The Last Patrician (24 page)

In time this Christian conception of compassion was corrupted by snobbery and indifference; it was transformed into a merely donative charity, a matter of gold coins and silver ducats. The Maundy ceremony itself ceased to involve the poignant act of royal and other eminent persons washing the feet of the poor; all that remains today of the ritual is the distribution of Maundy Money by the sovereign. The old belief that an act of compassion—an act of love—might cleanse the heart of the cleanser and inspire the imagination of the cleansed was for the most part lost, to be kept alive only by organizations like the Salvation Army.
93
And while, of course, practical—as opposed to ritual—acts of compassion continue to occur every day, they seemed to Bobby to occur less frequently now than in the past. This was particularly true, he believed, in the inner city. Bobby liked to tell the story of a priest who worked with a young gang leader whose gang had acquired “a reputation for violence that struck fear in the hearts of adults and children alike.”
94
The priest “spent a great deal of time getting to know” the young man and his cohorts.
95
He “counseled him in all sorts of troubles,” persuaded him of the value of learning, and eventually obtained for him a scholarship at university, where the young man flourished as a student.
96
Bobby knew, however, that such Monseigneur Myriels are not so commonly met with in this world, and it was the very rarity of their compassion that made it seem to him notable.

When Bobby and a handful of other important men came to Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1966, they came as agents of a truer compassion than is embodied in the faceless, bureaucratized charity of the welfare state. The welfare state, so far from slowing the deterioration of the traditional institutional bearers of compassion—the schools, the families, the churches—undermined those institutions even more. For all the Enlightened thought that went into its construction, the welfare state was, like the Maundy Money itself, a feudal corruption of an older and better conception of compassion—a means of buying off the poor with gold coins, a means of making people content with their mediocre place in the hierarchy of society. This was not, Adam Walinsky observed, compassion: it was a kind of bribery, a way of perpetuating poverty, a method of keeping people in their place.
97

13

The American Republic, 1966. On television Americans watched
Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., Petticoat Junction, My Favorite Martian,
and
Batman.
The Beatles released
Revolver,
Jacqueline Susann's
Valley of the Dolls
was a best-seller, and
Mame,
with Miss Lansbury in the title role, was the toast of Broadway. Truman Capote, fresh from the success of
In Cold Blood,
gave his famous black-and-white masked ball at the Plaza, and Susan Sontag published
Against Interpretation.
The Methodist Church merged with the United Brethren Church to become the United Methodist Church, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, and three Gemini series rockets were launched at Cape Kennedy. The Supreme Court handed down its decision in
Miranda v. Arizona
in June, and in September the first episode of
Star Trek
was broadcast on NBC. In July Richard Speck murdered eight student nurses in a house on the South Side of Chicago, and in August Charles Whitman killed sixteen people and wounded thirty others with a high-powered rifle fired from the tower of the University of Texas at Austin. It was a year in which
Gilligan's Island
and
Flipper
coexisted uneasily in the national consciousness with campus protest and alienated youth, in which pictures of dropouts and hippies in San Francisco contrasted oddly with the airbrushed glamour of the models depicted in advertisements in magazines and on television. It was the era of the
Dean Martin Show
and the
Jack Benny Hour;
of Barbara Garson's
MacBird
and Megan Terry's
Viet Rock;
of Danny Kaye, Stokely Carmichael, and Gary Player.

An American Senator in 1966

A
T THE END
of January 1966 President Johnson ordered a resumption of the bombing of targets in North Vietnam. In February the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under the chairmanship of Senator Fulbright, held hearings on the progress of the war. Bobby, about to leave Washington to go skiing in Vermont, urged the administration to negotiate an end to the conflict, and asserted that no lasting settlement would be possible unless the Americans invited “discontented” elements in South Vietnam (like the Communist National Liberation Front) to the bargaining table and admitted them to “a share of power and responsibility” in the government at Saigon.
1
President Johnson, who was still convinced that the United States could win a military victory in Indochina, was furious. Although Bobby would in the ensuing weeks soften his remarks about the necessity of admitting Communists to a share of “power and responsibility” in the south, he continued to believe that the war was unwinnable. His doubts were reinforced when, in March, he lunched in New York with the French statesman Pierre Mendès-France, who told him that Hanoi and Peking could afford to pursue the war indefinitely, and that in the end they would exhaust America's patience.

