The Last Patrician (2 page)

Reagan was nearer that truth than he—or his listeners—knew. Bobby
did
challenge the liberal orthodoxies of his day. If he was not a raging conservative trapped inside a liberal's body—a Bill Buckley waiting to be born—neither was he the gentle liberal whom Arthur Schlesinger depicted in his thousand pages.
19
According to the keepers of the liberal conscience, Bobby was, at the time of his death, poised to become the “Adlai Stevenson of the 1970s,” the “torch-bearer” of all that Eleanor Roosevelt stood for.
20
Eleanor Roosevelt herself was more canny; she “resisted” Bobby almost to the moment of her own death.
21
The liberals who canonized Bobby in death were suspicious of him in life—and for good reason. Newfield reluctantly conceded the existence of a conservative Bobby, a Bobby who “believed in the work ethic, family, and the rule of law.”
22
The rigors of a liberal education and his own conscientious attempts at liberal piety never succeeded in eradicating the conservatism at his core. “He never lost,” Newfield wrote, that “Puritan strain of moral conservatism” that made him despise
Playboy
magazine and movies that glorified sex and violence.
23
He “agreed with his wife that it was ‘not right' when
Newsweek
published a nude photo of Jane Fonda on its cover,” and he thought the decadence of Antonioni's film
Blowup
“immoral.”
24
Bobby would have been the first to applaud the contemporary renewal of interest in the Victorian virtues. William Bennett's anthologies, with their Kiplingesque paeans to work, courage, loyalty, and faith, would have appealed to him.

The story I have to tell is not a simple one. Ronald Reagan grew to manhood in small Middle Western towns whose sunny verities he instinctively adopted as his own. Bobby's was, from the first, a more complicated existence. He was the son of an entrepreneurial father who believed that his sons could obtain power for themselves only if they forswore the role of entrepreneurial hero and allied themselves to a patrician elite. Bobby and his brothers would be raised not in the entrepreneurial tradition of Joseph P. Kennedy, but in the aristocratic tradition of patricians who, like Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, believed that the age of the entrepreneur was over and that America's continued progress depended on its creation of a government powerful enough to institute reform at home and guarantee peace abroad. These patrician statesmen were the architects of the twentieth-century welfare and administrative state; after World War II they helped to construct the twentieth-century national security state. The son of an entrepreneurial capitalist, Bobby became the proselyte of the tradition of grand government that Roosevelt and Stevenson championed. This tradition was, of course, at odds with his own deepest impulses, and he never ceased to admire brave, self-reliant, self-made men. But Bobby was a good boy and for the most part did as he was told. His rebellion came later, when he was on his own, when his older brothers were gone and his father lay crippled by a stroke.

This book tells the story of that rebellion. It was a rebellion that brought Bobby to question, as cogently and thoughtfully as any statesman of the postwar period, the orthodoxies upon which the welfare state and the national security state rested. The argument advanced in these pages is not that Bobby was a repressed conservative, patiently waiting for an opportunity to come out of the liberal closet. There was much in Ronald Reagan's policies that he would have abhorred. And yet he would, I think, have been no less troubled by his younger brother's defense of a welfare system that had manifestly failed. He would have thought it sad and perhaps tragic that Ted should have spent his career championing a welfare establishment that he himself despised. The New Deal, Bobby asserted, was over; it was time for Americans to “disenthrall” themselves, to find new solutions to old problems.
25
In looking for new solutions, Bobby became convinced of the value of old ones.

Toward a Post-Enlightenment Politics

T
HE THEME THAT
gives his life its unity, its dramatic coherence, is his preoccupation with pain. Pain was for him a vocation of sorts; he would become, at the end of his life, a close student of Greek tragedy and an expert on the ways in which contemporary Americans suffer. When he came to write a foreword to the memorial edition of his brother's
Profiles in Courage,
pain was the first thing that came to his mind. “At least one half of the days he spent on this earth were days of intense physical pain,” Bobby wrote of Jack Kennedy. “He was in Chelsea Naval Hospital for an extended period of time after the war, had a major and painful operation on his back in 1955, campaigned on crutches in 1958. In 1951 on a trip we took around the world he became ill. We flew to the military hospital in Okinawa and he had a temperature of over 106 degrees. They didn't think he would live.”
26
But although Bobby grew up with pain, he did not immediately discover in it his life's work. One of the most vivid memories of his youth was the smell—putrid and horrible—of Lem Billings's burnt flesh when the two of them shared a room one summer after Billings had been scalded in the shower.
27
Much of Bobby's life was passed in the shadow of death; before he himself died, he would watch two brothers, a sister, and a brother-in-law die violent deaths. But it was not until middle age, long after he had first known the horror of charred and rotting flesh, that he discovered in human suffering his true métier.

If Bobby interests us today—and he should interest us today—it is because at some level his preoccupation with suffering was genuine, and not just a ploy to win over liberals and intellectuals.
28
At some level the anguish was real. Not simply his anguish over the sins of the nation, its manifold injustices to the poor, the blacks, the Indians. Not simply his anguish over his brother's death, his despair in the face of a world that could destroy a man like Jack Kennedy so casually, so carelessly, so capriciously. The tabloid histories that have appeared in recent years, so otherwise worthless, have this merit, a merit that goes beyond giving publishers an excuse to reprint old pictures of Marilyn Monroe: they have revealed to us the sordid places in Bobby's own soul, the shadowy depths to which Schlesinger and Newfield and the other hagiographers never dared to descend. A man with as finely developed a conscience as Bobby Kennedy's could not have been unaffected by the memory of his own less forgivable conduct. In this respect at least the anguish was real.

