office of Criminal Justice whose primary concern was to be the protection of the poor and the weak caught in the web of our legal machinery...

...He was entirely firm in his private insistence that he would not come into New York as the candidate of Charles Buckley, Peter Crotty, or any other old-line machine-man who proposed to pit him against a liberal opponent in a struggle for the nomination...

...He is the only Attorney General who ever stood "eyeball to eyeball" with the FBI's director on a great civil liberties issue...

...It is hardly my contention that his record is beyond reproach...

...The answer, for better or for worse, is that he believed other goals had to be achieved first, that the vbting bill would have to be the crucial business of the second term, and that significant advances could meanwhile be achieved by administrative measures...

...The attitude of The Times toward Kennedy's advent was nevertheless symptomatic of a more general resistance in many liberal sectors of what is awkwardly called the liberal intelligentsia...

...In a number of instances the cries of outrage could be unhappily traced to some measure of private malice or vested interest...

...He did so despite all the long-range calculations of the political prophets about an ultimate Kennedy-Humphrey rivalry for the Presidency...

...It was Baron who feared for his life despite the protective umbrella of the Justice Department, and there was never a moment when Hoffa lacked adequate resources for defense of his indefensible and ruthless despotism...

...How much they did learn is not reflected in the story of the Scales case alone...

...he earnestly believes—and history may vindicate his belief—that the enfranchisement of the Negro will be the memorable episode of our time . . ." At the time there were some who viewed his preoccupation with the voting issue as almost diversionary...

...it was Harry Truman who sagely remarked, when certain moves were under way to block his nomination in 1948, that "no s.o.b...

...it is also characteristic of a certain will to believe the worst about him...

...The concluding installment of this article will appear in the July issue...

...What impels me to explore the matter at some length is not only my sense that he has been unjustly caricatured —by such dubious political scholars as Gore Vidal—as my poignant recollection that John F. Kennedy was once no less foolishly underestimated, and even maligned, by numerous commentators (including myself) who were later to experience a shattering emotion of loss at his death...

...There were political hacks around Mayor Robert Wagner who viewed Kennedy's entry into the state as a threat to their established empire...

...During his career as Attorney General, I found myself with a deep personal involvement in another issue that sharply touched his office...

...But even if the accusations were to be sustained, it would hardly be the whole story of Kennedy's life, and one would at least hope that those who applied such fastidious standards to his conduct in this case will be equally vigilant in exposing prosecutors in all places...

...Nevertheless, he is still portrayed by certain purist liberals as a suspicious character and he is, one might say, damned when he does and damned when he doesn't...

...On Christmas Day, 1962, Junius Scales—with four and one-half years of his sentence still to face—was on his way home to his family...

...is the Meredith case already forgotten...

...npHE dinner gathering was one of liberals of many seasons and the gray-haired man across the table was saying to me: "Why don't you admit it...

...He argues earnestly that this is the key to the future and that the 'big breakthrough' is near...

...It happens that I have valued Hubert Humphrey's friendship since 1947, when we first met, and his accession to the Vice-Presidency was one of the brighter days in my life...

...He has spoken with greater, if understated, feeling about the gap between the haves and have-nots in the world and in the nation that is the heart of the modern ordeal...

...Kennedy has contended that the well-subsidized Hoffa defense in fact had "mounted a massive attack on the jury system" and there is an abundance of material to warrant that assertion...

...that he was singularly immune (no doubt in part because of his connection with the President) to crass political pressures...

...Wechsler is editor of the editorial page of The New York Post...

...I first met Robert F. Kennedy in the months soon after he had become Attorney General...

...Yet two or three months ago he was being branded a precocious, presumptuous Massachusetts alien who was trying to impose his ruthless rule on the Democrats of New York...

...J would suggest that the standards of prosecution conduct seem to have been applied with special fastidiousness by some barristers who begin with the premise that Robert Kennedy is public enemy number one...

...President Kennedy told inquirers that he would follow the recommendation of the Attorney General...

...It is valid to say that neither John nor Robert Kennedy grew up in a political atmosphere in which the traditional civil liberties movement had any real meaning for them...

