The Last Patrician (27 page)

Whatever the motive that underlay it, the insight that led Bobby to the idea of community was itself a valuable one. Without repudiating the Enlightened world of markets and modernity, Bobby sensed that something was missing. He was sympathetic to the individualist creed of Emerson and Lincoln, but he was also conscious of the shortcomings of that creed. The individualist creed was in some ways a very modern creed, but its strength diminished in direct proportion as it grew apart from the premodern sources of faith that originally sustained it. The individualist creed was in some ways a highly Enlightened creed, but it required something more than reason to make it work. The Enlightened mind tried to understand the soul, as if it were a machine; in doing so, it lost sight of those pre-Enlightened creeds that, without pretending to understand the soul, had nevertheless given it strength, confidence, and the ability to endure pain. In looking to the cult of the polis for a solution to the problem of modern pain—the pain of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the pain of the nation itself—Bobby looked to the wrong pre-Enlightened cult. But the instinct that prompted him was a sound one, and honest.

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Three decades later the pictures still move us: pictures of Bobby roughhousing with his children at Hickory Hill before putting them to bed, or teaching them how to throw a football on the lawn at Hyannis Port, or splashing about with them in the swimming pool at Palm Beach. To call him a family man is to understate the case considerably; so devoted was he to the cause of family, so completely did he identify himself with the interests of his own family, that his father, himself an expert on the making of families, bestowed upon the third son the highest of compliments: “Bobby's a tough one,” Joseph Kennedy said in 1957; “he'll keep the Kennedys together, you can bet.”
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Given the intensity of his belief that the good life finds its fullest expression in family life, it's odd that Bobby should have embraced, in his last years, an ideal that for much of Western history has been at odds with the ideal of family life. To the thinkers of old Greece the family was the great and unworthy rival of the community. The classical myths of community celebrated heroes who, like the first Brutus or the brothers Horatii, sacrificed their families in the name of the City. Plato went so far as to outlaw the family in the ideal state he described in
The Republic.
The tangled, fleshy coils of family were the stuff of tragic poetry, not of communitarian politics; for the Greeks the emergence of the polis represented the triumph of reason and order over the dark passions, the secret lusts, the furious blood feuds of the patriarchal family.

In practice, of course, great families have thrived in the communitarian world of the polis; from the Scipios and Metelluses of Rome to the Adamses and Roosevelts of our own republic, families have played as important a role in the political life of free communities as more formally public institutions like law courts and standing armies. And yet the Greeks were surely right to perceive an antagonism between the community and the family; the two cultures have for most of human history been utterly dissimilar. Until relatively recently women, the great generative force in families, were excluded from the political life of free communities, and the political culture of the Western democracies to this day bears the marks of their exclusion. Women have been queens and empresses for centuries, but not until our own age have they been prime ministers or even voters. Misogyny, a suspicion of women and the claims of family, a fear of the feminine: they are all to be found in the political tradition that descends from the Greek polis. And yet this overt sexism has rarely made a certain kind of Western political animal uncomfortable; it almost certainly, for example, did not trouble Jack Kennedy. American women, Kennedy once wrote, were “either prostitutes or housewives” and in either case did “not play much of a role” in the “cultural or intellectual life” of the country.
2
For him, as for so many men raised on the old classical notions of politics, women were not
meant
to participate in political life; they were, like the children it was their business to bear and raise, a diversion from the serious business of life, a diversion from the masculine avocation of politics. Pericles might while away an idle hour with Aspasia, but afterward he returned to the agora and resumed the manly business of leading Athens.

