Death and the Attorney General
ISAIAH BERLIN HAD been distressed to find, during a visit to Washington in the early sixties, that the relationship between Jack Kennedy and his aides-de-camp resembled that between Bonaparte and his marshals; some of Kennedy’s courtiers were “physically in love with him.”7 They had loved him in life, and now that he was dead, even the strongest among them were broken in spirit. “For a time after Jack Kennedy’s death,” Joseph Alsop recalled, “the sense of emotional loss was so staggering among those who had known and worked with him that the Washington landscape” seemed “littered with male widows.”8 “I suddenly realized,” the tough old Cravath lawyer Roswell Gilpatric said, “that I felt about [the President] as I’ve never felt about another man in my life.”9 McGeorge Bundy confessed that the President’s death struck him more deeply than the loss of his own father.10
If the effect of the President’s death on Alsop and Bundy and Gilpatric was great, how much greater must its effect have been on Bobby himself. He appeared to Ben Bradlee to be the “strongest of the stricken,” but this apparent strength was deceptive, for he, too, was at heart a broken man.11 In the months that followed the assassination he would sit for hours at a time at his desk in the Justice Department, staring out the window.12 Or he would wander aimlessly through the streets of Georgetown, dressed in an old tweed overcoat that had belonged to his brother.13 He lost so much weight that his clothes ceased to fit him.14 There was a “hollow” look in his eyes.15 In a quiet voice he talked of leaving politics altogether, and of devoting himself to other pursuits. He would teach, or write, or travel. His humor, always dark, became morbid. “Been to any good funerals lately?” he asked a friend. “I don’t like to let too many days go by without a funeral.”16 For a time he escaped, to Douglas Dillon’s house at Hobe Sound, Florida, and found release, in that enclave of tastefully displayed wealth, in games of touch football. They were, Pierre Salinger recalled, “really vicious” games. “It seemed to me,” Salinger said, that Bobby “was getting his feelings out … knocking people down.”17 But still the pain remained.
At length his spirits began to revive. A regimen of athletic competition at Hobe Sound might have been good for the body, but the insipid rhythms of life at a Social Register watering hole could not have been good for the soul. For spiritual nourishment Bobby was forced to wait until the spring of 1964, when he traveled to the house of Mrs. Paul Mellon in Antigua. There his sister-in-law Jacqueline gave him a book called The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton. Miss Hamilton, a classical scholar and former headmistress of Bryn Mawr, had first published her meditation on the salient characteristics of the Hellenic mind in 1930. Bobby found himself unable to put the book down. “I remember he’d disappear,” Jacqueline Kennedy recalled. “He’d be in his room an awful lot of the time … reading and underlining things.”18
Not merely the period of life in which we first read a book, but the place and the circumstances in which we begin to turn its pages, has everything to do with the nature and potency of its effect upon us.19 Under the tropical sky Miss Hamilton’s pages revealed to Bobby a far larger universe than he had previously had any conception of. The Stimsonian creed in which he had been bred up was an intensely practical creed; Miss Hamilton, however, taught that practicality alone was not enough, that greatness lay in the union of practical and spiritual excellence, in the “fusion of rational and spiritual power” which she believed the ancient Greeks and the Renaissance Italians had achieved.20 Although the Greeks possessed the raw strength and tenacious willpower that wins battles and prostrates enemies, they were at the same time devoted to poetry and to what Miss Hamilton called the “imponderables” of high civilization.21 The Greeks succeeded in escaping the fate of so many peoples who have excelled in works of practical genius; their closeness to the mysteries of human existence, their intimacy with the world of the imagination, the world of dreams—the dark ecstasies of Dionysus, the sunlit excellence of Apollo—saved them from spiritual superficiality. Miss Hamilton’s fifth-century Athenians were as “hard-headed” as the Stimsonians, and won as many famous battles and wars, but they took, as the Stimsonians did not, “a delight in the things of the mind”; they possessed a “love of beauty” and “delicate feeling” that was quite foreign to the protégés of Colonel Stimson.22 Bobby’s own debt to Miss Hamilton’s brilliant Hellenes was evident when he said that the two virtues he most admired were “courage and sensitivity.”23
Although a faint odor of the Middle Age hung about their seigneurial pretensions, the Stimsonians were curiously oblivious of the life of the spirit, and this blindness helps to explain certain shortcomings in their approach to man’s problems. So unconscious were they of the mechanics of human pain, so blind were they to its power, that they believed it could be done away with through a more Enlightened deployment of society’s resources. Stepchildren of the Enlightenment, the Stimsonians possessed a complacent faith in a painless future, a future bred to splendor by science and rational planning, the same faith that had characterized the eighteenth-century philosophes before them. Bobby was at the beginning of his life sympathetic to the Stimsonian point of view; but Miss Hamilton’s pages forced him for the first time to question it. He discovered in her book the mysterious processes by which tragedy and suffering defy so many of man’s rational and Enlightened efforts in the world (the relevant word, of course, is “hubris”). At the same time, he came to understand that pain is a necessary precondition for any great or worthwhile achievement. Oedipus himself, after all, had once been a Stimsonian, a technocrat, a solver of riddles, the Enlightened deliverer of his city.24 But he, too, had eventually grown up.
