Irish Heart, Greek Conscience

By Gerald Clarke, LANCE MORROW

AMERICAN JOURNEY: The Times of Robert Kennedy. Interviews by Jean Stein. Edited by George Plimpton. 372 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $8.95.

In a literary sense, Bobby was the most interesting of the Kennedy brothers. Detached and cool, Jack and Teddy often seemed like dutiful Romans. Not Bobby. Passionate, intense and contradictory, he had an Irish heart and a Greek conscience.

Until the right biographer--or dramatist--appears to re-create the tragic drama of his life and death, American Journey may suffice. An artful distillation of 347 taped interviews with friends, acquaintances and others connected in various ways with Bobby, it was compiled by Jean Stein and edited by a family friend, George Plimpton.

All the Phases. The unifying thread of the book is the funeral at Manhattan's St. Patrick's, and the interminable train ride from New York to Washington, where Robert Kennedy was buried. "His life, in a way, was all aboard that funeral train," observes Artist William Walton. "All the phases: the people he had known, from school friends, family friends, college friends, his early political friends and associates, and nonfriends . . . people who had gotten woven into his life."

Going beyond the train itself, the book includes interviews with the extraordinary range of people Kennedy knew, from Art Buchwald and Cesar Chavez to Tom Hayden and Alice Roosevelt Longworth. It is hard to think of any other politician whose acquaintanceships covered the entire spectrum of American life and thought. "Bobby was a man who knew how to use other men," says Author Theodore White. "He had impeccable taste in men. There are certain guys who've got good taste in women; others have got good taste in men ... I wouldn't characterize Bobby as an intellectual, I'd characterize him as something more important: the guy who can use intellectuals." He did not always understand them, but he never stopped listening.

Hare Krishna. As the train (and the book) proceeds, Bobby's intellectuals and the scores of people who knew him recall their encounters with him--sometimes momentous, sometimes amusing. It is hard to imagine many Senators, for example, receiving "Hare Krishnas" from Allen Ginsberg. Kennedy did just that. "I pulled out a little harmonium and sang through two choruses," Ginsberg recalls. "He stayed to listen. The 'Hare Krishna' mantra was more important than the whole conversation. So he stood there, and I sang for a minute and then quit." Kennedy was less patient with Poet Robert Lowell's insistent recitation of The Education of Henry Adams--and finally retreated to the toilet. Lowell indignantly recalled the Sun King's lamentable habit of giving audiences from a toilet throne. "If you were Louis XIV, you wouldn't mind," Lowell shouted through the closed door.

With Bobby, the famous Kennedy struggle for first place was sometimes touching. Sensing a lapse in his early education--unlike Jack he had never been bookish--he was rarely without a book in his later years, as if he were required to pass his own course in self-improvement. He would borrow Jackie's Plutarch, a gift from Lowell, peruse the biographies Lowell had marked for her to read--and then himself mark some for her. "Bobby," says the poet, "was very conscious of the nobility and danger of pride and fate," one of Plutarch's overriding concerns.

After Bobby had finished a huge anthology of Western literature, someone asked what he had got out of it. As always, his answer was unpredictable: "I liked the poet . . . the delicate Parisian one, Gerard de Nerval. He walked his lobster on a leash. People in the street said: 'What's your lobster doing out here on a leash?' Nerval said: 'He doesn't bark and he knows the secrets of the deep.'" Bobby's special affinity, however, was for the Greek poets and dramatists, particularly Aeschylus, the father of tragedy.

The most enlightening interviews are with those people who, like Lowell, could never be considered Kennedy camp followers. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, for instance, thinks that the real difference between Jack and Bobby would have become obvious only with the years. "I see Jack in older years as the nice little rosy-faced Irishman with the clay pipe in his mouth, a rather nice broth of a boy. Not Bobby. Bobby could have been a revolutionary priest." Radical Tom Hayden explains--and explains away --Kennedy's admiration for Che Guevara: "Bobby Kennedy was attracted to strong human beings and unorthodox people, and he had a romantic feeling toward guerrillas and people who struggle; but he was a very shrewd politician, and careful to repress those romantic instincts."

The book is not totally uncritical of Kennedy, but it lacks, nonetheless, the sharp tongue and unforgiving eye of a Gore Vidal or a Eugene McCarthy, both of whom disliked Kennedy intensely. Some, but not all the warts are there. One suspects, oddly enough, that Bobby might look even better with all his blemishes. Still, the portrait is vivid, and the Kennedy who emerges is likely to be a new man to many who thought they knew him. For nearly five years he was a standard by which other American politicians were judged. American Journey illustrates how much he is missed. Gerald Clarke

"R.F.K. MUST DIE!" A HISTORY OF THE ROBERT KENNEDY ASSASSINATION AND ITS AFTERMATH by Robert Blair Kaiser. 634 pages. Dutton. $9.95.

Just why Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy may never be fully explained. But few have tried harder to solve the mystery than Journalist Robert Blair Kaiser. With an enterprise perhaps slightly contaminated by opportunism, Kaiser became an investigative member of Sirhan's legal-defense team only weeks after the assassination. In the months before a California jury condemned Sirhan to die for first-degree murder, Kaiser recorded many hours of psychiatric interviews with Sirhan, while keeping an intimate journal on the defense, the prosecution and Sirhan's own behavior.

The result of Kaiser's effort is sometimes fascinating but, like the case itself, weirdly incomplete. Kaiser suggests that investigations by the FBI and the Los Angeles police were sufficiently slovenly to demand reopening the case. Kaiser claims some evidence that Sirhan stalked Kennedy on several occasions, once in a Pomona, Calif., restaurant two weeks before the assassination, at which time he was accompanied by a woman. Kaiser thinks she might have been "the girl in the polka-dot dress" whom witnesses claimed to have seen at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5.

Kaiser hesitates to claim a conspiracy, and with good reason. He does not present any compelling evidence for it. Rather, he has elaborate suspicions. This is natural enough in a period of political assassinations, but thus far the truth remains locked in Sirhan's head.

Much more interesting than Kaiser's theories is his portrait of Sirhan, the strange little Rosicrucian enthusiast who was adept at automatic writing and obsessed with buying a Mustang. For anyone who valued Robert Kennedy, it is impossibly sad to hear Sirhan telling Kaiser: "As far as for me to have satisfied myself with Kennedy, I think all I would have needed to do was just to give him a good punch in the nose at that Ambassador. I think that would have satisfied me." Lance Morrow

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