The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  The gentleness wasn’t only with children after, in December, 1961, a stroke left his father permanently crippled and virtually unable to speak. Bobby maintained that Jack, “because he really made him laugh,” was “the best” with Joe Kennedy after the stroke, but others had a different opinion, although with Bobby it wasn’t always about laughing. “Bobby would fly down to Palm Beach at 6 AM, and be back at noon, just to say hello for fifteen minutes,” says White House Social Secretary Tish Baldridge. During summers at Hyannis Port, he would exercise with his father every day in the swimming pool. Says one of Joe Kennedy’s nurses: “During the years that followed [the stroke], I watched Bobby strengthen his father, laughing with him, praising him, then he would swim away. His eyes would fill with tears, and a look of deep sorrow would cloud his face, but he would quickly compose himself, and begin once more doing what he could to assist him in his therapy.” Once, in Palm Beach, when Jack and Bobby were visiting him, the old man rose from his wheelchair to try to walk, but began to fall. Bobby grabbed him, but his father, in frustration, began to struggle, wildly swinging his cane at him. When, with the help of a doctor, he was finally back in his wheelchair, he kept screaming and shaking his fist at his son. Bobby leaned over and kissed him. “Dad,” he said, “if you want to get up, give me your arm and I’ll hold you till you get your balance.… That’s what I’m here for, Dad. Just to give you a hand when you need it. You’ve done that for me all my life, so why can’t I do the same for you now?”

  There were hints in the way he acted with everyone who was a member of his family when there was trouble.

  When, after the 1956 convention, his pregnant sister-in-law, Jacqueline, was rushed to a hospital in Newport, Rhode Island, at 2 a.m., it was not her husband but her brother-in-law, with whom she had never been particularly close, who was sitting by her bed when she awakened from the anesthetic. “Jack,” as another of Bobby’s biographers, Evan Thomas, puts it, “was off cruising in the Mediterranean with two of his fellow pleasure-seekers, his brother Ted and Senator George Smathers.” When Rose had called Bobby to tell him what had happened, he had driven through the night from Hyannis Port to be there with her. It was Bobby who told her that she had lost her child. When Jack, as Thomas puts it, “did not rush back,” it was Bobby who arranged for the infant’s burial. He never told Jackie that; when, years later, after they had endured other troubles together, she learned that it had been he who had done so, she said she wasn’t surprised to hear it. “You knew that, if you were in trouble, he’d always be there.”

  And it was the way he acted sometimes with people who were not members of the family, like an elderly Supreme Court Justice, too old to remain on the bench: at one of Felix Frankfurter’s last public appearances before he retired, the justice, confined to a wheelchair, made a rambling speech that went on for a very long time. Notes were passed, someone even whispered to him that he had spoken long enough; but he went right on. People were restless. One who wasn’t was Bobby Kennedy. Driving away, he said to a friend, “If that experience gave the old man half an hour of pleasure, no one in the room had such pressing business that he couldn’t stay for a few extra minutes.”

  “It’s pretty easy to see somebody compete fiercely and see a grimace on his face or see what looks like a snarl as he really is … just trying as hard as he can … and trying harder than he thinks he can,” says Charles Spalding, who had known Robert Kennedy since he was a boy. “You can see that and then you translate that into terms of ruthlessness. But what you don’t see is the softness because it’s been disciplined not to show.” It didn’t show much now, when the runt of Old Joe’s family was attorney general of the United States. “It was his most tenaciously maintained secret: a tenderness so rawly exposed, so vulnerable to painful abrasion, that it could only be shielded by angry compassion at human misery, manifest itself in love and loyalty toward those closest to him,” Richard Goodwin says. Joe’s son may have taken great pains to conceal that tenderness, but it was there.

  DURING THE TWO YEARS since he had come to power, moreover, new colors had been added to the portrait: elements of personality of which there had previously been no indication at all in Robert Kennedy.

  Some had been added to what had always been one of the portrait’s least appealing features: the Manichean “black and white view of things,” Robert Kennedy’s previous tendency to see the world and individuals as either evil or good.

