The Last Patrician (14 page)

The record of his brother's administration in other areas was less enviable. Most of Jack Kennedy's energy and imagination was consumed, during his presidency, by foreign crises, by the ongoing melodrama of Cold War confrontation, by the constant need to defend an empire whose far-flung frontiers the Romans themselves would have thought presumptuous. Jack Kennedy seems not to have foreseen, when he took office, the extent to which his achievements were destined to be the achievements of reaction—reaction to missiles in Cuba, to a wall in Berlin, to guerrilla activity in Indochina. His administration responded to history, responded, indeed, “flexibly” to it, to use the jargon of the time, but it did not shape history. History had been shaped for it—shaped by an earlier generation of Stimsonians, by those who, in Dean Acheson's words, had been “present at the creation” of the postwar order.

But all of this lay in the future. The burdens of history were as yet unrevealed to Jack Kennedy when he took the oath of office on a cold sunny day in January 1961. David Halberstam has given, in
The Best and the Brightest,
the definitive account of the confidence and mutual admiration that prevailed during the first months of Camelot. The men who came to Washington to serve under the Kennedys, Halberstam wrote, believed that there “was no limit to what brilliant men, untrammeled by ideology and prejudice and partisanship, could do with their minds in solving the world's problems.”
29
The administration was at once the culmination and the perfection of seventy-five years of Stimsonian aristocracy. Jack himself gracefully accepted the challenge of the moment, and articulated, more memorably than any other Stimsonian of his generation, the purposes and premises of their leadership, their vision of a group of Enlightened statesmen solving the problems of the nation and the world through a careful deployment of the resources of a powerful government. With its confident assertion that “man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish … all forms of human poverty,” with its famous pledge to “pay any price” and “bear any burden” to ensure the survival and the success of liberty and the American empire, Kennedy's inaugural address is a classic statement of the Stimsonian creed, an eloquent declaration of the principles on which the welfare state and the national security state rested.
30
Joseph Alsop could not have been more pleased, and when, a few months later, his dear friend the President came to dine at his house on Dumbarton Avenue, and complimented him upon his selection of wines (a stomach complaint prevented Kennedy from actually drinking them), we may fairly suppose that Alsop's ecstasy was complete.
31

It is, perhaps, more than a coincidence that the Kennedys were not simply the last, but in some ways the most brilliant representatives of a dying aristocracy. As is so often the case with aristocratic castes, the rich and fermenting processes of decay brought forth the most splendid growths. The repeal of the Corn Laws in England meant the end of the Tory Party as it had been constituted in that country for two centuries, but its leadership was never more memorable than at the time when its fortunes began to decline and its principles came to be discredited, when it brought forth Disraeli (who like Jack and Bobby had not been born into the aristocracy he was later to lead) and Randolph Churchill. It was during the last years of its ascendancy that the ancient republican aristocracy of Rome produced its most memorable men: Cato the Younger, Brutus, and Caesar himself. The extinction of the Roman aristocracy coincided with the collapse of the Republic, and afterward the emperors filled the Senate with mediocrities and nobodies, with scribes and centurions and the sons of former slaves.
32
In America half a century of Stimsonian aristocracy culminated in the rise of Jack and Bobby Kennedy—outsiders to begin with, but men whose names came in time to be synonymous with the idea of aristocracy in the United States.

P
ART
II

The Portrait of a Rebel

8

On the morning of Friday, November 22, 1963, the Attorney General presided, in his office in the Department of Justice, over a discussion of the problem of organized crime in the United States. Among the federal prosecutors in attendance were Robert Morgenthau, scion of a prominent New Deal family and now in Henry Stimson's old job as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and his assistant, Silvio Mollo, the chief of the criminal division in the Southern District. When, about noon, the meeting adjourned, Bobby invited the two lawyers to luncheon at Hickory Hill. The day was warm, and the three men sat out of doors, on a patio beside the swimming pool, where a meal of tuna fish sandwiches and New England clam chowder was served. Later Ethel joined them, and Bobby swam in the pool.
1

The Kennedys had recently added a new wing to the house, and in the distance a group of workmen were painting it. Some time after one-thirty one of the workmen, a radio in his hand, came running toward the luncheon party in a state of agitation. At the same time, a maid, or possibly a butler—Morgenthau's memory was uncertain—approached the little group and announced that the director had telephoned and wished to speak to the Attorney General. The director, of course, was J. Edgar Hoover, and he was not in the habit of telephoning the Attorney General at home. Bobby went to the telephone, and all at once Morgenthau began to comprehend the agitated workman's words. A moment later Bobby put his hand to his mouth; Ethel went to his side. When he put the telephone down, Bobby was at first silent. At last he spoke, and told the group that his brother had been shot.
2

The four of them returned to the house. Morgenthau and Mollo were shown to a television set in the drawing room; Bobby and Ethel went upstairs, where Bobby attempted to telephone Kenny O'Donnell in Dallas. Failing to reach O'Donnell, he spoke instead to Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent who a short time before had leapt aboard the presidential limousine in a Dallas street. The President, Hill said, was gravely wounded. Bobby asked whether they had summoned a priest, and Hill replied that they had. Half an hour later the Attorney General spoke again by telephone to Dallas; this time he was informed that the President was dead. Bobby went downstairs. “He's dead,” he announced, in an oddly casual way, to Morgenthau and Mollo, and then he went outside.
3