...Indeed, at the time when his name was being put forward for the Vice-Presidency prior to the 1964 convention, his identification with the civil rights cause was most frequently advanced as the basis for excluding him from consideration...

...Perhaps in this area more than any other, they learned most from exposure to men like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Kenneth Galbraith, and others of the Massachusetts intellectual fraternity to whom they increasingly turned for counsel...

...it is even my guess that his estrangement from the outfit was the result of an intuitive sense of smell about Cohn rather than a large, sudden political awakening...

...To refresh the reader's recollection, let me merely emphasize that there was no serious doubt about the authenticity of Scales' defection from Communist affiliation...

...Of more modern relevance is the charge by some civil libertarians that Kennedy's zeal in the pursuit of James Hoffa led him beyond the boundary-line of fair procedure...

...The case was extensively explored in the pages of The Progressive at the time...

...Kennedy, in his shirt-sleeves, with his door wide open, was a curious blend of confidence and reserve...

...Among his books are The Age of Suspicion and Reflections of an Angry Middle-aged Editor.—The Editors...

...it must be confessed that I instinctively liked him, but possibly that was because I was already suffering from misgivings about some deprecatory words I had written about his Presidential brother during the pre-campaign interval...

...During the course of the three years in which he served, in effect, as chief deputy to his brother, my contacts with him were few and fragmentary...

...It can be said with equal certitude that Kennedy would not have agreed to run without the assent of the Liberal Party's leadership...

...These matters of record—both in terms of his Washington service and his New York move—are set down at some length because they render so elusive the meaning of the attack leveled at him by some of the liberal skeptics to whom he remains the Peck's Bad Boy of progressive politics...

...One attorney for whom I have high regard maintains that it is far from a clear-cut intrusion of legal privacy if the Justice Department, with advance warning of jury-tampering, used a "plant" to obtain evidence of conspiracy by Hoffa's barristers...

...With regard to the latter point, it is my personal knowledge that Kennedy held back his decision until he had reason to believe that Stevenson had rejected the overtures...

...if there is fault to be found, it is in his failure to press that issue in the civil rights program initially presented by President Kennedy...

...It must simply be said "authoritatively," in the political writer's word, that Kennedy would not have sought the Senate nomination if Stevenson had responded to the pleas for his own entry into the contest...

...But never in the long years of political inquisition has an Attorney General resisted the counsel of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (bulwarked by Senator Eastland) in such cases and cooled the FBI's hot line to the White House...

...That Robert Kennedy fought hard in this case is beyond question...

...I do not contend this was the rationale for President Johnson's decision...

...Unquestionably he has tried to remain aloof from them and to concentrate on the business of service in the Senate...

...In a column written after that session, I reported: "When the subject turns to civil rights, Robert Kennedy swiftly reverts to his favorite theme...

...What has been said so far deals largely with what seems to me the intellectual inconsistencies and petulance of the criticism to which Robert Kennedy is still being subjected in our liberal salons...

...Moreover, I am favorably disposed toward shy men who are frequently misunderstood because they too often assume the mask of arbitrariness, and from the first moment I had no doubt that Robert Kennedy suffered from this affliction...

...He reaffirms his belief that the great issue is to obtain voting rights for Negroes...

...This sequence of comment obliged me to remark that it would apparently never be said of Robert Kennedy that he got his jobs through The New York Times...

...Surely the ruthless accident of history that occurred in Dallas in 1963 should make all men pause before they project with any precision the nature of the choices the Democratic convention may face in 1972...

...That he worked for the McCarthy Committee in 1953 is beyond challenge...

...It is, of course, conceivable that the moment may come when there is a confrontation between Humphrey and Kennedy, but this is scarcely an immediate prospect...

...Four years later, when Kennedy's New York Senate bid began, the same newspaper acknowledged that he had been an eminent Attorney General but angrily questioned his presumptuousness in seeking to displace Republican Senator Kenneth Keating...

...Robert Kennedy has a genuine obsession with the political process...

...The fact that Robert Kennedy's work for that squalid squad was only peripherally concerned with individual inquisition is small mitigation...