  In no area had this view been more stark than in his attitude toward Communism and the Soviet Union. His enlistment with Joe McCarthy and his belief in McCarthy’s cause had been just one token of it. In 1955, he had taken a trip—arranged, of course, by his father—to the Soviet republics in Central Asia with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. (Douglas, who had previously spent time with Bobby, was reluctant to take him along, but Joe Kennedy insisted.) A foreign service officer reported hearing the same story from local officials at each stop. “We liked Justice Douglas.… But [great sigh, looking at the ground] with him there is Mr. Kennedy. He seems always to be saying bad things about our country.” The young man, Schlesinger was to write, “carried mistrust to inordinate extremes.” Claiming that Russian food was dirty, he ate as little of it as possible, “subsisting,” during the month-long trip, “mainly on watermelon.” When their guide brought them a container of caviar, he was so suspicious that he wouldn’t even taste it. When, in Omsk, he became ill, running a high fever, he said, “No communist is going to doctor me”; only Douglas’ insistence—“I promised your daddy I would take care of you”—persuaded him to allow a physician to examine him. Administering not poison but penicillin, the doctor told Douglas, “This is a very disturbed young man.” He arrived home so pale and thin from illness and lack of food that when Ethel saw him, she shouted at Douglas: “What have you done to my husband?”

  Two years later, neither his attitude nor his manners had changed, as State Department aide Harris Wofford found when his boss, Chester Bowles, planning a Central Asian trip of his own, sent him to Kennedy for advice. “Already Bobby’s reputation was that of an arrogant, narrow, rude young man,” Wofford was to recall. Shown to a chair on the far side of Kennedy’s Rackets Committee office, he was kept waiting for almost an hour while Kennedy “ate his lunch, talked on the telephone, worked on his papers.” Finally waving to Wofford to approach, he “gave a short, glum account of [his] Russian trip, warned that they spied on you day and night … and said he had nothing special to suggest. Then he went into a diatribe against the Soviet regime, which he explained was a great evil and an ever present threat, and bade me goodbye.” Inclined though Wofford had been to support Jack Kennedy for President, the encounter gave him pause: “If the senator was not guilty by association with his father, there was this insufferable brother.” Within the first few months after Bobby became attorney general, however, he was not only meeting frequently and secretly with Soviet diplomat Georgy Bolshakov but had made a friend of him, using him as a back-channel conduit for personal messages between Jack Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. By 1962, the role he had played in devising compromises over crises in Berlin and Laos had made the Russians trust him enough so that they let Washington know they would be pleased if he was appointed ambassador to Moscow. Although Bobby tossed off the proposal with a quip—“In the first place, I couldn’t possibly learn Russian; I spent ten years learning French”—it was evidence of how much, in his biographer Thomas’ words, “the bullyboy of the 1940’s and 1950’s, so quick to pick a fight,” had “quite quickly developed a more balanced, neutral way of dealing with the Kremlin.” Part of this moderation came, of course, “on the direct orders of his brother,” but part was due to something in Bobby himself. “While his first instinct was” still “to strike a blow, his second was to listen carefully” and try to find a way in which both sides could preserve face—and peace.

  And people who remembered “the old Bobby” were startled also by what he did with his new job—the post of attorney gene
ral of the United States which his brother had handed to him although he seemed utterly unqualified for it: a lawyer who had never tried a case in court.

  In hiring a staff, he selected men who possessed not only the qualifications he lacked, but stature far above his. His top deputies—the famous Byron “Whizzer” White, the all-American football player and Rhodes Scholar; Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach, former editor-in-chief of The Yale Law Journal and Rhodes Scholar; the renowned legal authority Archibald Cox, holder of an endowed chair at Harvard Law School; Burke Marshall, former editor of The Yale Law Journal and an attorney deeply respected in the Washington legal community—were, as one historian described them, among “the sharpest lawyers of his generation.” Another historian called them one of “the most impressive groups ever assembled in the top jobs of one government agency,” and the selection showed something about Bobby, too: that, as Evan Thomas puts it, “he did not feel upstaged by men who had more experience, credentials, than he.” The legal scholar Alexander Bickel, who had once criticized his McCarthylike tactics, now said, “One immediately had the sense of a fellow who wasn’t afraid of having able people around him and indeed of a fellow who had an ideal of public service that would have done anyone proud.”

