The Last Patrician

 

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To my wife

and my parents

Acknowledgments

I
WISH TO
thank the following people for their help in connection with the writing and publishing of this book: Mary Elizabeth Ward Beran, Denis Beran, Virginia Beran, Michael V. Carlisle, Henry P. Davis, Sarah Jeffries, Brian H. Johnson, Becky Koh, William W. Morton, Jr., Barbara J. Ward, Sedgwick A. Ward, and Robert Weil. I should also like to thank members of the staff of the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library for permitting me to review documents in the library's archives. None of these individuals is, of course, responsible for such errors of fact or interpretation as the book may contain.

Note

H
E DID NOT
like the name “Bobby.” He preferred that more grown-up, manly-sounding name “Bob.” But just as his sister-in-law Jacqueline could not escape the intimacy of “Jackie,” so he could not escape the diminutive boyishness of “Bobby.” Jack Newfield, in his book
Robert Kennedy: A Memoir,
records the charming story of a ten- or twelve-year-old boy outside a Manhattan tenement who, when he was asked what all the fuss was about, replied that “Senator Javits and Bobby” were inside the building. It was as Bobby Kennedy that he was known to the world, and is now known to history, and I have therefore called him by that name in this book.

 

A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.

—E
DMUND
B
URKE

I
NTRODUCTION

A Patrician in Pain

The White House, June 5, 1981. The survivors of Camelot have gathered in the Rose Garden to hear Ronald Reagan pay tribute to one of their own. Bobby Kennedy's widow is at last to receive the gold medal that Congress ordered to be struck in her husband's memory. Jimmy Carter, spiteful to the last, never found time to do it, and so it now falls to Carter's more magnanimous successor to present Ethel Kennedy with a token of the nation's gratitude.
1

It is an exercise in irony, or rather in multiple ironies, this spectacle of a seventy-year-old President with a glistening black pompadour consecrating the memory of a tousled young martyr. Ronald Reagan was fourteen years old when Bobby Kennedy was born; he did not become President until twelve years after Bobby's death. In contrast to Reagan's long life, Bobby's was relatively brief: he was forty-two when he died in a Los Angeles hospital room in June 1968. Bobby's political career
ended
two years after Reagan's began. The younger man reached the summit of American politics half a decade before the older man started to climb. Bobby, in his thirties, was Attorney General of the United States when Reagan, in his fifties, was a faded actor working for the General Electric Corporation. Reagan privately blamed Bobby's Justice Department for costing him his job. Justice had long suspected that MCA—Jules Stein's company, the entertainment giant with which Reagan had formed close ties during his Hollywood career—was violating the antitrust laws.
2
When in 1962 Justice appeared ready to indict a number of MCA officials and others who had done them favors, GE panicked and fired the genial host of its popular television program—or so Ronald Reagan believed.
3

Bobby died young, but now, as they gather at the White House to honor his memory, his disciples are old. The brilliant young lawyers who once brought the power of the federal government to bear on MCA are themselves out of power, and the fading actor whose ties to men like Jules Stein and Lew Wasserman once provoked their scrutiny is now the President of the United States. In the Rose Garden on this warm June day it is the aging Kennedy men, not the newly installed Republican President, who seem tired in spirit, worn out by the battles they have fought. Camelot is gone, and the faithful, bereft of their captains, are left to wander aimlessly in the diaspora. Ethel Kennedy, in her fifties, chats amiably with Nancy Reagan, but her good cheer cannot mask, quite, the sorrow written in the lines of her face.

The family's reigning prince, brother Edward, is also on hand. The handsome youth whom Bobby helped to win a Senate seat in 1962 has settled into an uncomfortable middle age.
4
It has not been a good year for Teddy. Less than twelve months have passed since he was defeated by Jimmy Carter in his bid for the presidency. Six months ago he announced that his pro forma marriage to Joan Bennett was over.
5
Gossips whisper about too much drinking; some talk of drugs.
6
Suzannah Lessard has exposed his philandering; her article “Teddy's Women Problem / Women's Teddy Problem” caused a sensation when it appeared in
The Washington Monthly
at the end of 1979.
7
But, beleaguered though he is, the prince can still summon his hundred knights. The geriatric Cavaliers have dutifully presented themselves at the palace: McNamara, Harriman, Alsop, a host of lesser figures. Unlike the heady days when they came here to stare down Khrushchev or sip champagne to the sound of Pablo Casals's cello, the old warriors are bent and gray, a shadow of their former selves. The strong and confident leaders of the sixties are themselves
in
their sixties. They were, of course, the best and the brightest of the new generation that Jack Kennedy summoned to power on a cold January afternoon in 1961, but today they are haunted by their former greatness, humiliated by the promise to which they failed to live up. There is a peculiar pathos in seeing
this,
of all political generations, in its dotage.

