The Last Patrician (15 page)

Although a faint odor of the Middle Age hung about their seigneurial pretensions, the Stimsonians were curiously oblivious of the life of the spirit, and this blindness helps to explain certain shortcomings in their approach to man's problems. So unconscious were they of the mechanics of human pain, so blind were they to its power, that they believed it could be done away with through a more Enlightened deployment of society's resources. Stepchildren of the Enlightenment, the Stimsonians possessed a complacent faith in a painless future, a future bred to splendor by science and rational planning, the same faith that had characterized the eighteenth-century
philosophes
before them. Bobby was at the beginning of his life sympathetic to the Stimsonian point of view; but Miss Hamilton's pages forced him for the first time to question it. He discovered in her book the mysterious processes by which tragedy and suffering defy so many of man's rational and Enlightened efforts in the world (the relevant word, of course, is “hubris”). At the same time, he came to understand that pain is a necessary precondition for any great or worthwhile achievement. Oedipus himself, after all, had once been a Stimsonian, a technocrat, a solver of riddles, the Enlightened deliverer of his city.
24
But he, too, had eventually grown up.

Carrying the Torch

T
HE DIRECTION IN
which his private thoughts tended did not initially influence his public politics. He became, if anything, even more zealous in his advocacy of the principles of Stimsonian governance in the months that followed his brother's death. This was so in part because of the duty he believed he owed his brother's memory. Jack Kennedy had pledged himself to upholding the ideals of the welfare state at home and the Pax Americana abroad: he had declared that Americans would pay any price to ensure the survival and the success of liberty and the American empire around the world; at home he had been troubled by the pain and poverty depicted in Michael Harrington's book
The Other America
and had vowed to do something about it. Inevitably history would judge him by how well he had served the causes to which he had dedicated his presidency. The truth, of course, was that his administration had been characterized by a remarkable degree of reticence. The rhetoric was dazzling; the actions were cautious, cool, and pragmatic. Kennedy had rejected Arthur Schlesinger's advice that he adopt an ambitious domestic program along the lines of FDR's New Deal; Schlesinger, the President said, “couldn't get it through his head” that this was “1963, not 1933.”
25
In foreign policy Jack Kennedy had been no less circumspect; he had been more interested in reducing the scope of America's commitments abroad by means of carefully negotiated settlements (as in Laos) than in extending America's influence by concluding fresh alliances around the world. Kennedy privately criticized Eisenhower's promiscuous promises of American support to all and sundry; he seemed, at times, reluctant to defend even those governments, like the regime in South Vietnam, to which the United States—and his own Vice President—had given unconditional assurances of support. But it is boldness, not prudence, that turns the heads of historians, and so cautious a record as President Kennedy's was unlikely to win him an enviable place in the history books. Bobby knew how cruelly posterity treated those leaders who, in his words, failed to “press”; he was therefore determined to foster the notion that his brother had been a consummately progressive President, one whose last wish had been to launch a great federal war to “end” poverty.
26

The fact that Jack Kennedy had been, in Bobby's view, so distinctly progressive a President made it all the more necessary for Bobby himself to embrace the progressive cause with a becoming zeal. Somebody, after all, needed to carry on Jack Kennedy's legacy. Bobby decided, not unnaturally, that he was the best man to do it. He had been closest to his brother in life; why should he not carry on his brother's legacy after his death? Certainly Lyndon Johnson, he believed, could not be trusted with so important a task; for Johnson, Bobby argued, was at heart a conservative. “People just don't realize,” Bobby said as he rode in the elevator to Robert McNamara's office a few hours after his brother's murder, “how conservative Lyndon really is.”
27

