The Last Patrician (7 page)

What Groton knocked out of little Joseph Alsop, Milton just as efficaciously knocked out of little Bobby Kennedy. Bobby threw himself into football and made friends with the greatest athlete in the school. Dave Hackett was, a contemporary recalled, “the hero of our school, captain of teams and those things.”
13
It was upon this golden boy that the character of Phineas in
A Separate Peace
was apparently modeled.
14
It is said that the author of that morbid little volume encountered Hackett one summer at Exeter, where Hackett had been enrolled in the summer school. Hackett possessed such glamour that the smallest boys in the school followed him everywhere he went. And yet this magnanimous Steerforth was not as confident as everyone supposed him to be. He was tormented by feelings of worthlessness, and inexplicably believed himself to be a misfit. In Bobby he perceived a kindred spirit. Bobby was, Hackett said, “neither a natural athlete nor a natural student nor a natural success with girls and had no gift for popularity.” As Steerforth had taken the sympathetic young Copperfield under his wing, so Hackett took the sympathetic young Bobby under his. “They spent a lot of time wrestling,” one schoolmate remembered, “and going in each other's room and throwing things out the window and wearing each other's clothes and generally horseplaying around.” Bobby eventually became known around the school as Hackett's friend, his
best
friend.
15
(The friendship was to be an enduring one, even as the balance of power between the two shifted; many years after their graduation from Milton, Bobby, riding with Hackett in one of those long black limousines that are made available to the Attorney General, looked at his old friend, laughed, and said, “Dave can't remember when it was I got ahead of him.”
16
) Though far from being a natural athlete like Hackett, Bobby persevered in his pursuit of football immortality, and eventually achieved it when, unlike his older brothers, he made the varsity squad at Harvard.
17
It was a dubious victory. For the first time in his life, classmates began to remark not on Bobby's sensitivity or his shyness, but on his brusqueness, his coldness, his insolence. One Harvard classmate recalled him as a “nasty, brutal, humorless little fellow.” Another described him as “callow and tough,” a “remote figure,” a “sort of a football player.”
18

Scholarship, predictably enough, was a purely secondary matter. If Bobby professed concern about his poor grades—lamented the fact that he was not “hitting the honors” the way his older brothers had—he wasn't
that
concerned; the Stimsonian aristocracy winked at poor scholarship.
19
Even Jack Kennedy, the most intellectual of the Kennedy children, lacked the discipline to put his senior thesis into a coherent form; it was Arthur Krock who transformed that piece into the book
Why England Slept.
20
A college essay on the French king Francis I makes it clear that the future Pulitzer Prize winner was no Gibbon.
21
If Jack's scholarship left something to be desired, Bobby's was still more primitive. He was a thoroughgoing C student, one whose intellectual horizons were correspondingly limited. For years his reading was confined largely to books on the best-seller lists.
22
Bobby's college grades were not good enough for admission to Harvard Law School; for a time there was some doubt as to whether Virginia would have him.
23

It was not his mind alone that suffered. The spirit showed signs of atrophy as well. Whatever depths of feeling had existed within him—whatever passions had inspired thoughts of a life of religious contemplation—they were suppressed, forgotten, ignored. Though Bobby was in some ways the most interesting—the most imaginative, the most passionate, the most questioning—of the Kennedy siblings, he emerged from Milton and Harvard an orthodox and, if the truth be told, an uninteresting figure. The romantic young Irishman whom Schlesinger gives us, lost in a Yeatsian melancholy, is largely a creature of fiction.
24
The young Bobby differed hardly at all from those of his contemporaries who left school, in E. M. Forster's words, possessed of “well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and undeveloped hearts.”
25
A distinguishing feature of the Stimsonian aristocracy was its hostility to reflection, self-examination, the cultivation of the imagination. For years Bobby shared this hostility. His greatest admirers admit that he was “a man unprepared for introspection.”
26
The Stimsonian creed was a formula for practical, not spiritual, success; it taught its disciples not to come to better terms with the root agony of existence, or to gain some new insight into its causes, but to lose sight of it in the press of affairs. As might be expected, the Stimsonians left behind them a tremendous legacy of practical achievement, but little of intellectual or imaginative excellence. They produced a vast quantity of legislation, but little literature. Other great political aristocracies had produced statesmen who excelled, not only in practical business, but in intellectual and imaginative endeavors as well. The Victorians had Disraeli to their credit, and the Georgians Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox. The founders of the American republic, with whom the Stimsonians are sometimes compared, included men (like Hamilton and Jefferson) whose intellectual achievements were no less memorable than their political activities. The intellectual and imaginative achievement of the Stimsonians was more slender. It is only because Bobby broke with their faith that he has any claim upon our attention today.

