The Last Patrician (16 page)

“Get out of this mysticism,” Paul Corbin told him. “Get out of your daze.… Goddamn, Bob, be yourself. You're real. Your brother's dead.”
50
With his poll numbers dropping and his campaign adrift, Bobby launched a massive advertising offensive in the middle of October and harshly criticized Keating for his failure to support a host of welfare state legislation: laws authorizing the construction of new housing projects, the creation of a larger federal education bureaucracy, the extension of the minimum-wage law.
51
Bobby's efforts to tie his candidacy to the future of the welfare state were in the end successful, and he won the election by some 720,000 votes.
52

The Predicament

H
E NEEDED DESPERATELY
to discard prior selves, to reinvent himself, to re-create himself; only then could he hope to win over critical constituencies in his own party. If in order to do this he had to betray his own deepest self, no matter: the act of betrayal could itself be turned to political advantage. His different selves—the “good” Bobby and the “bad” Bobby of the famous Jules Feiffer cartoon—became evidence of his complexity and depth, of everything that separated him from the packaged politicians of the era, of everything that made him “authentic” in a way that Johnson and Nixon and Humphrey were not and could never be. Was he struggling with his own dark passions? So much the better; the higher journalists loved it. “God!” Murray Kempton exclaimed after interviewing him. “He's not a politician! He's a character in a novel!”
53
It hardly matters that much of what made Bobby interesting to intellectuals in the middle sixties hasn't worn well, that the quotations from McLuhan, the allusions to Camus, seem curiously trite. Posterity may sniff; the brightest journalists of the day did not.

The pressures that forced him to embrace the Stimsonian ideals of federal noblesse oblige in the 1964 campaign did not diminish with his elevation to the Senate in January 1965. On the contrary, Bobby's difficulties increased when Lyndon Johnson, whom he had expected to be a cautious and conservative president, rapidly emerged as the most progressive occupant of the White House since Franklin Roosevelt. The sentimental Johnson had hung, in a conspicuous place in the White House, an old photograph of himself with President Roosevelt; beneath the picture he had written, “I listen.” Listen he did. Sometime in 1964 (speechwriter Richard Goodwin said that the decision was made during the course of a swim in the White House swimming pool) Lyndon Johnson determined to build a Great Society.
54
What conceptions of policy, what considerations of interest, what intimations of glory, caused Johnson to embark upon so fantastic a project cannot now be deduced with a precise or scrupulous accuracy. The genesis of so vast, so lavish, and so impossible a scheme cannot be reduced to discrete causes or simple motives. A hundred circumstances influenced Johnson's decision. He was influenced by the spirit of the age, and by the promptings of his advisers; by an urge to direct the destiny of a nation, and by a desire to secure a just historical fame for himself; by the wish to emulate his heroes, and by the hope of disgracing his enemies. Not least among his motives was his desire to prove to the Stimsonians, who had always regarded him as a coarse and primitive man and who had “laughed at him behind his back,” that he was no less worthy than they, and that he could play the part of federal philanthropist-in-chief just as effectively as the best of them.
55

In order to maintain his image as a progressive, Bobby was forced to assert, improbably, that Johnson was not doing enough to expand the welfare state. In his attempts to outdo Johnson in feats of liberal virtue, Bobby criticized the President for failing to fund federal poverty programs adequately.
56
He blamed him for failing to allocate sufficient monies for the creation of public housing.
57
Johnson's Great Society was, Bobby said at one point, a mere “drop in the bucket.”
58
In his eagerness to out-Johnson Johnson, in his eagerness to tell the Arthur Schlesingers of the world what they wanted to hear, Bobby reached for easy, facile solutions—increased government spending, higher taxes, more federal programs. He hadn't yet begun to do the hard work—and the hard
thinking
—that produce persuasive answers to complicated problems.