If men raised in the Western tradition of communitarian politics were not supposed to depend on women for the confidence they needed in order to be political players, Bobby was an exception to the rule. He very obviously
did
depend on women for that confidence; the celebrator of community required in his own life the constant affirming presence of the very sex the communitarians had for so long excluded from their counsels. Women were for Bobby much more than a temporary diversion, a source of merely social or sexual gratification, a necessary adjunct to the light and frivolous side of life. They were an indispensable bulwark of character. As a boy he had been too young to be a companion to his older brothers, to Jack and Joe Junior, and he had spent much of his time in the company of his sisters—so much so that Rose's mother worried that her grandson would become a “sissy.”
3
In his teens Bobby developed something more than crushes on girls; he adoringly worshiped the unattainable female in the way that romantic minds sometimes do. The name of one of these Beatrices has even come down to us: she was called Ann Appleton. Doubtless there were others. Bobby's infatuations were in great contrast to Jack's more prosaic attitude toward women; the older brother rapidly penetrated whatever mystery and romance chivalry attributed to the fair sex, and is said to have lost his virginity to a whore. The older brother soon afterward embarked on a long line of somewhat passionless affairs, very different from the series of intense attachments that the younger brother was to form.

He married early: he was twenty-four when he married Ethel Skakel in Greenwich in 1950. (Jack, by contrast, was thirty-six when he married Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953.) Unlike Jack, Bobby did not hesitate to marry; he preferred, perhaps required, the care and attention of a wife, and he was no doubt grateful for a woman's ability to nurture self-confidence and self-respect in those she loved.
4
Ethel helped Bobby to break out of the lonely self-absorption that characterized his adolescence and early manhood; she was as responsible as anyone for the emergence, in the early fifties, of the extraordinarily talented and energetic statesman that Bobby, to the surprise of everyone who knew him, became. Lively, not complicated, and completely in love with him, Ethel drew her husband out of himself, and helped him become the self-confident operator who made even strong men jump, who made Jimmy Hoffa tremble and Lyndon Johnson wince.

His other relationships with women are more difficult to decipher. There was, of course, Marilyn Monroe; even Schlesinger conceded, in his oblique, literary way, that there was a bond between the two, that Bobby, “with his curiosity, his sympathy, his absolute directness of response to distress,” “got through” the “glittering mist” that surrounded Monroe “as few did.”
5
Jean Kennedy Smith supposedly wrote Monroe a letter in the early sixties in which she joked that “you and Bobby are the new item.”
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But what did the bond amount to? A casual friendship? A passing dalliance? A grand affair? The fragmentary glimpses that history affords are hardly dispositive. A dinner party at Pat and Peter Lawford's Santa Monica beach house in October 1961: Marilyn drank too much champagne, and Bobby and Ed Guthman, concerned for her safety, drove her home.
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Another dinner party at the Lawford house in February 1962, where among guests who included Kim Novak, Natalie Wood, and Janet Leigh, Marilyn questioned Bobby about his civil rights program and may have taught him how to dance the twist.
8
A party at Arthur Krim's Manhattan penthouse in May 1962, on the evening that Marilyn sang “Happy Birthday” to the President at Madison Square Garden: Bobby dodged about the actress that night “like a moth around the flame,” or so Adlai Stevenson remembered.
9
A log of telephone calls from the actress to the Attorney General's office at the Justice Department during the last melancholy summer of Monroe's life.
10
That is all; the rest is speculation, or gossip.
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His relationship with his sister-in-law Jacqueline is only slightly less difficult to interpret. He had, while his brother lived, been as solicitous of her as a brother-in-law could be; it was Bobby, after all, not Jack, who rushed to Jacqueline's bedside in Newport in 1956 when she was prematurely delivered of a baby that soon afterward died. (Jack was enjoying himself on a yacht in the Mediterranean and apparently overcame the urge to hurry home.) After the President's death the bond between the two deepened. They spent long hours together beside the fire in Averell Harriman's Georgetown drawing room. They flew to Antigua. (Ethel stayed home.) He was a frequent guest at her Fifth Avenue apartment. Their intimacy has been variously characterized as the chivalrous courtesy a man owed his brother's widow, as a spiritual tutorial in which a latter-day Diotima broadened her pupil's intellectual and moral horizons, even as something more purely Greek: an affair rooted in a tragic and doomed desire to honor a dead beloved brother and husband. Whatever the truth of their relationship, for Bobby it was almost certainly yet another exercise in the all-important business of confidence building. If he gave her the courage to face a new life, she gave him the confidence to read books and poetry and to discuss openly those questions, of life and death and love and suffering, that Kennedys tended to avoid.