  Younger and more inexperienced than they were, he nonetheless inspired them. One of White’s newly appointed assistants, Joseph Dolan, remembering Kennedy as the bully from the Rackets Committee, “thought he was an absolute disgrace [there]. I thought I was going back to save the country from Robert Kennedy.” But Dolan saw something different now. Bobby was still given to quick, impulsive, harsh judgments, he saw—until he realized that the subject he was dealing with was important. Then he would stop, catch himself—as if, by an effort of will and self-discipline, he was making himself change. “Once he realized something was significant, he became the most deliberate, most thoughtful, most intense man.” Listing, years later, the qualities that had made him admire, and want to follow, Robert Kennedy, Archibald Cox would include “his willingness to listen and reconsider his initial reactions.”

  Standing behind his desk, jacketless, shirtsleeves rolled up, necktie pulled down, talking to them about what he thought the Justice Department should be doing, “he had,” one of them says, “a way of creating an impression that if he thought something was wrong, he’d do something to right it. He had a way of saying it, a lilt to his voice. I can still hear it, a little higher pitch.… He had a passion.” Says another: “He had that quality of leadership that made us all play above our heads,” the quality of “bringing out the very best in everyone who worked for him.” He inspired them, and bound them to him, by his commitment to social justice, by an instinct for what was right, and by his insistence on doing it—at once. “Bob never pauses to regroup and say, ‘Now what shall we do?’ ” Dolan recalls. “When he is saying, ‘What shall we do now,’ he is doing something.” “Don’t tell me what I can’t do,” he told them. “Tell me what I can do.” They learned he was willing to take on the most unpleasant tasks himself, that if one of them made a mistake, he would stand behind him. They started to roll up their own sleeves, to pull their own neckties down. Bobby was always quoting Shakespeare to make a point, and after he recited some lines from Henry V one day to tell them what he thought of them, they were very proud, and they started to call themselves “the band of brothers.”

  Aides outside this inner circle were treated with the same lordliness with which he treated everyone else. He was, one biographer notes, “in the manner of the very rich, rather spoiled.” Some staffers were “less [than] amused about getting his laundry” or carrying his shirts, which he changed several times a day. “If you want to be secretary of state, you have to know how to get those shirts out of their plastic bags,” one said. But, roaming the halls of the Justice Department, bursting into the offices of lawyers who had never seen the attorney general up close before, asking them about their work, he filled the vast building with new life. Ramsey Clark, the son of a former attorney general, Tom Clark, was working for Kennedy now, and he said, “It was a quiet and sleepy place until January of ’61 …. Then it came alive.” Flying around the country to visit departmental outposts, Bobby took a special interest in the work of young lawyers. “That was one of his great gifts,” says Robert Morgenthau, the new United States attorney in New York, “to make people feel they were part of the team.”

  And he made people have a broader, deeper idea of what the team should be doing. By the end of 1962, Justice had taken a newly active role in fighting not only organized crime but juvenile delinquency; once, testifying before Congress, the man who had been an arrogant prosecutor blurted out a sentence that wasn’t in his prepared testimony: “I think some of us who were more fortunate might also have been juvenile delinquents if we had been brought up in different circumstances,” he said. A broader role was being taken against many forms of social injustice. Looking back on his prosecutorial days, it was possible now to see that there had been hints of such concerns visible even then. In The Enemy Within, he described attending a Mass at a workingman’s church and seeing “the strong, stern faces of people who have worked hard and who have suffered.”

