An Irresistible General, An Immovable justice

...But we also have a case of actions that reinforced Justice conservatism...

...Navasky’s own accounts of the most significant issues of that period unintentionally confirm the innate conservatism in almost every way...

...The FBI eventually did enter into the Mafia campaign, after they were faced with the prospect of new crime-fighting functionaries...

...Their enemy was the Justice Department bureaucracy...

...In fact, 18 of these firms were already actual defendants in existing antitrust or FTC cases...

...Yet not only were few of the changes in southern race relations attributable to their efforts...

...It is in this that Kennedy Justice serves us poorly, so poorly that the reader must instruct himself...

...the unintended impression conveyed by Navasky is that Kennedy efforts in civil rights were on net counterproductive...

...However, as Navasky reports it, most of the pharmaceutical houses contributing the millions of dollars in medical supplies got tremendous tax advantages from their contributions, and almost every one of the 60 contributing firms was under investigation by the Antitrust Divison of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission...

...For example, their bringing Martin Luther King into the inner councils of decision-making only tended to reduce King’s freedom of action and to squelch his poetic appeals to southern blacks to set aside their fears and demand their dignity...

...That is, he carefully weighs all the facts and presents a responsible balance sheet...

...This is why Senator Kennedy will be a much more important and memorable figure than General Kennedy...

...This has to be why such an exhaustively researched and wellbalanced book could be so frustrating, and why such a sober treatment could be so unsettling...

...The second way to get him to eat burning mustard is to spread it on his hide and make him so uncomfortable that he has to lick it off...

...But what is more impressive is the part of this story not put explicitly into the balance, which is that Kennedy finally did confront and beat the FBI in the battle to establish the existence of the Mafia, but that the price he paid was the actual enlargement of the power and independence of the FBI...

...Senator Kennedy found this out...

...The Kennedy people brought politics to Justice and assumed that politics meant bargaining when bargaining only weakened their legal position and strengthened the legalisms of the bureaucrats...

...In flanking the FBI they had confirmed the FBI...

...They made elaborate assumptions about the honor and dependability of state governors and other local and state officials, and they even developed a doctrine supporting negotiation with these people despite the fact that almost all of the legal authority was on the civil rights side...

...Here we have another testimonial to their dedication, their cunning, their energy, and resourcefulness, their brilliance, their utter nobility...

...Another example of the counterproductive tendencies of the Kennedy civil rights approach is probably more fundamental in the long run than his cooperation with the FBI in wiretapping...

...This is certainly a clear case where Kennedy and his top people were sincerely dedicated to change...

...The Limits of Charisma Out of all this, in a very long book, Robert F. Kennedy emerges as something of an epic character...

...But unfortunately, the Kennedy people apparently defined civil rights as a problem of dealing with “society’s victims” rather than “society’s enemies,” because they proceeded with extraordinary caution and respect for legal procedures...

...They are contradictions inherent in the subject, the book, and the hero...

...Where Justice is concerned it seems compellingly clear that at a minimum Kennedy should have established a new agency to deal with all questions concerning the 14th Amendment and “state’s wrongs...

...In a complex society, substantial innovation is unlikely under any circumstances...

...and the question remains, how do we teach an old dog, a wise old dog, new tricks...

...This is not a quibble over questions of petty corruption...

...In the second instance, it is reactionary because it is designed to react to external events, not to initiate, or to initiate in specific “cases or controversies” only as the internally defined status quo requires...

...One is supposed to bargain when legal positions and economic resources are close to equal on both sides...

...The present situation, in which legality means full faith and credit in state and local law and law enforcement authorities, can never be one in which the system can deal with official wrongdoing...

...There were higher laws to which Justice should and would have been beholden if Kennedy had chosen, as he did in reapportionment, to fight law with law, legality with legality...

...In such a context it is important to report at the outset how well the hero comes off...

...But that method will probably fail...

...it can never be and probably should never be anything else...