And yet there is no bitterness, no resentment, in these men, the decayed remnant of a generation that would have changed the world—had it but world enough and time—as they sip cold drinks served on silver trays in the summer afternoon.
8
The New York Times
will report that “both Kennedy and Reagan loyalists” are using the word “graceful” to characterize the occasion.
9
The reporters want to play up the contrast between New England idealism and California conservatism, between patrician conscience and Hollywood glitter. The Kennedys aren't playing that game. Ethel Kennedy nods “approvingly” as President Reagan speaks.
10
Reagan may be the first movie-star President, but, after all, the Kennedys themselves made glamour an indispensable part of American politics long before the host of
Death Valley Days
and the
General Electric Theater
reached the White House. Joseph Kennedy was in Hollywood, learning its lessons, studying its methods, financing its movies, ten years before Ronald Reagan showed up at Jack Warner's studio in Burbank in 1937.
11

Still, the occasion
is
strange. Why
is
Ronald Reagan paying elaborate—and apparently unfeigned—verbal homage to a man Alice Roosevelt Longworth likened to a “revolutionary priest”?
12
Is it mere politeness that leads him to celebrate the hero of the liberals and the left, the admirer of Che Guevara, the man whom Arthur Schlesinger called a “tribune of the underclass”?
13
Is it hypocrisy? It is as if Augustus, safely ensconced in the imperial palace, had celebrated the memory of good old Cato, or as if Charles II had praised the memory of Cromwell. It doesn't make sense.

The Liberal Icon

O
R DOES IT
? When Ronald Reagan claimed that Bobby Kennedy was critical of bloated bureaucratic government,
The New York Times
sneered: Reagan was playing politics with Bobby's reputation, turning him into an advocate of his own vision of smaller government.
14
The
Times
was subscribing to the conventional wisdom: that Bobby Kennedy was the antithesis of Ronald Reagan, a martyr to the cause of twentieth-century liberalism, an orthodox liberal figure who, if he was capable of flirting with the radical left, never strayed very far from the principles of Franklin Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, and his own older brother. To the extent that Bobby was moving “beyond” conventional liberalism, he was moving in a direction consistent with its larger purposes, its higher ends; in moving beyond it, he was not turning against it. This is the prevailing view of Bobby Kennedy, the view memorialized in Arthur Schlesinger's vast (and brilliant) tome and in Jack Newfield's slender memoir. Ronald Reagan might have had the audacity to challenge this view of Bobby; few others have. Unlike Jack Kennedy, Bobby has largely been spared the indignity of a critical reevaluation. The historians who are hardest on Jack Kennedy are surprisingly gentle in their treatment of Bobby, unwilling to disturb popular myths, hesitant to cast doubt upon the first principles of the man's contemporary cult. Garry Wills, who in
The Kennedy Imprisonment
depicted Jack Kennedy as one of the great frauds of all time, is surprisingly sympathetic to Bobby, a man who (as Wills sees it) was forced by the charismatic requirements of being a Kennedy to move to the left and create “a kind of revolution in the hills, his own personal Sierra Maestra.”
15
Wills's Bobby is “radicalized” by the sixties; he “flirts with language that was framed in the hills of Cuba” and is in danger of becoming “a mini-Fidel.”
16
This, of course, is nonsense; is as valuable a contribution to the Bobby literature as Frank Capell's right-wing polemic
Robert F. Kennedy, Emerging American Dictator,
with its picture of Bobby as a soul mate of Castro.
17
Neither Wills nor anyone else has succeeded in revising Schlesinger's picture of Bobby as the last great liberal. Is such a revision even possible? Will the sentimental defenders of the welfare state permit it? In his guise as the last great liberal, Bobby is a valuable commodity, a rare example of a liberal icon whose appeal remains undiminished today.
18
There has been no rush to tell the truth about Bobby Kennedy.