The Enigma of Robert F. Kennedy
WITCOVER, JULES
BOOKS The Enigma of Robert F. Kennedy by JULES WITCOVER The basic facts and froth about the past, present, and expected future of Robert F. Kennedy are so well known by now that anything...
...What honest conviction prompts, political logic confirms...
...Robert Kennedy is the emotional lifeline to the reign of a "new generation of Americans born in this century" that was turned aside so abruptly by the assassination of his brother, President Kennedy...
...But valid accusations are accompanied by overstatements and oversimplifications that give the book a devil-theory tone and paint Kennedy as entirely too one-dimensional...
...Schaap is not an "insider," but that is not necessarily a drawback...
...They would do well in this regard to read the postscript in Kennedy's own book...
...It would be easy, but an oversimplification, to put Kennedy down as an opportunist who has changed masks to fit the new circumstances of his public life...
...4.95...
...In addition, the Robert Kennedy book market is swelled because for all the words written about him, the man remains an enigma...
...In it, he challenges youth to effect change but warns of four dangers: futility ("the belief that there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of world's ills...
...Putnam...
...he is cool and abrupt with his contemporaries but he is warm and engaging with kids...
...Shannon notes that "it is impossible to determine definitely where honest growth ends and alert opportunism begins in this process of change...
...timidity ("few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society") ; comfort ("the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who enjoy the privilege of education...
...evoke word sketches to match a brilliant if adoring array of photographs in his handsome picture book, R.F.K., rehashes the Kennedy legend slickly and probes at the Kennedy enigma from fairly close quarters...
...he effectively portrays the ambivalence toward Kennedy that many outsiders feel...
...381 pp...
...Even the casual reader knows the litany: he is "ruthless" but he is "shy...
...The authors of the first three Robert Kennedy books are more or less in this category, and therefore might be expected to shed new light...
...In the amending and shaping of legislation, therefore, Kennedy usually pushes for the most liberal position, the biggest appropriation, the toughest regulation...
...Kennedy is indeed a subject worth unraveling...
...And it probably did him no great harm in the deep anti-patriotic climate...
...Picture Editor, Michael O'Keefe...
...Sources seldom are given for quotes on "inside" accounts, and no bibliography is provided...
...To Seek A Newer World, by Robert F. Kennedy...
...he was a Congressional inquisitor and now he is a civil libertarian...
...Doubleday, 233 pp...
...De Toledano's peripheral book, a sort of primer for Bobby-haters, is not totally valueless because his recounting of Kennedy's Congressional committee days does bring back graphically memories of the bratty Bobby that have been fogged by his more recent charisma...
...His observations range from fawning to perceptively critical...
...Finally, Ralph de Toledano is a literary kamikaze pilot who sacrifices a lively style in an assault of bitterness and prejudice, spewing pettiness and innuendo as he plunges down, well out of range of his target...
...BOOKS The Enigma of Robert F. Kennedy by JULES WITCOVER The basic facts and froth about the past, present, and expected future of Robert F. Kennedy are so well known by now that anything written about him—positive, negative, or in-between—risks being little more than a variation on the old cliches...
...Rising American and Vietnamese casualties worked on him, Shannon says, but he also "astutely perceived that the Vietnam war would eventually mean political disaster for the Democrats and that the prudent course for a political leader who cared about his future was to get on record early in favor of a negotiated peace...
...At the same time it is understandable...
...He has had to shift gears in full view of an electorate now riveted on him, and if he has been helped immeasurably by the national heartache over his brother's assassination and the yearning to repair somehow a gross national injustice, he is paying a price for it, too, in the endless comparisons of the old private Bobby and the new public one...
...Macmillan, 309 pp...
...He is an astute politician who recognizes that he has no place to go for additional support for the Presidency except to the left . . . Hubert Humphrey's natural constituency...
...Though few thought Kennedy was being either politically astute or prudent when he spoke out in early 1966, later Vietnam developments have made him look much more so...
...New American Library...
...Kennedy certainly cannot be accused in his own career of yielding to futility or to comfort...
...he has the arm's length charisma that makes a crowd surge toward him and the close-up monosyllabism that turns interviewers off...
...He was well into the non-elective governmental life, relatively unconcerned with the need to attract and maintain a personal constituency, when President Kennedy's death thrust him into the arena where being liked can be nearly as important as being right...
...There is also a righteousness that borders on intellectual dishonesty running through the book...
...One chapter based on a peek at life at Hickory Hill, called "A Day with R.F.K.," lends color and a good feel for the man, but little fresh insight...
...It did explain why some one-time Kennedy supporters were begifining to refer to him as Ho Chi Bobby...
...5.95...
...Kennedy's own book, To Seek A Newer World, is an often preachy appeal to the liberal left constituency, but with the accent on youth that has become his trademark...
...He has not committed political suicide in doing so, either...
...All three books about Kennedy appeared before the emergence of Senator Eugene J. McCarthy in the role of the liberal, anti-Johnson white knight—a role McCarthy hastened to note he would not have had to play had Kennedy filled it...
...R.F.K., by Dick Schaap...
...9.95...
...Dick Schaap, striving valiantly to The Heir Apparent: Robert Kennedy and the Struggle for Power, by William V. Shannon...
...But neither, in this critical hour, is he throwing expediency to the winds or exhibiting notable boldness while another man, admittedly with much less to lose, makes the overt challenge Kennedy's words of the last three years have defined...
...Most politicians, leading a public life as they do, come into focus sooner or later, particularly for the serious professionals in the news business who take it upon themselves to practice amateur psychology on the side...
...Lyndon Johnson also was born in this century, but that circumstance, in the legend of The New Frontier Interrupted, makes him no less a usurper...
...Oh, boy...
...Robert Kennedy is a puzzlement at least partly because he is basically a private person forced by circumstance, ambition, and/or a compelling sense of mission to go public...
...None really scores a breakthrough, although William Shannon in The Heir Apparent makes a contribution with a penetrating examination of a major Kennedy soft spot—his failure to provide constructive leadership to the Democratic Party he theoretically heads in the state of New York...
...224 pp...
...His liberal votes not only bolster his position in his own state but also help him carve out a national Democratic constituency...
...Accordingly, the authors of the nineteen Kennedy books to come have fresh material on which to base their own curbstone psychoanalysis of the man...
...It is a commentary on the insatiability of the American public that some twenty-two authors, and their publishers, have committed themselves to produce books about him, the first three of which already have appeared, along with another by Kennedy himself...
...6.95...
...auge critics like de Tole-ictably, see not merely un-jortunism but also rank se-Lennedy's Vietnam position, tor's remark that giving the North Vietnamese in the oldest traditions of mis country," says de Toledano, "endeared him to left-wing students and to those actively seeking to undermine the American war effort...
...As Shannon and Schaap indicate, the post-assassination Robert Kennedy has demonstrated an awareness and sensitivity toward social problems that go well beyond mere opportunism...
...It adopts airs of objectivity and scholarship, yet dips to snide carping and innuendo...
...R.F.K., The Man Who Would Be President, by Ralph de Toledano...
...The theme, so attractive to the new generations—that the old, rigid cold war must be thawed into a more realistic, constructive period of competitive detente—-courses through Kennedy's retelling of his views on Latin America, nuclear control, China, Vietnam, and neglected problems at home...
...Concerning Vietnam, Shannon discerns the same happy juxtaposition of conviction and political benefit in Kennedy's early call for doing business more directly with the National Liberation Front...
...expediency ("those who say that hopes and beliefs must bend before immediate necessities...
Vol. 32 • February 1968 • No. 2