And she led him to the Greeks. By putting
The Greek Way
into Bobby's hands, Jacqueline Kennedy introduced her brother-in-law to the tragic poetry that helped him make sense of his own family's sufferings—and put him on the road that led to his discovery of the Hellenic idea of community. The tragic poets of Athens, in celebrating the shame and suffering of the family, point their audience in the direction of a supposedly nobler ideal, that of the polis. The birth of tragedy is the death of family: the death of family as a high ideal, the highest social ideal a man can have. Like the early Greeks, the Kennedys, too, had made family the highest ideal; but now Bobby, an Aeschylus in his hands, was ready to look away from the messy complications of family, was ready to look, as Aeschylus had looked, to the community for salvation instead. The tragedies performed in the shadow of the Acropolis proclaimed the advent of a new dispensation; the soaring city, resplendent in marble, the embodiment of reason and justice, was, the audience was assured, altogether superior to the old ideal of bloodshed in the name of consanguinity. This transition from family politics to polis politics is usually taken to be a sign of progress, one of the West's great leaps forward: instead of being hacked to death by the Furies for murdering his mother, Orestes is, in the final play of Bobby's favorite tragic trilogy, lawfully tried by a tribunal of Athenian citizens. The polis, not the family, emerges victorious in the
Oresteia.
Athens is the real hero of Aeschylus' play, not the discredited House of Atreus. Bobby was himself a member of what Gore Vidal (perhaps only half in jest) called the Riverdale House of Atreus; and, like the fifth-century Greeks, he was ready to look beyond the ideal of family, was ready to embrace the cleaner, less complicated ethos of community.

Had he fallen into a trap? Had the poets led him astray? The blessings of the polis are obvious enough: our notions of law and order, democratic governance, etc., descend from it. Its curse is more subtle, is to be found in the vague and abstract ideal of community—a vapidly defined “common good” or “general will”—that it enshrines, a pleasing ideal that diverts us from the messier realities of life, the messier realities of the family. The enduring themes of family—the sacrifices we must make for our spouses, our children, our parents—are ignored: the great communitarian myth makers, from Plato and Livy to Rousseau and Marx, escape these questions by telling us instead about the sacrifices we must make for our community. The Kennedys were masters of the high rhetoric of community (“Ask not what your country can do for you…,” and all that). The problem with their rhetoric lay in its loftiness; many of our most pressing problems exist not at the exalted level of community, but at the humbler level of the family. Families, not communities, are the nurseries of productive citizens.

Why Bobby Couldn't Talk About Family

W
HY DID
B
OBBY
, in seeking a solution to America's problems in the sixties, avoid the problems of family? Why did he shrink from the eternal questions of the relations between men and women, their differing needs and desires, their struggle to accommodate these in the institution of marriage, in order that families might flourish? Why did he take refuge instead in a vapid politics of community?

In part because of the tendencies of his times. A politician courting certain liberal constituencies in that era could hardly afford to speak candidly about, say, the problems of the black family; those who tried found themselves accused of insensitivity—and worse. The sixties, too, witnessed the beginnings of a sexual revolution that altered the moral landscape of the West; a politician who proclaimed the importance of what are now called family values would have been perceived as disappointingly old-fashioned. And, of course, the troubled lives of Bobby's own relations prevented him from speaking out frankly on the question of family. He had, it is true, done a better job with his own marriage than any of his brothers had done with theirs, and yet it would still have been difficult for him to talk about the importance, say, of honoring one's marriage vows when such talk would have given reporters yet another excuse to mention the breakdown of Pat's marriage to Peter Lawford, or Steve Smith's philandering, or the loveless marriage of Ted and Joan Kennedy, or Jack Kennedy's satyriasis—or even Bobby's own reported interest in the pretty blondes who filled a number of positions on his staff.
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