The Lasky Lash

Critical judgment is the basis of all good reporting. In Robert F. Kennedy: The Myth and the Man (Trident Press, $6.95), Victor Lasky is simply critical. His singleminded judgment is that ev erything Robert Kennedy ever did was ill-motivated or wrong -- usually both. To back that up, he has compiled 407 pages of quotations and anecdotes, mostly from newspapers, magazines, books and anonymous journalists and politicians. For example, as evidence that Kennedy was not far enough left on an issue, he quotes Ramparts. To bear wit ness that Kennedy was not far enough right, he cites William Buckley's Na tional Review. Was Bobby too hostile to the automobile industry? A Pontiac, Mich., publisher is the judge. Was the Cuban missile crisis a defeat for the Kennedys? Nikita Khrushchev says so. Any source dissatisfied with Kennedy is accepted without evaluation.

Lasky raises valid questions about Kennedy's zealous pursuit of Jimmy Hoffa and his tendency at times to make cavalier statements on Viet Nam that could have been too easily misinterpreted by Hanoi. But these get lost amid endless sniping at Kennedy's wealth, protective friends, staff-written speeches, etc., etc., etc.

Lasky lashed the Kennedys in a 1963 newsbook called JFK: The Man and the Myth. Published shortly before the assassination, it exhibited the same unblinking reliance on unfriendly quotes as RFK. The question arises: Who is Lasky, and why does he seem to spend his life attacking Kennedys in print?

Money to Be Made. Surprisingly, Lasky, 50, turns out to be an amiable, ex-Scripps-Howard correspondent, who describes himself as "a political centrist. I'm a hatchet man with a sense of humor," he laughs, though the humor is nowhere apparent in his book. In the foreword to RFK, Lasky claims to describe his subject "as he actually was," but privately he now admits: "I never really knew him. This was a tentative appraisal from one side. I don't tell the whole story. I'm trying to tell 'the opposite side.' That's why I sided with Hoffa, even though I don't like him."

There is money to be made attacking Kennedys, and Lasky knows it. "Go ahead. Get me," he recently goaded a reporter. "Hostile reviews sell books." Although JFK got mostly bad reviews in 1963, it sold, says Lasky, "about a quarter of a million hardbound copies. At $1.20 a copy, you figure it out."

No More. The inspiration to write that first book, he says, came while he was doing research for a review he was assigned on a 1960 campaign book comparing Kennedy and Nixon. "I was interested in JFK's change from a fairly interesting, noncommitted guy into some great liberal." After JFK was published, friends told Lasky that he was being investigated by a Department of Justice official, an act he blames on Robert Kennedy--and an act that may have been the genesis of RFK. "I can't prove he was personally involved," Lasky admits. "But maybe I was most influenced by the fear that he threw into my wife."

Already, offers are in to write about Jacqueline and Ted, but Lasky refuses to write again about the family. "I've lived with the Kennedys nearly one-fifth of my life. I'm not a vulture. Any more would look like I was persecuting them. Enough is enough."

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