...That being the year in which I was subjected to some harassment by that Committee, ostensibly because of my political heresies of the 1930's and more probably because of my irreverence for Roy Cohn, I can hardly be accused of bias in favor of any alumnus of that group...

...The dinner colloquy, however, perhaps offers a point of departure for some remarks on what I have increasingly come to view as the fierce anti-Robert Kennedy obsession afflicting some areas of American liberalism...

...Whether his counterattack involved ignoble methods is still a litigious point...

...At the time of the fateful Cuban confrontation, he was one of those who spoke out bluntly against a massive assault that would have been, as he put it at the time, an American-engineered "Pearl Harbor...

...It is difficult to understand why no comparable reprieve can be granted his brother—especially in the light of his record in the Justice Department...

...This is not to say that I view them as identical political twins, which they clearly were not...

...He has been deeply aware for a long time of the essentially political nature of the cold war, and of the fallacy of blind faith in military muscle...

...In view of the judgment of Hoffa rendered by his peers in the AFL-CIO, I trust it is superfluous to dispute the view that Kennedy's crusade against him reflected an anti-union bias...

...sitting at this desk can be stopped by any convention...

...He sponsored the Criminal Justice Act designed to create Federal guarantees of legal defense for the poor...

...I think it can only be observed that Kennedy not only reconciled himself to the decision...

...As stated at the outset, these lines are intended not as apologia for all his words and deeds but as an answer to some of the least plausible assaults...

...he took pains to let it be known to the White House, after he had been pointedly and publicly eliminated by an adroit Johnsonian maneuver that also buried Adlai Stevenson and others of top rank, that he warmly endorsed the choice of Humphrey...

...With respect to Kennedy's tenure as Attorney General, a few other things need to be said...

...I dissented from the analysis and, because I had supported Kennedy's successful bid for the Senate, my challenger could hardly have expected me to respond affirmatively...

...The only reason Bobby Kennedy came into New York was to take the Presidency away from Hubert Humphrey...

...So did many legal scholars...

...He's a power-hungry young man without principles...

...Those who recall the exchange between Sidney Lens and Sam Baron in this magazine in 1963 will recognize that the issues in the Kennedy-Hoffa struggle cannot be neatly portrayed as a struggle between government tyranny and labor martyrdom...

...that he brought able, dedicated personnel into the Department of Justice...

...With a certain pride he takes you to a rear office where a map on the wall pinpoints the places where the Justice Department has already initiated prosecutions in voting cases...

...Robert Kennedy's association with Murrow was close—at times almost reverential—and a significant sequel to his early and lamentable employment by the McCarthy Committee...

...What is more relevant for the record of history is that, in that interview in which my concern was to obtain some portrait of his stance and direction on the developing civil rights crisis, he placed heaviest emphasis on the problem of securing voting rights for Negroes...

...It was the case of Junius Scales, a Southern-bred, former Communist functionary who had been sentenced to six years in prison under the Smith Act...

...This phase of his life can perhaps best be summarized by a review of the editorial columns of The New York Times...

...The death of Edward R. Mur-row is a poignant reminder that it was the Kennedy Administration which installed this celebrated and early prophet of anti-McCarthyism as head of the United States Information Agency...

...But John F. Kennedy never manifested any premature anti-McCarthyism and most of us learned to forgive him that lapse...

...Murrow, in turn, promptly brought Reed Harris, one of McCarthy's earliest victims, out of exile...

...rather it is that he has exhibited a remarkable capacity for learning and growth which has somehow remained invisible to those liberals who have distorted him into some form of major menace, despite their inability to find any serious current substantive grounds of dispute...

...Since my revered father-in-law, Osmond Fraenkel, is the author of an American Civil Liberties Union brief critical of one phase of these proceedings (the use of evidence on jury-tampering obtained by an informer who infiltrated the defense), I am in no way disposed to discuss the subject lightly...

...As one who was in close contact with Baron in the period after his own break with Hoffa, I must also offer the personal testimony that these were difficult, dangerous times, and that I find it hard to view Hoffa as a wronged underdog...

...It was one of the ironies of our politics that Humphrey, so long the major target of Southern attack, was deemed less obnoxious to the South than Kennedy...