  And there were other new shadings in the portrait. The moody and indifferent student now started to read, quite extensively, in history and biography. Since there weren’t enough free moments for the reading he wanted to do, he took the speed-reading course that Jack had taken. He began the practice, which he was to follow to the end of his life, of listening to recordings of Shakespeare’s plays while he was shaving and playing with his children in the morning. In 1961, he instituted a series of evening seminars at Hickory Hill at which leading thinkers discussed their areas of expertise. “They sound rather precious,” Alice Roosevelt Longworth said, “but there was nothing precious about those lectures.” The questioning of the speakers was quite intense—and the most intense of the questioners was often the attorney general (even though, sometimes, his old pugnacity reappeared: “That’s the biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve ever heard,” he told one lecturer—who was, after all, a guest in his home).

  An observer as acute as Budd Schulberg, the novelist and screenwriter who in 1961 was asked to write a screenplay of The Enemy Within because his masterpiece, On the Waterfront, dealt with corruption in a labor union, saw the depth of these concerns. During their first meeting, over dinner at Hickory Hill, to discuss Schulberg’s ideas for the screenplay, there was for some time a noticeable lack of rapport between the two men. And then Schulberg blurted out that he wasn’t interested in writing a script merely about the labor rackets investigation, that he felt the movie’s broader theme should be that there was something at the core of America as a whole that had begun to rot.

  Suddenly the man across from him was a different man. Yes, Robert Kennedy said, that was what he was interested in, too. In fact, he said, that “seems to me the only real reason for making the picture. If it comes out as well as Waterfront, it could help shake people out of their apathy.” He spoke in terms of his brother—“The creeping corruption, it is something the President hopes to check, to give the people a new sense of idealism, a sense of destiny that isn’t just money-making or pleasure-seeking”—but, Schulberg realized, it wasn’t just the President whose feelings Bobby was expressing. Robert Kennedy spoke “with quiet fervor,” the writer was to recount. “He cared about it. He felt it.… He said he thought the next ten years would produce the turning point in our history—either an America infected with corruption or the rebirth of a spirit and idealism with which we had begun.”

  The movie was never made—the producer who hired Schulberg died, and there were threats from corrupt labor bosses against studios that were considering making it—but during the year and a half that Schulberg was working on it, he spent days with Robert Kennedy at Justice, including the day the attorney general was directing efforts to get James Meredith enrolled, and he heard him say to one of his men in Mississippi, “I know it’s only on
e—but it’s the first one, and then two and then four, eight.… We have got to enforce the Constitution.… We’ve got to—it’s the law, it’s our moral obligation.” He hung up the phone, and then said, in a tone that Schulberg felt was a “human outcry,” “Oh, God, I hope nothing happens to Meredith. I feel responsible for him. I promised we’d back him up. I’m worried for the marshals. It seems so simple to us, and down there it’s bloody hell.” Having seen him up close, in that and other moments of crisis, Schulberg was to write that “No one can ever tell me that Bob Kennedy was merely going through the motions. When something struck him as wrong or evil, it was his nature to root it out, or to try like hell—not tomorrow, but now.”

  And, of course, the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought out all these new elements in Robert Kennedy, made them clear and vivid; during those thirteen days in October, there was unveiled in the Cabinet Room a portrait of a master of compromise, of diplomacy, of diplomacy with a moral element, of diplomacy that was, in fact, in some ways grounded in “the moral question”: there was the insistence that “a sneak attack is not in our traditions,” that America was not “that kind of a country.” And there had been, as well, the passion with which Kennedy presented his arguments, the “intense but quiet passion” that moved one of the hardened, pragmatic men around the long Cabinet table to say that “as he spoke, I felt that I was at a real turning point in history.” So many elements in the portrait came together during those thirteen days—as if, as his biographer Thomas was to write, “the worst of times brought out the best in Bobby Kennedy.” An aide who came into his office during the crisis said, “Something’s different in here.” “I’m older,” Kennedy replied. But the difference was due to more than age. So dramatically had Bobby Kennedy changed that the men around the Cabinet table were startled—“very much surprised,” in George Ball’s words. “He made believers of men who expected less of him,” Thomas says.