...Here, truly, is an ancient sense of honor, family loyalty, nobility, a feeling for the bigger picture rather than program commitment or legal obligation-and that, indeed, is an important insight into the Kennedy character...

...Robert Kennedy looks good in Kennedy Justice, surprisingly good considering that the author is a Yale Law School product who knows firsthand the Yale tradition that Kennedy recruited for Justice, who was alienated from that tradition, and who has been notably effective at Theodore Lowi is author of the recently published The Politics of Disorder...

...Navasky skillfully uses the Hoffa story as a Kennedy character sketch, and through this sketch we can begin to understand Kennedy jurisprudence, Kennedy government, Kennedy public philosophy, which is as threatening as it is simple...

...This was his acceptance of the intimate association between the FBI and the state and local officials...

...poking holes in it...

...The first method is to try and convince him it tastes good...

...In the eyes of entrenched bureaucrats, political executives, even from Camelot, are birds of passage, and birds of passage pass without leaving too much of a depository, even when they have magnificent plumage...

...And this may be the most unsettling part of all, that charisma, commitment, and the demand for excellence are simply not enough.The times had moved the requirements of justice far away from the requirements of Justice, and all the Kennedy horses and men...

...What better reinforcement of the FBI could there be than to concede to them the claim that they have the right to invade privacy at their own discretion and that they can use the results not in court but to blackmail the Attorney General of the United States...

...In civil rights, that was not the case, and Justice bargaining on clear points of law only served to weaken the legal position of the government and the moral position of the Movement...

...The FBI eventually did enter the southern civil rights fight more vigorously, after the Movement had made change normal and HEW and other agencies had made the process of integration almost a part of the status quo...

...Two passages epitomize book and hero...

...This is an extraordinary finding...

...you can prod him and scold him...

...In any investigation, whether a fishing expedition or an inquiry into a specific case, the FBI makes it a point to cooperate fully with state and local law enforcement authorities...

...Rather than confront the FBI with the problem, or to create a new agency to deal with official wrongdoing, the Kennedy people chose to carry out these investigations themselves on an ad hoc basis, sometimes using people in the Criminal Division, sometimes drawing on Tax, and so on...

...It is frightening to see how completely the Justice bureaucrats could thwart duly elected authority, and more so to learn how Kennedy confirmed and reinforced Justice conservatism even when he was trying buck it...

...For another example, take the far less important issue of raising the ransom to free the hostages taken by Cuba during the Bay of Pigs debacle...

...You can speak of its appetizing qualities, you can associate it with things the dog already likes...

...Moreover, Navasky became convinced after a careful examination of the records that Kennedy personally authorized the controversial King telephone tap on the mistaken notion that this would operate as a kind of “electronic insurance policy” to protect King and the Movement from the release of damaging hearsay on King’s association with communists...

...To use another analogy, Kennedy Justice is to Justice what a highly instructive essay on jazz would have been to a musician in the 1920s who had gone stone deaf in 1875...

...It is a wise and vigorous politician who plays on the weaknesses of others, but a stupid one not to realize who is exploiting whom...

...He was co-author with Robert Kennedy of The Pursuit of Justice...

...The Cuba caper was almost a guarantee against serious disruption of the business status quo for many years to come...

...The real changes in the use and abuse of local government power against blacks came from the Movement and, ironically, from Congress, through new legislation that sought change outside Justice...

...It ties together the Hoffa case with the Kennedy of the McCarthy committee, the Kennedy who could authorize a Martin Luther King phone tap, the Kennedy who could vigorously pursue civil rights, the Kennedy who could back away from the FBI, and the Kennedy who could prosecute family friends and relations without fear or favor...

...First, “The Kennedy system constituted a rare capability...

...It meant that the Kennedy presence uplifted the civic character of the bureaucrats...

...If there is to be a social order there has to be some institutionalized defense of institutions...

...During the Kennedy years, Congress and the courts armed Justice with a tremendous amount and variety of legal authority in the civil rights field...

