The Last Patrician (28 page)

Marriage is by its nature a fragile institution, and the family, though it is the most fundamental, is also among the most delicate of social units. The marital strains experienced by the Kennedys in the 1960s were experienced by millions of others as well: it was for this reason that the Kennedys were in such an ideal position to talk about those strains, strains felt in the impoverished inner-city families that Mr. Moynihan's report described no less than in the prosperous suburban territory charted by Mr. Updike in
Couples
(published the year Bobby died). But any attempt by Bobby to talk about the fragility of families would have done more than cause the press to dredge up tabloid muck: it would have forced him to talk about a subject more taboo even than family.

Religion is, of course, the great bulwark of family. Family and religion were, Schlesinger said, the rocks upon which Bobby's own Irish forebears had built their new life in America.
13
Bobby, however, was reluctant to talk about religion in public, even though religion meant a great deal to him in his own private life. It is too bad. Without religion, the institution of marriage—the foundation of family life—is no longer the product of vows made solemnly before God; it is just another contract, less binding, even, than a mortgage obligation.

The Other Tradition

O
NE BEGINS TO
understand, then, why Bobby should have overlooked a tradition that, unlike the communitarian tradition of ancient Hellas, does form a part of our heritage and our traditions. One begins to understand why he should have overlooked those institutions that have always exerted a degree of influence in our communities, and have shown an unparalleled ability to deal compassionately with the individual human soul. The temper of the times was against it; for Bobby there could be no alliance between church and state in the war against poverty.

The potential inherent in the churches, the synagogues, and the mosques, with their deep roots in the community soil, with their traditions of compassion and charity, with their capacity to nourish not only the body, but also the soul, was, of course, always very great; it would be difficult to conceive of a more effective agency than religion for dispensing hope to the hopeless. Jonathan Kozol has shown us how much these places mean in the poorest neighborhoods in America. “In one of the most diseased and dangerous communities of any city in the Western world,” Kozol wrote of the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, “the beautiful old stone church on St. Ann's Avenue is a gentle sanctuary from the terrors of the streets outside.”
14
To go there, he says, is to be immediately aware of the “presence of small children.” “They seem to be everywhere: in the garden, in the hallways, in the kitchen, in the chapel, on the stair.”
15

So-called faith-based rescue programs, programs that emphasize religious notions of love, compassion, and individual self-worth, have demonstrated a remarkable ability to help people without homes, jobs, or both, gain the kind of confidence in themselves that leads to the rebuilding of shattered lives.
16
These programs have rescued thousands of men and women from dependence, addiction, and despair and guided them to lives of self-reliance and self-respect.
17
Even without the benefit of federal subsidies—for the federal government has until recently refused to support “faith-based” programs—the churches, the synagogues, and the mosques have done more to
improve
the lives of the downtrodden (as opposed to merely perpetuating their miserable status quo) than a host of federal welfare programs. If these institutions, rather than the dreary welfare office, could have been made the focal point for the distribution of some part of the nation's public charity and compassion, who knows what the result might have been? For once the government might have done something to remedy the problems of poverty, homelessness, and unemployment that continue to plague the inner city without erecting a vast (and expensive) federal infrastructure to do so, for, of course, the bricks and mortar are already there. There are churches in every neighborhood in America, and synagogues and mosques in many of them. But the jealous tenets and petty animosities of the Enlightenment have been taken, in America, to their ultimate conclusions, their furthest extreme, and we have been led to believe that any cooperation between government and religion, whether in the education of children, the maintenance of public morals, or the feeding and clothing of the poor, will be fatal to the principles of our coldly secular state, and will inevitably set us on the road to the dictatorship of a theocracy.

The idea that government might usefully cooperate with religion, and provide the churches, the synagogues, the mosques, with a portion of those funds that now course through the byzantine channels of the federal welfare bureaucracy, would have been dismissed out of hand by even the most open-minded reformers of the sixties as a prima facie violation of the First Amendment. To be sure, government agencies have in the past helped to fund certain charitable programs sponsored by churches, but in order to qualify for these funds, such programs have typically been required to eliminate the very faith-based elements that account for their astonishing success.
18
A federally funded faith-based rescue program would almost certainly fail the Supreme Court's
Lemon
test, so called because of a 1971 case,
Lemon v. Kurtzman,
in which the Court held that government subsidies that “advance or inhibit” religion are unconstitutional.
19
Bobby, contemptuous though he eventually became of much of the conventional wisdom of his day, could not break with the liberal consensus on so delicate a point as this. Although the arguments against the cooperation between church and state in the war on poverty were singularly unpersuasive, any attempt by Bobby to move very far in that direction would have cost him critical support in his own party. He would have been crucified, not indeed upon the altar of the First Amendment, but upon the altar of that frigid, fanatical ideal of absolute secularism that the First Amendment has been twisted into meaning.
20

The Cross or the Capitol

E
MERSON DID NOT
dwell on the problem of failure in American life. His friend Thoreau did; Thoreau did not shrink from exposing the quiet desperation that underlies so many apparently solid, placid, respectable American lives. Emerson shrank from the oppressive reality. The world of second mortgages, compound interest, the lost job, the unfulfilling career, the wrecked marriage: it was unreal to him. “But when you have chosen your part,” Emerson said, “abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world.” Fair enough. But what of those men and women who, though unreconciled to the world, fail in their attempt to stand up to it, and are crushed by the power of those “badges and names,” those “large societies and dead institutions,” that Emerson chastises us for too easily capitulating to? What comfort can Emerson give
them?
Their money back? An autographed copy of “Self-Reliance”? A subscription to Dale Carnegie's course? Melville was only the first critic to perceive how perilously close the apostle of self-confidence came to being just another riverboat confidence man.
21