4

East Hampton airport, Labor Day weekend, the middle nineties. Waiting for friends, I happen by chance to encounter members of the golden family itself. Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and her husband, Ed, have arrived, together with assorted children, and are stepping out of a single-engine plane. I fail to recognize them; my eyes are fixed on the sleek jet that has just landed, bearing who knows what contemporary American eminence. Would the not particularly tall woman wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat, sunglasses, and a red-and-white-striped shirt please get out of the way, that I might witness the triumphant disembarkation of Mr. Geffen or Mr. Spielberg or Mr. and Mrs. Alec Baldwin? My wife gently gives me to understand that I have failed to recognize the real aristocrats in my midst; they have walked past me and are now struggling with their luggage. Someone has come to greet them: he is dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt; the face is youthful but the hair thick and gray, a look that President Clinton and Richard Gere have apparently made popular. Is he famous, too? To my wife's displeasure I stare at the progeny of the exalted dynasty. It is, of course, a really shameless thing to do, but I comfort myself with the thought that Pepys himself used to go and stare at the Queen while she dined at Greenwich.

I stare, but in truth I am disappointed. It might be too much to expect the pomp of a Veronese, but Kodachrome alone could do justice to this. Was there anything in the least aristocratic about the rather ordinary people who had just passed by me? Were
they
patricians? And if they were not, was there any point in my trying to demonstrate that the founder of their family's fortunes had sold out to an aristocracy that never ceased to regard his entrepreneurial successes as the dishonest achievement of a common thief? Perhaps Caroline Kennedy's father, or even one of her uncles, would have made a more dramatic entrance; they, after all, avidly
sought
the fame from which she so instinctively shrinks. Jack Kennedy's comings and goings, by all accounts, possessed a certain splendor even before he dragged a presidential entourage. But must one endow his glamour with a political meaning? Must one call it an
aristocratic
glamour? It is true that, in our loose and casual talk, we speak of the Kennedys as being America's “royal” family, and of its scions as being our “princes.” But this is the frippery of conversation; we do not really mean to imply that the country has abandoned its republican forms, that there has been a violation of the constitutional injunction against titles of nobility.
1
Do we not let our imaginations outstrip the reality when we speak of the existence of an American aristocracy, or of the Kennedys and the Roosevelts as constituting an indigenous American nobility? Do we not deceive ourselves when we pretend to discover, in our public life, the elaborate forms of the Old World, when in reality there is nothing but the prosaic republican reality of the New?

“In all ages,” the great historian Ronald Syme wrote, “whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the façade.”
2
What distinguished the twentieth-century Stimsonian oligarchy from those that came before and those that came after it was the sheer audacity of its aristocratic pretensions. The Stimsonians could never get away with it today, could never have gotten away with it even in the era of Jackson and Lincoln. The two Roosevelts made a great show of trying to help the Common Man, the Forgotten Man, the Average Man, but they never made any pretension to being, like Jackson and Lincoln, like Eisenhower and Reagan, common men themselves. They were gentlemen, not common men. They were fascinated by European nobility (Franklin Roosevelt was particularly fond of royalty). Not since the days of Hamilton had American statesmen been so ready to acknowledge a debt to England and her aristocratic system. The Stimsonians attended faux English public schools and studied at real English universities; they belonged to English clubs and corresponded with English peers. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who owed his Supreme Court seat to Theodore Roosevelt's love of intelligent preppies (he “is just our type,” Roosevelt would gush when he singled out such a preppy for preferment), counted his trips to England among the great blessings of his life.
3
Holmes liked to say that “nature was an aristocrat, or at least makes aristocrats,” and once complained that he had to go to England for proper appreciation of his scholarship: the American mind was too “lax” to comprehend it. Decades before Ralph Lauren made a fortune selling Americans on a New Yorker's vision of the life of the English gentry, the Stimsonians reverenced the quintessentially English institutions of the country house and the gentlemen's club. Until relatively recently the interiors of respectable Wall Street firms, though tucked away in modern skyscrapers, bore an uncanny resemblance to Brooks's or White's or the Carlton Club, replete with wood paneling, oil paintings, and working fireplaces.