Hardly a day passes without our being introduced to some new and hitherto undiscovered aspect of the American agony. There is, of course, the physical pain of the inner-city slum, the deprivation described by Jonathan Kozol in his book about the Mott Haven section of the Bronx.
29
But this physical pain, Bobby knew, was a manifestation of a deeper pain, a pain that was not limited to the ghetto. This pain, a spiritual, or what we more often today call a psychological pain, is big business in America, one of our foremost growth industries. Evidences of this pain are ubiquitous in our culture: depression, anxiety, alcoholism, drug abuse, eating disorders, the pervasiveness of Prozac are among its more readily apparent symptoms. To escape the hurt, we spend billions of dollars in the pursuit of more or less counterfeit approximations of felicity. In the Old World, human suffering was a question for philosophers and theologians. Ordinary men and women were too busy
doing
the suffering to care much about why they suffered, or whether they should suffer. How different the case in America. In the second half of the twentieth century, the vast majority of Americans, free of the harsher forms of physical suffering, have become, if anything, even more conscious of the other agonies of human existence. They have become even more obsessed with the question of why they so often feel so bad. Depression, despair, frustration, alienation—whatever name we give the pain, it is there, defying the most ingenious attempts of the pharmaceutical industry to mitigate its deleterious effects.

The Enlightenment promised to end our pain. The
philosophes
promised to liberate us from our misery, to deliver us from the evil of suffering. It is in part because our pain was supposed to have gone away—or greatly decreased in severity—that we are so morbidly conscious of its presence today. The free market, the welfare state, the modern discipline of psychology, the modern pharmaceutical industry are among the more readily identifiable methods by which the Enlightenment tried to put an end to human suffering. Man's desire to escape from pain fueled the engines of Enlightenment, but in the end pain itself, our stubborn nemesis, revealed the
limits
of Enlightenment. Pain is part of our destiny. Bobby, the first post-Enlightenment American statesman, sought to make peace with it. How, he wondered, can we learn to live with pain? How can we profit from it? Bobby did not, in his attempt to fashion a post-Enlightenment politics, come up with all the answers. But he understood the problem; he grasped our predicament better than most.

P
ART
I

The Making of an Aristocrat

1

He became a questioner, a doubter, but that is not how he began. It is an old story: before he rebels, the heretic is among the most pious of priests. Only those who have thoroughly understood a system can act decisively to change it. Augustine was a perfect pagan, Paul a perfect Jew, before each became a revolutionary Christian. Luther was a priest before he became a Protestant. It was only because he had embraced the orthodoxies of his age—embraced them with the passion of a believer—that Bobby Kennedy was able to become, at the end of his life, so constructive a critic of those orthodoxies.
1

He grew up amid contradictions, a confusion of identities, a profusion of faiths. His life was grounded in Yankee realities: prep schools and Ivy League colleges, summers on the Cape. But he did not adjust to them in the ready and easy way his brothers did. He was shyer, quieter, more withdrawn. Vestiges of the old life, the life of his ancestors, so different from the secular Yankee world in which the father sought to envelop the children, perplexed him. Beside his father's worldliness there was his mother's piety, her daily attendance at Mass, her constant resort to prayer and contemplation. Her faith made a deep impression upon the young Bobby, deeper than the impression it made upon his brothers. For a time, it is said, he considered becoming a priest.
2
Who knows? He might have been a good one. But his father had different ideas.

The Meaning of the Malcolm Cottage

T
HE HOUSE ITSELF
tells the story. In 1926 Joseph Kennedy turned thirty-eight. He was a stock speculator and millionaire who four years before had left the investment banking firm of Hayden, Stone & Company to play the bull market of the twenties on his own. More recently he had acquired a controlling interest in a motion picture company with operations in New York and California, and it is probable that he continued to derive profits from the illegal distribution of bootlegged liquor.
3
At all events, Joseph Kennedy had by 1926 become a rich man; in the spring of that year, when he moved from Boston to New York, he hired a private railroad car to take his family south. But Kennedy did not want his children to become New Yorkers, and in the summer of 1926 he returned to Massachusetts, took his family to the Cape, and there rented a house known as the Malcolm cottage at Hyannis Port.
4
Bobby Kennedy, who had been born the previous November, was not yet a year old.

Two years later Joseph Kennedy bought the Malcolm cottage outright for some $25,000.
5
It was not such a lot of money to a young millionaire who, like Kennedy, was fond of occasional extravagance. He claimed that he lost $1 million on the movie
Queen Kelly,
his failed attempt to showcase his sweetheart, Gloria Swanson.
6
And he agreed to put up a horse called Silver King, one of his studio's principal box-office attractions, in a stable that, at $25,000, cost as much as the Malcolm cottage itself.
7
The big spender in Hollywood was, however, curiously reticent when it came to throwing his money around on Cape Cod. Even after he enlarged it, the Malcolm cottage remained a conspicuously modest place, a New England summer house, spacious and comfortable, but not at all grand, a rambling, white-shingled, somewhat ordinary house, the chief distinction of which lay in the great swath of lawn that separated it from Nantucket Sound. It was the house of a successful lawyer, a well-off banker, not an American tycoon.