Second Thoughts on Bobby

Enraged and horrified by the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Philadelphia Inquirer Columnist Joseph McGinniss wrote: "You do not live in a country any more but in a cesspool. It does not happen anywhere the way it happens here. The country does not work any more. All that money and power have produced has been a bunch of people so filled with fear and hate that when a man tries to tell them they must do more for other men, instead of listening they shoot him in the head."

McGinniss' immediate reaction was echoed by much of the rest of the press: many columnists and editorial writers quickly decided that the U.S. was consumed with violence, with sickness. Then, last week, after the first wave of dismay had passed, the press began to have some sober second thoughts. McGinniss' own paper, in fact, took him to task in an editorial for "responding immaturely and emotionally to the overwhelming horror of the moment. We vigorously condemn his blasphemy of America."

No Time for Weeping. Without going as far as the Inquirer, other commentators declared that the McGinniss kind of reaction was indeed overdone. "Some psychologists," wrote New York Times Columnist Tom Wicker, "believe that the 'sick society' idea is a sort of American defense mechanism; these dreadful things having happened, some Americans are anxious to regain their self-regard and the respect of others, and therefore hurry to accept the responsibility for awful events." It may be, agreed David Broder in the Washington Post, that the wave of assassinations heralds a "social breakdown," but it "seems to me a form of escapism to throw up our hands, and, like a chorus of Miniver Cheevy's, 'weep that we were ever born.' " Broder proposed acting instead of weeping. One of the first acts urged by almost all the press was to legislate strong gun-control laws.

Most papers tried to strike a balance, avoiding the we-are-all-guilty approach, but at the same time recognizing that American society as a whole could not be held totally free of responsibility for what had happened. Newsday Columnist Flora Lewis suggested that the violence in American life cannot be separated so easily from American idealism, from the American dream. She quoted the wife of a U.S. diplomat at the U.N.: "America is a place where people really can do something if they pick themselves up and try. It's the beauty and the danger all at once. I saw on TV the women of Dearborn, Mich., the same women who had organized for all sorts of community good works, and now they were on the police shooting range learning how to use pistols." The columnist concluded: "What seems especially American is the depths of the belief that it is easy to right wrongs. And that may be the root of youth's bitterness at finding that wrong abides."

To New York Post Columnist Max Lerner, the assassination indicates that the "irregular violence" of the American past may be giving way to ideological violence. Though the politics of Europe has always been "heavily ideological," says Lerner, U.S. politics has been pragmatic and personal. "That is now changing. There are passionate isms sweeping the ghettos and the university campuses. Unfortunately, the three traumatic killings of the last five years, which should have taught us how bitter is the fruit of the poisoned tree of ideological passions, do not seem to have carried their lesson home."

Here and there in the press, some commentators used the assassination as a weapon in their continuing ideological warfare. On the right, William Loeb, publisher of the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader, said in so many words that Bobby brought it on himself. The Kennedys, he wrote in an editorial, encouraged dissent and disorder. "Class was set against class, group against faction, race against race. Was it not Senator Kennedy who himself assured the rioting, burning Negro mobs that they had every right to 'regard the law as their enemy'?" On the left, the Village Voice's Jack Newfield, a noisy supporter of Kennedy, used the occasion to berate all the people who do not share his apocalyptic, sock-it-to-'em view of politics. Newfield felt "rage," he said, "at men like Archbishop Cooke and Eric Hoffer, who say America should feel no national guilt, because the assassin was a Jordanian nationalist."

Critics' Contrition. Amid all the uproar over the state of the country, a few columnists took a quiet, steady look at Kennedy the man. Two of the most eloquent eulogies were delivered by two of his severest critics. "He was, despite his passions," said Mary McGrory, "a remarkably competent human being. He programmed his pity for the poor. He was fierce. He could be rude. He shared the family conviction that the Kennedys, if not born, had at least been bred to rule. And he attracted the adulation and the rage which his clan, with their splendid, doomed lives, aroused in a nation that had never seen such a compelling collection of human beings, so beautiful, armored, and so vulnerable."

Alluding to his harsh treatment of Bobby in recent months, including a brutal thrust in this month's Esquire, Murray Kempton was contrite. "Our politicians are just too vulnerable to be thought of in the old callous way," he wrote. "We must see them in life as we would in the shock of death when we would be conscious only of the good in them. The language of dismissal becomes horrible once you recognize the shadow of death over every public man. For I had forgotten, from being bitter about a temporary course of his, how much I liked Senator Kennedy and how much he needed to know he was liked. Now that there is in life no road at whose turning we could meet again, the memory of having forgotten will always make me sad and indefinitely make me ashamed."

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