The great virtue of religion, of course, is not so much its ability to help men succeed, although, of course, it
can
help them succeed. The great virtue of religion lies in its ability to console men in the midst of failure, to permit them to function even in the midst of despair. Bobby, however, was curiously oblivious of the consoling powers of religion. If he was a devout Catholic, he was also a troubled one. He “did not talk much about religion,” vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman report.
22
He found his “primary solace in Greek impressions of character and fate,” Schlesinger says.
23
He continued to be a practicing Catholic. But he was uneasy in his faith.
24

Part of the problem was politics. Bobby believed that the Church was too conservative, that it was out of touch with contemporary life. Hugh Carey told him that the Church was a “problem” in Brooklyn, and Bobby at once accepted the revelation as true.
25
Bobby told Pope Paul VI that the Church was a “reactionary force” in Los Angeles.
26
He wondered “why the kids who came out of parochial school” were “so conservative.”
27
Though he regularly attended Mass, and wore a St. Christopher medal round his neck, the ancient traditions of his faith seemed to mean little to him; he was always urging the Church to become more “contemporary” in its orientation.
28
He welcomed those Vatican II reforms that did so much to undermine a number of the Church's oldest traditions. Bobby, the sympathetic celebrant of the cult of the polis, saw much less practical or spiritual value in the creed that had vanquished paganism and erected the banner of the Cross on the ruins of the Capitol. The deep piety of his boyhood was gone; he had become a secular man, one who was instinctively attracted to Greek ideals of citizenship and patriotism. The City of Man appealed to him in a way that the City of God did not. A Catholic from habit, he was a Greek by inclination, and to the end of his life remained curiously blind to the transformative power of religion. When in 1966 he set about asking the Paleys and Dillons of the world for help in Bedford-Stuyvesant, he neglected to call the bishop of Brooklyn. The bishop “very badly wanted to help,” according to a 1966 memorandum from Walinsky to Bobby. But he had not been asked to.
29

I wonder whether there was not another reason why Bobby should have been ambivalent about the social virtues of religion. He had seen, in his mother's life, the ability of religion not only to console but also to detach, to isolate. Perhaps it had been in Rose's nature to incline toward solitude, to be always, in Red Fay's words, “out of the loop,” a “very lonely person,” one who spent many hours by herself walking on the beach or lost in prayerful reverie.
30
Perhaps her powerful husband, so adept at encouraging his children, had failed sufficiently to encourage her—failed to encourage her to develop those social impulses that had rather touchingly manifested themselves, when she was young, in her “Ace of Clubs,” a social group dedicated to the social and intellectual improvement of its members.
31
Whatever the cause of Rose's tendency to solipsism, she found, in religion, an excuse for indulging it more fully than was healthy, found in it an excuse for evading the world rather than coming to terms with it. The variety of religious faith with which Bobby was most familiar was his mother's, and her example must at times have made him doubt whether the creed that dominated her life was indeed the ideal one to draw people out into the world and give them the strength to act confidently in it.

Bobby did not break with all the Enlightened dogmas of his age. It was achievement enough to have broken with some. Like Disraeli before him, he found in the pre-Enlightened past the inspiration for a modern politics of compassion, and he softened the dogmas of nineteenth-century liberal individualism by recognizing how necessary it was to preserve certain of the older traditions of the West. Disraeli (and the other partisans of the Young England movement, of which he was the most illustrious representative) had hoped that religion might serve as the basis for a modern politics of compassion; in his novel
Tancred
Disraeli declared that Englishmen must look upon the Church of England as the “main remedial agency” in the “present state” of crisis: only the Church, he said, could supply the “machinery” by which “results might be realised.”
32
Bobby, of course, looked not to religion for results, but to community, to the ancient Hellenic tradition of the polis. Although that choice seems now to have been a mistaken one, it should not be permitted to detract from the man's larger achievement, that of demonstrating how pre-Enlightenment traditions could be made the inspiration for a post-Enlightenment politics.

16

Early in 1967 there were rumors that Hanoi had changed its position on negotiations with the United States; that it had dropped its insistence that a series of improbable conditions be met before it would come to the bargaining table; and that it was now insisting upon a single condition, that the United States halt its aerial bombardment of targets in the north. Bobby, in Paris at the end of his European tour, heard as much from Etienne Manac'h, an official in the Ministère des Affaires étrangères who was in close communication with the North Vietnamese Mission at Paris. Bobby was accompanied to his meeting in the Quai d'Orsay by an American diplomat, John Gunther Dean, who concluded that the French official's source was important enough to warrant a cable to Washington. Upon returning to the embassy, Dean dispatched a report to his superiors at the State Department. By the time Bobby's airplane touched down in the United States, the story was out: the North Vietnamese had made an important peace overture through the unlikely channel of a French diplomat and an American Senator in Paris.
1

President Johnson believed that any indication of America's eagerness for peace threatened to upset his prosecution of the war; in a meeting with Bobby a few days after the “peace feeler” story broke, he accused the Senator of having himself informed the newspapers of his conversations in the Quai d'Orsay. Bobby denied it; he said that the President's own State Department was responsible for the press reports. “It's not
my
State Department, goddamn it,” the President replied. “It's
your
State Department.”
2
A presidential tirade followed. “I'll destroy you and every one of your dove friends in six months,” Johnson said. “You'll be dead politically in six months.”
Time
magazine claimed that Bobby responded to Johnson's threats by calling the President a son of a bitch to his face. But this was apparently an exaggeration. Bobby did, however, tell the President that he did not have to “take” the kind of abuse to which the President was subjecting him.
3