Re-Creation of the Way It Was

By Paul Gray

ROBERT KENNEDY AND HIS TIMES by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.; Houghton Mifflin; 1066 pages; $19.95

Because it is huge, exhaustively researched and written by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., an eminent historian who has won two Pulitzer Prizes, this biography will probably be heralded for years to come as the definitive portrait of Robert F. Kennedy. The book's breadth and scholarship merit this attention; future students of R.F.K. and his age could do far, far worse. But those too young to have experienced the 16 turbulent years of Kennedy's public life may leave Schlesinger's extended guided tour with a pronounced feeling of bewilderment. Why did Bobby waste time campaigning for the presidency when he was so obviously a candidate for canonization?

Schlesinger, who was a special assistant to President John F. Kennedy, as well as an adviser and friend to J.F.K.'s brother, makes no attempt to hide his bias. Paraphrasing the author of a book on the controversial Lord Beaverbrook, he writes: "If it is necessary for a biographer of Robert Kennedy to regard him as evil, then I am not qualified to be his biographer." This begs a question. The problem with Schlesinger's book is not that he finds no evil in Kennedy. His case for R.F.K.'s virtues--compassion, puritanical fair-mindedness, personal and professional decency, courage--is amply supported by word and deed and is thoroughly convincing. Difficulties arise because Schlesinger is not content to leave it at that. He must also find evil (at worst) or stupidity and incompetence (at best) in all those who opposed Bobby or who stood in his way.

This animus extends, when the need arises, to great masses of Americans. One week before his murder in Los Angeles, while pursuing his party's 1968 presidential nomination, R.F.K. was defeated by Eugene McCarthy in the Oregon Democratic primary, the first loss ever sustained by a Kennedy in a general election. The defender of the faith now tries to even the score. Writes Schlesinger: "Oregon [is] a pleasant, homogeneous, self-contained state filled with pleasant, homogeneous, self-contained people, overwhelmingly white, Protestant and middle class. Even the working class was middle class, with boats on the lakes and weekend cabins in the mountains."

A comparable tone of Harvard Yard sneering surfaces whenever Schlesinger seems to feel that Kennedy was threatened. The effect is often tasteless. Staging a counterattack on one of Bobby's anti-Viet Nam War speeches, the Johnson White House "exhumed," as Schlesinger has it, James A. Farley, a distinguished elder of the Democratic Party. Throughout, R.F.K.'s opponents are made to look asinine or worse. Hubert Humphrey "chirruped." On the hustings in 1968, Kennedy is consistently praised for his ability to rouse mass audiences to a pitch of righteous frenzy; Lyndon Johnson, meanwhile, "pounded the podium and shouted about the war." At Martin Luther King's funeral in Atlanta, Kennedy was asked by an English friend where President Johnson was. "Kennedy observed, without bravado, that lack of physical courage kept him away." It is hard to decide which is more offensive, Kennedy's insult or Schlesinger's bland, exculpatory narration.

"Why do people hate me so?" Kennedy asked New York Post Publisher Dorothy Schiff in 1965. Bobby seems to have been honestly bewildered by this question up to the moment of the assassination that he expected ("Sooner or later," he told one friend, "sooner or later"). Schlesinger's Manichaean fable of a lonely R.F.K. crossing swords with the forces of darkness does not fully explain the passions that this remarkable politician stirred.

For one thing, he spent his awkward years in full public view. His father's influence landed him a job in his mid-20s as an assistant counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Then and during a later stint as the relentless harrower of Jimmy Hoffa, Bobby's rough image was frozen forever in many minds: an Irish Torquemada with a face like a fist and a voice out of Warner Bros, cartoons. He ran J.F.K.'s 1960 campaign in a manner that suggested, reasonably enough, that winning mattered most. As an activist Attorney General with a brother in the White House, he inspired more fear.

His inherited wealth and clannish up bringing were mixed blessings. His ad vantages could have cut him off from the world; instead, they helped him to perceive the miseries of those at the oppo site end of the social spectrum. His sympathy for the wretched of the earth was visceral. But he had undisguised patrician contempt for the middle class, those who hankered after comforts he took for granted and who felt threatened by the prospect of militant poor. Significantly, Kennedy's most bitter political enemies were men, like L.B.J., who had scrambled up from poor or straitened childhoods.

Schlesinger does not speculate much on what kind of President R.F.K. would have made. Given what is now known about the nosedive of the U.S. economy, it seems fair to wonder whether Bobby, after 1969, could have possibly satisfied the expectations he had raised. That he was cut down in mid-struggle remains an abiding American tragedy. At its eloquent best, Robert Kennedy and His Times movingly re-creates the way it was, and the way it seemed to be to those who loved him.

--Paul Gray

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