English Suits and Garden Parties

T
HAT
B
OBBY WAS
influenced by the aristocratic ethos of the Stimsonians is difficult to deny. Simply look at his house. Rhetoric may deceive; bricks and mortar do not. Joseph Kennedy, fearful of being labeled a parvenu, might have shunned baronial splendor in favor of New England simplicity. Not Bobby. In 1957 he moved his family to the Virginia estate known as Hickory Hill, a large Georgian manor house set on half a dozen acres of landscaped grounds.
4
It was horse country, and the Kennedys soon added new stables (as well as a tennis court and the now-celebrated swimming pool).
5
Far more than the cold perfection of Jack and Jacqueline's Georgetown showpiece, with its eighteenth-century antiques and tastefully selected art, Hickory Hill was an aristocratic establishment, tended by more than a dozen servants, and alive with the careless exuberance of a prosperous young noble couple.
6
It was a house filled with children, animals, and a constant stream of distinguished visitors. Jack Kennedy loved David Cecil's evocations of the country houses of the eighteenth-century Whig nobility, but he was not fated to live in such a house himself.
7
Jacqueline Kennedy's exquisitely furnished, beautifully arranged, and coldly classical interiors made a visitor instantly aware of the chatelaine's icy reserve; breaches of decorum—such as Gore Vidal's drunken behavior at a White House dinner party in 1961—were swiftly and effectively punished.
8
It was Bobby, not Jack, who realized Cecil's splendid vision in his own life, in a house “alive with the effort and hurry of politics,” a house that resembled, in its energy and unrehearsed elegance, the great Whig establishments that Jack adored. Cecil's evocation of the “splendid naturalness” of those houses still beguiles. Though they are “among the most conspicuous monuments of English history,” the Whig houses “are not palaces.” There is

something easygoing and unofficial about them. Between the library and the saloon one comes on little rooms, full of sporting prints and comfortable untidiness;… less designed for state occasions than for private life—for leisure and lounging, for intimate talk and desultory reading.… The Whig lord was as often as not a minister, his eldest son an M.P., his second son attached to a foreign embassy.… Red Foreign Office boxes strewed the library tables; at any time of day or night a courier might come galloping up with critical news, and the minister must post off to London to attend a Cabinet meeting.
9

When Bobby himself was not forced to post off to Cabinet meetings in Washington, he and Ethel threw lavish parties at Hickory Hill. Those soirées have since become the stuff of legend: the masquerade party in celebration of Averell Harriman's seventy-fifth birthday in November 1966; the famous pet shows over which Bobby's court jester, Art Buchwald, presided; the epochal fete at which Arthur Schlesinger went shooting over Alice Roosevelt Longworth's shoulder into the swimming pool. “Ethel was so naughty for doing it,” Mrs. Longworth said.
10
“How sweet the occasions were!” Teddy White exclaimed.
11
One never knew whom to expect; one might come upon Bob McNamara and Byron White playing hide-and-seek in the big house, or Chip Bohlen and Georgei Bolshakov sitting in a quiet corner discussing Russian politics, or Bobby himself, in the library, deep in conversation with Gene Kelly, the actor.
12
How different, the columnist Joseph Kraft thought, were these chaotic and “mixed up” affairs from the “layered and structured” parties Jack and Jacqueline gave at the White House.
13
At Hickory Hill one encountered such dissimilar personages as George Plimpton, Colonel Glenn, André Malraux, and Lord and Lady Harlech.
14
It was not, of course, all fun and games, mornings on horseback and evenings beside the pool. Aristocracy had not merely its privileges but its duties as well, and ever mindful of these, Bobby asked Arthur Schlesinger to arrange a series of educational seminars at Hickory Hill and the White House. Hardly less glamorous than the Kennedy pool parties, the seminars were all-star intellectual galas, and featured such academic luminaries as Sir Isaiah Berlin, then the Chichele professor of social and political theory at Oxford and a fellow of All Soul's, A. J. Ayer, another Oxford philosopher, and John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist who'd helped administer FDR's system of wartime price controls and who in the early sixties was representing Camelot in India.