...But as with Lee, Robert Kennedy the Attorney General will have more to teach us in failure than in success...

...In the first instance, it is reactionary because it is officially committed to the defense of the social order, as bureaucratically defined...

...In all these matters and still others, especially the chapters dealing with the southern governors and with the reapportionment cases, Navasky makes a good accounting...

...An Irresistible General, An Immovable Justice a review by Theodore J. Lowi Kennedy Justice by Victor S. Navasky...

...In this book, Victor Navasky also poked lots of holes, but through those holes he looked, and he found a leader far more formidable, far more capable of growth, and far more sincerely committed to the public good than the person, the author, or almost anyone else could have expected...

...We can learn from this experience something the Kennedy people did not learn and that Kennedy Justice did not explicitly teach, which is that the only way to fight legality is with higher legality, not with sentiments, not with heroics, not with skillful negotiation...

...The prosecution/ persecution of Jimmy Hoffa is a study in the abuse of the vast discretionary powers of the prosecuting attorney, and it is an ideal study of this particular wielder of the powers...

...it is most unlikely he will come to eat the stuff because he likes it...

...Probably the best case is his account of Kennedy’s campaign against organized crime, which reveals as much about Justice as the Hoffa case reveals about Kennedy...

...No one seems to have questioned their sincerity, and they were not lacking in resources, effort, intellect, or cunning...

...The best we can hope to do is to hold Justice, especially the FBI, to its own pretentions and to prosecute Justice’s officials vigorously for their own violations of law...

...They met the enemy and they were had...

...Nevertheless, Navasky’s answer is that, “ironically, [a review of significant actions taken as Attorney General] misses Kennedy’s most lasting and least conventional contribution: his impact on those with whom he worked and, through them, on the humdrum routine of the Justice Department itself...

...It is a case of actions taken for the achievement of a particular result that unintentionally produced far more fundamental results...

...but if there is any chance of innovation at all, it will come from outside Justice, and it will have to be imposed on Justice...

...It is quite clear that the ransom would never have been raised without the Kennedy commitment and the backing of Kennedy Justice...

...they had unintentionally abandoned the gut issue of institutionalized bias...

...The facts may balance, but they don’t cumulate, and I think I finally figured out why: the author used Justice to understand Kennedy when he should have been trying to use Kennedy to understand Justice...

...That question makes one wonder what the author meant earlier by helping to “transform the bureaucracy...

...Parkinson’s Justice Without intending to, Navasky has established beyond one’s most pessimistic expectations the fact that the Department of Justice is reactionary in a world of change...

...For society’s enemies, justice apparently means taking men of excellence and having them decide the question of probable guilt...

...As with so many men of family and nobility, Robert Kennedy approached the polity with goodwill and the attitude, “What’s a constitution among friends...

...This record of counterproductiveness in civil rights is not worse than that of other Attorneys General...

...why did Kennedy Justice, in so many ways, fail to transcend the conventional...

...Innovation does not seem possible through established bureaucracies...

...But it is also one of the most frustrating...

...It was only after all this selfinstruction that I could begin to understand and appreciate Navasky when he concluded that Kennedy’s rare capacity served conventional values, went largely unrealized, and yet “its mere existence helped transform the bureaucracy...

...But it is a total absurdity in all those civil rights cases in which law enforcement authorities themselves are being charged with malfeasance, misfeasance, brutality, and murder...

...This distinction between society’s enemies and society’s victims is the principle underlying the contradictions in Kennedy Justice and of Kennedy justice...

...Nevertheless, there is a gnawing frustration in all of this responsible reporting, and it took a long time to figure out what the frustration arises out of...

...In his zeal he manfully and unprecedentedly confronted the FBI, and, as we learn in the Navasky balance sheet, General Kennedy threw away his chance to transform the FBI only because he feared a confrontation with Hoover might undermine the larger goals of his brother’s Administration...

...To Kennedy, reports the author, “there are two kinds of justice...