When he entered the Senate in 1965, Bobby could not be called an original statesman; he was still a conformist. The qualities that seemed so original and refreshing in the 1964 campaign—the shy humor, the tousled appeal that was even then being compared to that of a rock star—were qualities of style, not substance. Nothing better illustrates Bobby's lack of originality than the way he conformed his politics to the precepts of Stimsonian liberalism. Politics and circumstance may have played a part in his decision to conform; but so, too, did his inability to see any alternative body of political principles on which to base a political career. The Stimsonian creed was the only respectable creed available to him, and in 1965 Bobby was still a man who cared deeply about respectability. Lionel Trilling's claim that liberalism was not only the dominant but even the “sole” political tradition in the United States was no less true in 1965 than it had been when Trilling's book
The Liberal Imagination
first appeared in 1950. The liberalism Trilling had in mind—a liberalism grounded in a faith in an “educated class” committed to “progress, science, social legislation, planning, and international cooperation” and possessed of a “mild suspiciousness of the profit motive”—was an unmistakably Stimsonian liberalism.
59
The old nineteenth-century tradition of liberal individualism, the tradition of Lincoln and Emerson, was in the New Deal and postwar periods known as “conservatism,” and it was distinctly unfashionable. However privately skeptical Bobby might have been of certain facets of Stimsonian liberalism, he must have believed, at the time he entered the Senate, that he had very little choice but to embrace it. His mind was afire with striking thoughts and startling conceptions, with Aeschylus and Plutarch, but in his public politics he remained, at the beginning of 1965, a most conventional statesman.

9

In April 1965 Bobby visited tenements in Harlem, where, he said, “the smell of rats was so strong that it was difficult to stay there for five minutes.”
1
They came out of holes in the wall and mauled little children, who, Bobby said, “slept with lights turned on their feet to discourage attacks.”
2
In a Brooklyn slum he encountered a young Puerto Rican girl with a mangled face; her mother “explained that the rats had bitten her face off when she was a little baby.”
3
In a ghetto school he watched a young boy identify a picture of a teddy bear as a rat.
4
To complacent middle-class audiences Bobby liked to cite a startling statistic: there were more rats in New York City than people.
5

He had been in the Senate for only a few months. He had not really wanted the job. “I remember and regret,” he said shortly after he took his seat, “the situation that gave rise to my being here.”
6
Unlike his older brother, he derived no imaginative stimulus from the Senate itself, from its history, its ceremony, its ritual pomp. He thought it “too archaic,” Pierre Salinger said, “too slow and inactive.”
7
Jack Kennedy had felt the charm of the place, had reveled in its very archaisms; to him they were relics of the Republic's Silver Age, the age of Calhoun and Webster, a time when Senators had filled the chamber with a neoclassical rhetoric so carefully wrought as to have possessed an almost voluptuous quality. Jack had, indeed, been something of an unofficial historian of the Senate: his
Profiles in Courage
was a study of the careers of eight illustrious Senators; in May 1957 he delivered a speech on the floor of the Senate entitled “The Senate's Distinguished Traditions.”
8
But the historic grandeur of the Senate made little impression upon Bobby; for intellectual and imaginative sustenance he would have to look elsewhere.

When he found the stimulation he craved, he found it not in Washington, but in New York. During his years in the Senate Bobby flew up from Washington at least twice a week, sometimes more often. In New York there would be a school to visit, a speech to deliver, a banquet to attend. He took an apartment high above the little park beside the United Nations, in a fashionable building at 870 United Nations Plaza—Truman Capote was a neighbor—and had an office at Lexington and 45th Street in the old Post Office building. (The Kennedy house at Glen Cove, Long Island, a twenty-five-room mansion in the Dutch colonial style, was less frequently used.
9
) He had his favorite hangouts in the city: after a day of hand-shaking and speech-making he would meet a small group of friends for a drink at the 21 Club, a hamburger at P.J. Clarke's, or a chocolate sundae at Elaine's. But all that was best in the city—the museums, the theaters, the opulent dinners at restaurants like La Côte Basque and La Caravelle, where Bobby frequently dined—could not disguise that which was worst. On the long drive from the airport, on the tours of the slums, on visits to his constituents, Bobby became aware, in a way that he had not been before, of the city's evils, of its “blackened tunnels,” its dilapidated schools, its terrible housing projects, its dirt, its stink, its careless “brutalities,” its “grotesque” violence, its “congestion,” its “filth,” its “danger and purposelessness.”
10
His very appreciation of the sun-washed brightness of the old Hellenic poetry—ever since Antigua he had devoted his leisure hours to the literature of ancient Greece—worked rather to increase his sensitivity of the terrible urban poetry that now confronted him, a dark poetry that haunted his mind and troubled his dreams. The world of the Greek poets had, of course, also been filled with pain and suffering and horror. But it had at least been free of rat shit.

