The Last Patrician (32 page)

None of this, of course, explains why Bobby's statesmanship has been so often misunderstood, explains why so many people have insisted on looking upon a small number of his sillier gestures—his profession of sympathy for a misguided Marxist, his interest in the radical left, his encounters with Tom Hayden and the Jefferson Airplane—as the key to an understanding of his politics. Both he and his older brother said that he could not be understood in terms of conventional labels, that it was impossible to classify him as either a liberal or a conservative. But the habit of claiming him for the left persists. I suppose this is so partly because he was a rebel and a dissenter, and we all but instinctively associate rebels and dissenters with the left. But dissent is not the exclusive property of the left. There was in Bobby's rage at the insensitivity of modern institutions a quality reminiscent of John Ruskin, the English moralist and critic who condemned the world the Enlightenment had made, and yet it would be difficult to call Ruskin, a self-professed Tory of the “old school,” a conventional figure of the left.

The great Romantic rebels against Enlightenment, the rebels who trusted the ideals of the Greeks and of medieval Christendom more than they trusted modern notions of progress and Enlightenment, cannot properly be claimed by either the right or the left. Those rebels may have been, like Burke, like Newman, like Scott, like Ruskin himself, deeply conservative in their general orientation, but conservatism is not an exclusively right-wing phenomenon any more than dissent is an exclusively left-wing one. When it is divorced from the superficial garb of progress, science, and Enlightenment in which it is so often dressed, a great portion of the radical thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be seen to have been distinctly conservative in its ends; the radicals sought to conserve as much as they sought to destroy, sought to conserve the values of an older and, as they supposed, a better society than seemed likely to flourish under modern conditions. Even the nineteenth-century liberalism of Lincoln and Emerson was, in a curious way, conservative; it was a liberalism that sought to conserve the idea of the sacredness of the individual in a world where that idea is constantly under attack. Insofar as they were radicals, Lincoln's and Emerson's was a conservative radicalism, a radicalism that celebrated the power and potential of the free, unhindered individual. If one were forced to affix a label to Bobby, one could do worse than to describe him as a Tory radical, a Romantic conservative, in the tradition of Ruskin. Such a classification makes a good deal more sense than attempts to classify him as a progressive radical along the lines of Tom Hayden and Che Guevara, or as a progressive liberal in the style of Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson.

The Ambivalent Conservative

C
ONTEMPORARY OBSERVERS WERE
on to Bobby's complexity. But after his death they conspired to forget the more original (and, to some, the more troubling) aspects of his statesmanship; they succeeded in persuading themselves that they were burying a pious liberal martyr. They remembered the progressive, nodded to the radical, and promptly forgot the conservative. Bobby
was
a conservative, conservative not only in the modern sense that he believed in the potential of free men and free markets, but in the older sense that he believed in learning from, and building on, ancient intellectual and cultural traditions, traditions whose value had been sanctioned by time and custom, traditions that could help people to act confidently in a complicated world. His use of tradition was very different from, say, T. S. Eliot's. Eliot used tradition as a weapon: he used it to criticize, to condemn, to condescend to an Enlightened world he did not like. Bobby, on the contrary, accepted the modern, market-oriented world in which he found himself, and he accepted the theory of liberal individualism, the creed of Emerson and Lincoln, that underlay it. If he recognized the limits of the world that free markets had brought into being, he never repudiated that world. A tradition like the old Hellenic cult of community could, he believed, give men the strength and the confidence to prosper in it.

In reconciling his commitment to nineteenth-century theories of liberal individualism with his belief in the importance of those intellectual and cultural traditions that are the most valuable legacy of the past, Bobby used the past, not ironically, like Eliot, or frivolously, like the postmodernists, but constructively and practically, in a way that strengthened rather than undermined the first principles of his Enlightened nation. His approach to both the traditions of the past and the principles of the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment was in great contrast to the approach of the Stimsonians who, under cover of theories of economic planning and control derived largely from the French Enlightenment and European socialism, sought to revive traditional notions, like the feudal notion of noblesse oblige, that have no place in a modern democratic society. The Stimsonians sought to transfer much of the political power that belongs by right to free and independent citizens to administrative and judicial bureaucracies that were largely insulated from electoral control.