...But if the analysis stands the test of time, I think Robert F. Kennedy will turn out to be another Robert E. Lee, whose memory improved as it mellowed, and whose character traits were used in civic instruction totally aside from the cause he fought or the results he achieved...

...The second passage is Navasky’s final question coupled with his own answer: “. . . given the rare combination of charisma and capability...

...Judged against earlier performances, the Kennedy record is clearly superior...

...Little wonder Black Power emerged with hostility toward conventional politics...

...In an era overflowing with critical works intending to improve the race through shock, Kennedy Justice is a sober, factual, sympathetic treatment...

...Kennedy did not fail to confront the FBI...

...But the most surprising part is that neither the hero nor the author seemed to be fully aware of what was happening to them...

...That the values it served were unspectacular, that this capability often went unrealized, does not detract from the astonishing fact that its mere existence helped transform the bureaucracy...

...He lost to the FBI in all matters that involved its integrity or the larger bureaucratic integrity of Justice...

...A final instruction to be drawn from the interstices of the book is that if innovation by government is ever possible it will ordinarily require a new bureaucracy...

...The Kennedy corps recognized this and decided to do nothing about it...

...That’s the only sure way to teach a wise old dog new tricks...

...Another example of sincere effort producing contrary results may have been more directly demoralizing to the Movement, even though in the long run it may prove to be less fundamental than the other examples...

...But if that is the case, then it is either foolish or insincere to take over that particular department as the instrument for determining the course of change...

...If the verdict is guilty in their considered judgment, they would then be expected to proceed for results without too much regard for forms and legal procedures...

...But judged against the high standards set by New Frontier rhetoric and extended in and by Kennedy Justice, the record of Kennedy Justice is a dismal flop...

...Navasky impatiently called much of Justice’s backtalk and logic-chopping “Bureauthink” or “FBI-ese,” but it was merely legality taken to its bureaucratic extreme...

...These are contradictions, not of logic but of purpose and design...

...But what is all that if the cause is not just (Hoffa) or if the goals were not achieved (civil rights...

...These examples are tragic because they are the unanticipated and undesired results of men who were zealous and sincere about their responsibilities to bring about social change...

...In a kidnapping, gambling, or white slavery case this may be an indispensable relationship...

...The first instruction is that Justice is a legal office...

...Electronic Insurance Far and away the most important account in the entire book, and at the same time the one that most clearly confirms the capture of General Kennedy by the conservatism of Justice, is Navasky’s story of Kennedy-FBI relations concerning the southern civil rights movement...

...The issue is not how to turn the FBI around...

...The third instruction is related in turn to the second: real innovation in a Department dedicated to maintaining the status quo requires the creation of a new status quo, to which that Department will ultimately dedicate itself...

...In an era abundant with nonfiction books on American politics, Kennedy Justice ranks among the best...

...one for society’s enemies, another for its victims.’’ Justice for society’s victims means a justice of strict legality, respect for established forms, and at the same time sympathy for the needs of the downtrodden...

...It is no place for policy innovation, no instrument for vast social change...

...When you get right down to it, we may not want it any other way...

...Navasky goes on then to review those personal Kennedy characteristics that contributed to his unexpected impact on the members of the Justice Department...

...New personnel, good intentions, and great excellence will not change that...

...Civic uplift is indeed better than nothing, but the old dog still lies there wise and immobile...

...It’s as though Navasky the accountant drew up a balance sheet for the wrong company, or maybe for one unit in a large conglomerate...

...This leads to a second instruction, which is that in legal office, legality is supreme...

...Yet it may be the most frightening, precisely because it does not intend to be...

...Without any question, the issue of the Mafia-virtually getting its existence established as the opening to a campaign against organized crime-was more important than any other to General Kennedy...

...Robert Kennedy’s only great failing seems to have been Jimmy Hoffa, and this was at least an epic failing born of epic flaws and epic commitments to the public good...

...According to an old folktale, there are two ways to get a dog to eat hot mustard...