But there was more to Bobby's life in 1966 than Vietnam. In June, the same month in which he dedicated a new swimming pool in Bedford-Stuyvesant, he made a triumphal tour of South Africa and several other African nations.
2
The trip was extensively covered in the newspapers and on television, and Bobby's own popularity soared. “Senator Kennedy,” Joseph Alsop wrote, “has now reached the status of an unprecedented political phenomenon.” Alsop likened him to “the young Theodore Roosevelt returning from Cuba” with all eyes upon him.
3
By the end of the summer Bobby had moved “dramatically ahead” of Lyndon Johnson in public opinion polls, and people began to talk of the inevitability of another Kennedy administration.
4

During the second half of 1966, however, Bobby found himself on the defensive, forced to devote much of his time to the sordid and unfashionable pursuits of conventional politics—hand-shaking, speech-making, king-making. In July he helped elect Sam Silverman, a former Paul, Weiss partner, to the New York City Surrogate's Court. After the Silverman victory he turned his attention to the November elections. Nelson Rockefeller, who had taken the Governor's Mansion from Averell Harriman in 1958, was standing for reelection as Governor of New York. Bobby weighed the merits of a number of potential opponents: Sol Linowitz, the Rochester lawyer and Xerox executive; Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., to whom Bobby was under a personal obligation (Roosevelt had helped Jack Kennedy win the West Virginia primary in 1960); Eugene Nickerson, a Long Island politician who, though he was more obscure than his competitors, would in Bobby's view make as good a Governor as anyone. But Bobby hesitated to spend his political capital in the expensive effort of making a king, and in the fall his party, meeting at Buffalo, nominated Frank O'Connor, a machine politician from Queens. Bobby endorsed his party's nominee without enthusiasm.

In September there was a brief respite; Bobby put aside the burdens of politics and went sailing off the coast of Maine. Word reached him there that General de Gaulle, on a visit to Cambodia, had offered to broker a peace between Washington and Hanoi. Bobby thought the offer worth exploring, and was disappointed to learn that Johnson had summarily rejected it. He spent much of the rest of the fall campaigning for fellow Democrats—O'Connor in New York, G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams in Michigan, Pat Brown in California, Paul Douglas in Illinois. It was not a good year for liberals. Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California, and many of the candidates for whom Bobby campaigned lost their races.
5
In New York the Rockefeller machine spent some $11 million to defeat O'Connor, making it one of the most expensive gubernatorial contests in American history.

Exhausted from the rigors of campaigning, Bobby flew to the Bahamas to recuperate in the sun. When he returned to Washington, he faced still more bad news, allegations that as Attorney General he had authorized illegal wiretaps on telephones and other impermissible forms of electronic surveillance. Nor was this his only problem. William Manchester had recently completed his manuscript on the assassination of President Kennedy;
Look
had secured prepublication serialization rights; the book itself was scheduled to appear in bookstores in 1967. Jacqueline Kennedy did not want the book published. Indeed, she did not want
any
history of the assassination published.
6
Bobby reluctantly agreed to press her cause. In November, the same month in which he feted Averell Harriman at Hickory Hill, Bobby showed up at the Berkshire Hotel in New York, where Manchester was staying in a suite maintained by
Look,
and demanded a meeting. Manchester refused to open the door to the suite, leaving Bobby to pound on it in impotent fury.
7
Rebuffed by Manchester, the Kennedys went to court. Jacqueline Kennedy authorized Simon Rifkind, another Paul, Weiss lawyer, to seek an injunction preventing publication of
The Death of a President
on the ground that Manchester had breached his contract with the Kennedys. (The Kennedys' ties to Paul, Weiss, among the most liberal of New York's preeminent law firms, had been strengthened when Theodore Sorensen became a partner there in January 1966; Adam Walinsky's father-in-law was the firm's real-estate partner.
8
) Bobby, on the slopes at Sun Valley, condemned what he called Manchester's greed (
Look
had agreed to pay him $665,000 for the serialization rights) even as he privately acknowledged that the affair was damaging his own reputation.
9
(The accusation of greed was unfounded; Manchester would eventually donate more than a million dollars in royalties from
The Death of a President
to the Kennedy Library.)
10