...all other blessings will flow once that mission is accomplished...

...In Washington it has long been unhappily agreed that there is little "political mileage" in matters of civil liberties...

...the real problem was his tenacious refusal to "name names" of those with whom he had been associated in North Carolina's Communist operations...

...whether the nature of the fight he waged violated basic civil liberties ground rules remains to be decided by the courts...

...At the time he was appointed by John F. Kennedy to the office of Attorney General, The Times lamented this seemingly naked nepotism and heatedly questioned Robert Kennedy's credentials for the position...

...As heretofore indicated, he invited the political damnation of the South by his resolute conduct in the battle of Mississippi...

...At least a limited association with him over the period of the last five years, however, persuades me that he is, to an important degree, a victim of mistaken identity...

...There were also some devoted admirers of Adlai Stevenson who had hoped (as I did) that Stevenson would accept the Senate nomination and liberate himself from the inhibitions of diplomatic office...

...I do not lightly discount them...

...Certainly I do not regard Robert Kennedy as beyond the range of criticism, or deem his works as graced with infallibility...

...The notion that he "stole" the nomination from Stevenson is an absurdity...

...he vigorously pressed bail reforms...

...Perhaps the sentimental footnote may be added that, in New York's Senate campaign of 1964, in which Robert Kennedy's association with the McCarthy Committee more than a decade earlier was being widely exploited by his liberal critics, the high-school age daughter of Junius Scales was militantly campaigning for him...

...Against that background I find no difficulty in rejecting the notion that Kennedy's advent in New York politics compels those of us who have journeyed this far with Humphrey to choose up sides, and to view Kennedy as the impudent usurper...

...Only a few days before these lines were written, The New York World Telegram and Sun reported that he was being widely criticized in Democratic ranks for failing to play a decisive role in the grotesque political squabbles of New York's Democratic Party...

...that he was both activist and innovator with respect to such neglected frontiers as the crusade for adequate defense for indigent defendants...

...It has been asserted that, even in recent years, Kennedy has manifested a reluctance to belabor McCarthy's memory...

...To one who had last visited that office when it was occupied by a distinguished patrician named Francis Biddle, the encounter was somewhat startling...

...at times I editorially badgered him for more aggressive Federal intervention in civil rights cases (even while he was becoming the whipping-boy of the Southern segregationists) and on several occasions Ed Guthman, his conscientious, dedicated press aide, a fighting liberal who had won a Pulitzer prize exposing a spurious "loyalty" witch-hunt in Seattle, would say to me almost tearfully: "We just aren't running a Federal police force...

...Another criticism frequently leveled against Robert Kennedy by liberals is that he labored in the service of the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy...

...The movement for a Christmas amnesty for Scales won widespread support—from distinguished conservatives like Grenville Clark and spirited liberal anti-Communists like Norman Thomas and David Dubinsky...

...it is to say that I believe there are some common origins—one is almost obliged to say prejudices—involved in the treatment of both men by some liberal voices at somewhat comparable stages in their careers...

...Looking backward, it seems hard to dispute the totality and courage of Kennedy's role in the civil rights struggle, most notably in the explosive battles of Mississippi...

...It would require a separate essay to evaluate the details of these allegations...

...that is a separate part of the story, relating far more to personal chemistry than political assessment...

...One local labor attorney whose name adorned the anti-Kennedy lists had been chastised by Kennedy a few years earlier for placing his allegiance to a corrupt union leadership over his fidelity to the interests of the union membership...

...It is my assumption that if Humphrey were to succeed to the Presidency during the Johnson regime, his continuance in office would be assured...

...I think it is fair to observe that such retroactive rebuke to a man dead for more than eight years would scarcely require large political valor at this juncture, and would no doubt be condemned by the anti-Kennedy set as a tasteless, self-serving act...

...It was —as it has been for many years—the basic doctrine of the FBI, the Eastland Committee, and the House Un-American Activities Committee that the only true proof of redemption was a willingness to engage in such disclosure...

...He laments what he feels has been time lost in this crucial realm because of diversionary activity...