The January Speeches

A
S A CANDIDATE
for the Senate, Bobby had portrayed himself as a devoted champion of the welfare state, and it was only natural that, after he had taken his seat in that body in January 1965, he should have immediately set out to obtain for his state as large a slice of the federal welfare pie as possible. The tables had hardly been cleared following the luncheon Ethel and Bobby gave at Hickory Hill on the afternoon of Bobby's induction into the Senate before the new Senator went to work trying to find ways to bring more federal dollars to his state. He sought to make thirteen New York counties eligible for aid-to-Appalachia funds.
11
He announced a federal grant of half a million dollars to fight poverty in Syracuse.
12
And yet in even the earliest speeches of his senatorial career an element of heresy is detectable. In April 1965, a month after he climbed a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain in Canada's Northwest Territory (the peak had recently been renamed in honor of President Kennedy), Bobby declared that “we have gone as far as goodwill and even good legislation will take us.”
13
He continued to chant the standard liberal mantras of the times: more government money, more government programs. But he had begun to waver in his faith.

In the late summer of 1965 rioting erupted in the Los Angeles district of Watts. There was bloodshed, and there was death: thirty-four people died and more than a thousand were injured. In a speech delivered at Spring Valley, New York, a few days afterward, Bobby did more than elucidate the underlying causes of urban violence—the dearth of jobs, the absence of the “purpose, the satisfaction, [and the] dignity” that steady work provides.
14
He explicitly questioned the reasonableness of the welfare state. “A way must be found,” he declared, to stop the “waste of human resources and the resulting financial drain on the rest of the community” that the existing welfare regime encouraged.
15
He insisted the country could not “afford to continue, year after year, the increases in welfare costs which result when a substantial segment of the population becomes permanently unemployable.”
16
These were bold words, but they were overshadowed by another passage in the speech in which Bobby asserted that in the United States the law was the “friend” of the white man and the “enemy” and “oppressor” of the black. This last assertion was much gazetted in the press, and as a result Bobby's more controversial remarks about the deleterious effects of the welfare state went largely unnoticed.
17

He sensed the inadequacy of the existing welfare regime, but he had as yet no conception of an alternative. His speeches of the period are to be faulted for their vagueness and their tendency toward dreaminess; for all the grandeur of the aspirations expressed, they say little about how the speaker's dreams of felicity were to be realized in the life of the nation. Bobby sensed their shortcomings, and shortly after his appearance in Spring Valley he asked the brightest of his bright young aides, Peter Edelman and Adam Walinsky, to translate his felt but as yet inarticulate dissatisfaction with the methods of the welfare state into a comprehensive critique of the assumptions upon which it rested. Edelman and Walinsky's work in the autumn of 1965 formed the basis of a series of speeches that Bobby delivered in New York City that winter.

The speeches—they were given on three successive days in January 1966—were not delivered in a famous university; they did not bear the imprimatur of a splendid endowment, like the Godkin Lectures or the Bollingen Foundation; they were never collected into a book and separately published.
18
But the delivery of the January speeches was as momentous an event in the history of the welfare state as any; Bobby was at last prepared to nail his theses to the cathedral door. At the heart of the speeches was a simple proposition: no genuine and lasting improvement in the conditions of life in the ghetto would occur unless such improvement resulted primarily from the efforts of the individuals who inhabited it. The welfare state failed because it was premised on the idea that governments, bureaucracies, programs, laws can by themselves, or with a very minimum of cooperation, lift people out of poverty and pain. But of course they cannot. Bobby himself knew as much about the strengths and weaknesses of bureaucracy as anyone of his generation. He knew how intransigent and inflexible even the most efficient bureaus could be. They were often unable to solve the smallest problems. Could they really be expected to lift large numbers of people out of poverty and pain? The massive postwar federal establishment, Bobby would later declare, had “foundered” as new agencies had “proliferated, splitting tasks and energies among dozens of distant and unconnected bureaus.”
19