Bobby condemned the welfare state. But he never made a clean break with it. He indeed helped to inspire two very different trends. One sees this in the subsequent careers of the two bright young men upon whom he so greatly relied for advice and counsel during his Senate years. Peter Edelman became an ardent defender of the welfare state; he married Marian Wright; he advocated a guaranteed minimum income; he resigned his position in the welfare state when President Clinton signed the welfare reform bill in 1996. Adam Walinsky traveled in a different direction. Obsessed with the growth of crime and the decline of public order in the United States, Walinsky, who has argued that “the federal welfare system began the destruction of black family life” that helped to bring about the “huge increase in violence” in the nation's cities, has spent the last fifteen years advocating the creation of a militant domestic version of the Peace Corps called the Police Corps, an organization that he hopes will enable America to put at least half a million new police officers on the streets by the end of the decade.
3
(Walinsky shrugs off suggestions that his efforts to deploy massive amounts of police power in America's cities would turn police officers into an urban “army of occupation”; the cities, he observes, are already occupied by “hostile bands of brigands”
4
).

In what direction would Bobby himself have traveled? We don't know. The right was suspicious of Bobby—but so was the left. The
Ramparts
journalist Robert Scheer thought Bobby particularly dangerous because he
seemed
like a radical but really wasn't one; he provided “the illusion of dissent without its substance.” Bobby was, Scheer thought, a deeply orthodox figure, a believer in America's free-enterprise system, one who looked to it to solve many of the nation's problems.
5

The End of the American Enlightenment and the Question of American Pain

H
E WAS TORN
between the Enlightened idea that a statesman ought to offer something new and better and his own realization that the intoxicating and medicinal properties of old wine are very often superior to those of more recent vintage. It has always been necessary for the successful American statesman to seem to be offering something new, something that promises to deliver his constituents from the evils of the moment, something that has about it the visionary gleam of miraculous progress—an escape from pain. Proposals for new deals, new frontiers, and new covenants—for new world orders and great new beginnings—for new heavens and new earths—have been so common in our history as to have made novelty itself un-novel. Bobby was himself much given to exploiting this American weakness for visionary poetry; he frequently invoked Shaw's belief that there are two kinds of men: some who see things as they are and ask “Why?” and others who dream of things that never were and ask “Why not?” Bobby was not above resorting to such a cheap lollipop as this; it was a kind of Kennedy signature, one that gave the impression that Americans were going on to grander things, a better world, a new republic, without disclosing exactly how this wonderful progress was to be achieved.
Friend, go up higher.
But really the most original, the most novel, aspect of Bobby's statesmanship was his willingness to see the usefulness of older, pre-Enlightened ideas (like the Hellenic idea of community) in mitigating the terror of a modern world governed only by the morals of the marketplace and vast impersonal bureaucracies. He was unembarrassed to admit how much we, the most modern of peoples, could benefit from the ancient traditions of our civilization. We might not be able to
escape
our pain, but the older creeds could at least teach us how to live with it.

His relevance today? He reminds liberals of the importance of remaining true to the nineteenth-century liberalism of Emerson and Lincoln; he teaches them that reforms should help to create self-reliance and self-respect in individuals, not undermine those qualities. Turn the safety “net” into a trampoline. And he reminds liberals not to overlook the value inherent in older strategies for dealing with pain. He reminds conservatives that any genuine conservatism must be allied to compassion, and that, in their devotion to the principles of a free market, conservatives should not forget their obligations to the less fortunate among us. He was an imperfect man, possessed of many grievous faults, and yet we may number him among the saints.

Sources

Below is a list of sources consulted, together with the abbreviations used in the notes.