As 1966 drew to a close Bobby talked about getting out of the United States for a time; the struggles of the past few months had left him tired and dispirited.
11
“I gotta get out of the country,” he told friends.
12
A European itinerary was soon put together. The trip, a combination of business and pleasure, would give him a chance to see old friends like the Radziwills, Rudolf Nureyev, and Margot Fonteyn.
13
There was a lunch at Blenheim with the Duke of Marlborough; a dinner party in Paris given by Hervé Alphand, the former French Ambassador to the United States, and his wife, Nicole (Pierre Cardin, Shirley MacLaine, and Catherine Deneuve were among the guests); dinner with Candice Bergen at a cozy little place on the Left Bank; drinks with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Rome; and a shopping tour with Contessa Crespi.
14
There was, too, a series of obligatory calls on heads of state and other movers and shakers in the highest political and diplomatic circles. During the course of the trip Bobby met Prime Minister Wilson, President de Gaulle, Ambassador Bohlen, Chancellor Kiesinger, Mayor Brandt, Premier Moro, Cardinal Cicognani, and the Pope.
15

The Idea of Community

T
HUS THE PUBLIC
life of a powerful American Senator thirty years ago. What of the intellectual life, the life of the mind? Bobby has consistently been celebrated by his admirers as one of the most creative political personalities of his day, a man whose capacity for intellectual growth distinguished him from the other politicians of the period. “Most people,” Tony Lewis said, “acquire certainties as they grow older; he
lost
his.”
16
Bobby “grew” more than anyone Lewis had ever known. Arthur Schlesinger said that Bobby possessed to an “exceptional degree” what T. S. Eliot called an “experiencing nature,” one that permitted him to respond to the turbulence of his times “more directly and sensitively than any other political leader of the era.”
17
Jack Newfield was awed by Bobby's “capacity to grow and change”; he contrasted it with the less credible transformations undergone by Nixon, Reagan, and Dole: “Below the surface of these packaged politicians,” Newfield said, “there was no authentic growth.”
18
We have, in a previous chapter, seen how Bobby believed that a crisis of confidence lay at the heart of the tragedy of the ghetto (as well as of many other places in American society), and we have seen that he further believed that this deficit in self-confidence could be made good only through the compassion of others. But quite obviously he himself could not visit every slum; he could not touch the life of every person who had been scarred by pain or seared by terrible experience. He could not personally persuade each drug addict, each delinquent, each hardened criminal, each teenage mother, that he or she had been created in God's image, and had a life that was worth living. He needed to find some more comprehensive dispensary of hope and affirmation, needed to find a broader means of effecting the “cure through love” that he envisioned.

During much of 1966 he was still groping toward a solution. His notes in committee show him struggling with the question of how to formulate a comprehensive response to what he called the “pathology of the ghetto.” It was not simply a matter of creating self-confident and self-reliant citizens in the inner city. It was, in a more important sense, a matter of demonstrating that the nineteenth-century tradition of liberal individualism, the tradition of Emerson and Lincoln, was not an anachronistic one. According to critics of liberal individualism, the cult of the individual had no place in twentieth-century American life.
19
The nineteenth century's faith in the powers of an archetypical “American Adam,” with his limitless horizons, his extensive opportunities, his relative freedom from restraint and coercion, had ceased to be compelling in the more complicated world of the twentieth century.
20
The early-nineteenth-century American, it was argued, was far freer to shape his destiny than his twentieth-century counterpart; he was not beholden, as his twentieth-century descendant was, to institutions over which he had no control; he was not at the mercy of vast corporations, a larger and more intrusive government bureaucracy, an educational establishment for whose credentials he must pay dearly if he was to have any hope of success. In this larger, more impersonal, more bureaucratic world, the typical American had far less opportunity than the free and unshackled “American Adam” of Tocqueville's time; hence the need for a neo-feudal welfare state presided over by benevolent technocrats.