In the gathering dusk he paced the great lawn of his estate. Friends and lieutenants joined him for brief periods of time, as did his own children, whom Ethel had fetched from school.
4
“He had the most wonderful life,” he told them as he embraced them. He shed no tears, but Ethel gave him a pair of dark glasses, lest his red-rimmed eyes betray him. In the early evening he changed clothes, put on a black suit, and was driven to Secretary McNamara's offices at the Pentagon; from there he traveled by helicopter to Andrews Air Force Base. When, about six o'clock, the Boeing 707 bearing the new President, the dead President, and the dead President's widow taxied to a halt on the Andrews field, Bobby, avoiding the television lights that illuminated one side of the great airplane, slipped through the shadows to the darkened side of the jet and climbed aboard unnoticed. He hurried past President Johnson and his party, who were gathered at the front of the plane, and went at once to the private apartments in the rear of the aircraft, where his sister-in-law, in her bloodied clothes, had kept a vigil beside her husband's coffin. Bobby held her hand as they stepped out into the brilliant glare of the television lights, and escorted her to the ambulance that was to bear the coffin, first to the Naval Hospital at Bethesda, and then to the White House itself.
5
Bobby slept in the Lincoln Bedroom that night; his friend Chuck Spalding brought him a sleeping pill. After Spalding closed the door, he heard an anguished cry from within: “Why, God?”
6

Death and the Attorney General

I
SAIAH
B
ERLIN HAD
been distressed to find, during a visit to Washington in the early sixties, that the relationship between Jack Kennedy and his aides-de-camp resembled that between Bonaparte and his marshals; some of Kennedy's courtiers were “physically in love with him.”
7
They had loved him in life, and now that he was dead, even the strongest among them were broken in spirit. “For a time after Jack Kennedy's death,” Joseph Alsop recalled, “the sense of emotional loss was so staggering among those who had known and worked with him that the Washington landscape” seemed “littered with male widows.”
8
“I suddenly realized,” the tough old Cravath lawyer Roswell Gilpatric said, “that I felt about [the President] as I've never felt about another man in my life.”
9
McGeorge Bundy confessed that the President's death struck him more deeply than the loss of his own father.
10

If the effect of the President's death on Alsop and Bundy and Gilpatric was great, how much greater must its effect have been on Bobby himself. He appeared to Ben Bradlee to be the “strongest of the stricken,” but this apparent strength was deceptive, for he, too, was at heart a broken man.
11
In the months that followed the assassination he would sit for hours at a time at his desk in the Justice Department, staring out the window.
12
Or he would wander aimlessly through the streets of Georgetown, dressed in an old tweed overcoat that had belonged to his brother.
13
He lost so much weight that his clothes ceased to fit him.
14
There was a “hollow” look in his eyes.
15
In a quiet voice he talked of leaving politics altogether, and of devoting himself to other pursuits. He would teach, or write, or travel. His humor, always dark, became morbid. “Been to any good funerals lately?” he asked a friend. “I don't like to let too many days go by without a funeral.”
16
For a time he escaped, to Douglas Dillon's house at Hobe Sound, Florida, and found release, in that enclave of tastefully displayed wealth, in games of touch football. They were, Pierre Salinger recalled, “really vicious” games. “It seemed to me,” Salinger said, that Bobby “was getting his feelings out … knocking people down.”
17
But still the pain remained.

At length his spirits began to revive. A regimen of athletic competition at Hobe Sound might have been good for the body, but the insipid rhythms of life at a
Social Register
watering hole could not have been good for the soul. For spiritual nourishment Bobby was forced to wait until the spring of 1964, when he traveled to the house of Mrs. Paul Mellon in Antigua. There his sister-in-law Jacqueline gave him a book called
The Greek Way
by Edith Hamilton. Miss Hamilton, a classical scholar and former headmistress of Bryn Mawr, had first published her meditation on the salient characteristics of the Hellenic mind in 1930. Bobby found himself unable to put the book down. “I remember he'd disappear,” Jacqueline Kennedy recalled. “He'd be in his room an awful lot of the time … reading and underlining things.”
18

Not merely the period of life in which we first read a book, but the place and the circumstances in which we begin to turn its pages, has everything to do with the nature and potency of its effect upon us.
19
Under the tropical sky Miss Hamilton's pages revealed to Bobby a far larger universe than he had previously had any conception of. The Stimsonian creed in which he had been bred up was an intensely
practical
creed; Miss Hamilton, however, taught that practicality alone was not enough, that greatness lay in the union of practical and spiritual excellence, in the “fusion of rational and spiritual power” which she believed the ancient Greeks and the Renaissance Italians had achieved.
20
Although the Greeks possessed the raw strength and tenacious willpower that wins battles and prostrates enemies, they were at the same time devoted to poetry and to what Miss Hamilton called the “imponderables” of high civilization.
21
The Greeks succeeded in escaping the fate of so many peoples who have excelled in works of practical genius; their closeness to the mysteries of human existence, their intimacy with the world of the imagination, the world of dreams—the dark ecstasies of Dionysus, the sunlit excellence of Apollo—saved them from spiritual superficiality. Miss Hamilton's fifth-century Athenians were as “hard-headed” as the Stimsonians, and won as many famous battles and wars, but they took, as the Stimsonians did not, “a delight in the things of the mind”; they possessed a “love of beauty” and “delicate feeling” that was quite foreign to the protégés of Colonel Stimson.
22
Bobby's own debt to Miss Hamilton's brilliant Hellenes was evident when he said that the two virtues he most admired were “courage and sensitivity.”
23