Bobby's problem lay in the fact that he himself didn't
seem
like a progressive politician. Jack may not have been a truly progressive statesman, but his eloquence, his grace, his generous and open nature, had combined to make him seem the very model of progressive liberality. Bobby, by contrast, with his crew-cut head and hard Irish face, seemed too ruthless, too bellicose, too unapologetically vindictive, too apparently petty, to be a really liberal statesman, a happy warrior in the tradition of Charles James Fox and Franklin Roosevelt. Nor was Bobby's style alone a problem; his record was just as troubling. The liberals in his party had not forgotten his apprenticeship under Senator McCarthy. They had not forgiven him for threatening to “get” Hubert Humphrey in 1960, or for humiliating Chester Bowles at the time of the Bay of Pigs crisis.
28
They remembered his work to expose the malversation of their allies in the labor movement. Only the most substantial atonement would cause the liberals to forgive; if Bobby was to make up for the deficiencies of his past conduct, he would have to redouble the zealousness of his exercises in liberal virtue. Even as he turned the pages of the Greek tragedians, even as he began to question the fundamental assumptions of the Stimsonian state, Bobby was forced, by the political realities of the moment, to be an enthusiastic, even aggressive, promoter of the idea of grand government.

The personalities he found himself opposing in the pursuit of power and the defense of his brother's legacy only intensified the pressures upon him. On a hot day in July 1964 Lyndon Johnson summoned Bobby to the Oval Office to inform him, during the course of an unpleasant forty-five-minute interview, that he had decided against asking him to be his vice-presidential running mate in 1964. The following weekend Bobby flew up to Hyannis Port to ponder his future. Arthur Schlesinger was there, and so were Averell Harriman and Dave Hackett. Together the four men reviewed Bobby's options. Though the possibility of a State Department post initially intrigued Bobby, Schlesinger and Harriman persuaded him that a man of his restless temperament would never be content in Dean Rusk's foreign policy shop. That left one other possibility: moving to New York and running for the Senate. Though Bobby had ruled out a Senate bid in June, he was now prepared to reconsider his earlier decision. Within days Kennedy loyalists were canvassing New York politicians in search of support.

In order to secure the nomination, Bobby needed to do more than find a house and establish residency in New York (a house was quickly obtained for him in Glen Cove, Long Island). He was forced to turn to the bosses. Men like Charles Buckley of the Bronx, Peter Crotty of Buffalo, and John English of Nassau County were, in style and stature, the antithesis of the Kennedys; they were unimaginative machine politicians of the type that good Stimsonians had been struggling against ever since the days when Stimson himself and Paul Drennan Cravath had worked together to draft legislation designed to curb the power of the Tammany bosses.
29
The Kennedys had, however, given abundant proof, in 1960, of their ability to do business with Daley-style machine politicians, and Bobby found himself unable to reject their support now.
30
The bosses were willing to put their power and influence at his disposal at a time when respectable Stimsonians—Adlai Stevenson, Mayor Wagner, Mrs. Herbert Lehman—were skeptical of his candidacy.
31
Stevenson, who was serving as Ambassador to the United Nations and was frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Senate himself, angrily turned away Steve Smith when the smooth-talking brother-in-law showed up at Stevenson's apartment in the Waldorf Towers looking for a kind word and an endorsement.
32
The presence of the bosses in Bobby's camp, however necessary it might have been, made it all the easier for the Stimsonians to discredit Bobby, to revive unpleasant memories of a man whose sole concern was power, a man who had grabbed poor old Chester Bowles by the shirt collar and poked a finger in his portly belly, a man who had told New York's liberals that he “didn't give a damn” about their reform committees and that his only concern was to get his brother elected President.
33
Only the most dramatic of mea culpas, only the most persuasive of demonstrations of fidelity to the Stimsonian faith, would overcome the animosity of the liberal Stimsonians in New York.

Bobby the mean kid brother, Bobby the McCarthy sympathizer, Bobby the bane of the Eleanor Roosevelt wing of the Democratic Party—this picture of Bobby as a “little Torquemada” (Gore Vidal's characterization) had a plausibility in 1964 that is difficult to comprehend today. He won the nomination easily enough. But no sooner had he done so than a number of distressingly respectable people—artists, scholars, grand old liberals—broke party ranks and threw their support behind his Republican opponent, Kenneth B. Keating of Buffalo. Although Keating was neither a memorable nor an inspiring political figure, his record in the Senate was progressive enough to make him a credible opponent. He was an amiable, pink-faced granddaddy, and many felt sympathy for him as he prepared to fight for his political life in an unequal contest against an arrogant rich kid, Joe McCarthy's brat, the Catholic Roy Cohn.
34
Even so passionate a Kennedy supporter as Arthur Schlesinger conceded that Keating's “vaguely liberal reputation” was justified by the “passable record” he had compiled in Washington.
35
Gore Vidal helped form a Democrats for Keating Committee. Vidal's antipathy toward Bobby might perhaps be ascribed to spite or envy; Schlesinger has suggested that Vidal, whose own quest for public office ended in failure, resented Bobby's political successes and was piqued by Bobby's failure to recognize him when the two met in 1960.
36
More troubling, no doubt, were the defections of such respected scholars and honorary Stimsonians as Archibald MacLeish, Richard Hofstadter, Barbara Tuchman, and (this was really embarrassing) Schlesinger's own father, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.
37
John Roosevelt, the youngest son of Franklin and Eleanor, condemned Bobby for implying that his mother would have supported his candidacy.
38
Stevenson himself noted the “widespread disaffection” that he detected among liberals, reformers, and organized labor.
39
Even the NAACP climbed aboard the Keating bandwagon.
40

As the election approached, Keating, who had been shrewd enough to repudiate Barry Goldwater, his party's standard-bearer in 1964, could plausibly claim that he was a truer liberal, a truer progressive, than his ambitious young opponent. Bobby's campaign, which had begun with great promise and a commanding lead in the polls, lost momentum. In the opening days the campaign had been fueled by the fire of his celebrity and the memory of his brother's martyrdom. But these things could not sustain it indefinitely. Bobby's odd and unpredictable humor, his evident struggle to reconcile his customary reserve with his love of the large crowds that gathered to cheer him—and the crowds
were
large in the beginning—made him a curiously appealing candidate. When, not long after Labor Day, Bobby arrived, five hours late, in the town of Glens Falls, he was “astonished” to find—for it was well after midnight—a thousand people waiting for him at the airport and thousands more in the town square.
41
By October, however, the novelty was gone, and the flame of celebrity had expired; Bobby himself seemed at times to forget where he was, and acted less like a man who wished to triumph at the polls than one who wished to pay a perpetual homage to the memory of his brother.
42
When the Warren Commission report was made public, Bobby spent the day in seclusion, unable to campaign.
43

His attitude toward the Warren Commission's work reveals much about the state of his mind during the Senate campaign. The period of mourning and melancholia was not yet over. Not only did Bobby not read the Warren report, he was reluctant even to talk about it, and once asked Arthur Schlesinger “how long he could continue to avoid comment” on its conclusions.
44
Although there was, of course, much to criticize in the Warren Commission's work, Bobby was unwilling to speak out and thereby “reopen the whole tragic business.”
45
Some thought this out of character: surely the question of who murdered Jack Kennedy ought to have perplexed a man as passionately devoted to his brother as he was more than it apparently did. And yet it's not clear that Bobby bothered even to learn Oswald's name; several years after the assassination he was still referring to “that fellow Harvey Lee Oswald.”
46
Was he afraid that a more thorough investigation of the assassination would reveal facts that were better off left in obscurity? Did he fear revelations of Mafia ties and plots to kill Castro? Or did his indifference to the circumstances of his brother's death stem rather from his conviction that to dwell upon an act so horrible, so blasphemous, so profane—a stain upon the honor of the world—was itself a kind of sacrilege, a form of disrespect? Jack Newfield, sitting next to him on an airplane, observed how Bobby's eyes would avoid any reference to the assassination in a newspaper.
47
He could “only speak around the event,” Newfield said, “or in euphemisms.”
48
When Newfield asked him “when he began to read poetry,” Bobby replied, “Oh, at the very end of 1963, I think.”
49