Carrying the Torch
THE DIRECTION IN which his private thoughts tended did not initially influence his public politics. He became, if anything, even more zealous in his advocacy of the principles of Stimsonian governance in the months that followed his brother’s death. This was so in part because of the duty he believed he owed his brother’s memory. Jack Kennedy had pledged himself to upholding the ideals of the welfare state at home and the Pax Americana abroad: he had declared that Americans would pay any price to ensure the survival and the success of liberty and the American empire around the world; at home he had been troubled by the pain and poverty depicted in Michael Harrington’s book The Other America and had vowed to do something about it. Inevitably history would judge him by how well he had served the causes to which he had dedicated his presidency. The truth, of course, was that his administration had been characterized by a remarkable degree of reticence. The rhetoric was dazzling; the actions were cautious, cool, and pragmatic. Kennedy had rejected Arthur Schlesinger’s advice that he adopt an ambitious domestic program along the lines of FDR’s New Deal; Schlesinger, the President said, “couldn’t get it through his head” that this was “1963, not 1933.”25 In foreign policy Jack Kennedy had been no less circumspect; he had been more interested in reducing the scope of America’s commitments abroad by means of carefully negotiated settlements (as in Laos) than in extending America’s influence by concluding fresh alliances around the world. Kennedy privately criticized Eisenhower’s promiscuous promises of American support to all and sundry; he seemed, at times, reluctant to defend even those governments, like the regime in South Vietnam, to which the United States—and his own Vice President—had given unconditional assurances of support. But it is boldness, not prudence, that turns the heads of historians, and so cautious a record as President Kennedy’s was unlikely to win him an enviable place in the history books. Bobby knew how cruelly posterity treated those leaders who, in his words, failed to “press”; he was therefore determined to foster the notion that his brother had been a consummately progressive President, one whose last wish had been to launch a great federal war to “end” poverty.26
The fact that Jack Kennedy had been, in Bobby’s view, so distinctly progressive a President made it all the more necessary for Bobby himself to embrace the progressive cause wit
h a becoming zeal. Somebody, after all, needed to carry on Jack Kennedy’s legacy. Bobby decided, not unnaturally, that he was the best man to do it. He had been closest to his brother in life; why should he not carry on his brother’s legacy after his death? Certainly Lyndon Johnson, he believed, could not be trusted with so important a task; for Johnson, Bobby argued, was at heart a conservative. “People just don’t realize,” Bobby said as he rode in the elevator to Robert McNamara’s office a few hours after his brother’s murder, “how conservative Lyndon really is.”27
Bobby’s problem lay in the fact that he himself didn’t seem like a progressive politician. Jack may not have been a truly progressive statesman, but his eloquence, his grace, his generous and open nature, had combined to make him seem the very model of progressive liberality. Bobby, by contrast, with his crew-cut head and hard Irish face, seemed too ruthless, too bellicose, too unapologetically vindictive, too apparently petty, to be a really liberal statesman, a happy warrior in the tradition of Charles James Fox and Franklin Roosevelt. Nor was Bobby’s style alone a problem; his record was just as troubling. The liberals in his party had not forgotten his apprenticeship under Senator McCarthy. They had not forgiven him for threatening to “get” Hubert Humphrey in 1960, or for humiliating Chester Bowles at the time of the Bay of Pigs crisis.28 They remembered his work to expose the malversation of their allies in the labor movement. Only the most substantial atonement would cause the liberals to forgive; if Bobby was to make up for the deficiencies of his past conduct, he would have to redouble the zealousness of his exercises in liberal virtue. Even as he turned the pages of the Greek tragedians, even as he began to question the fundamental assumptions of the Stimsonian state, Bobby was forced, by the political realities of the moment, to be an enthusiastic, even aggressive, promoter of the idea of grand government.
The personalities he found himself opposing in the pursuit of power and the defense of his brother’s legacy only intensified the pressures upon him. On a hot day in July 1964 Lyndon Johnson summoned Bobby to the Oval Office to inform him, during the course of an unpleasant forty-five-minute interview, that he had decided against asking him to be his vice-presidential running mate in 1964. The following weekend Bobby flew up to Hyannis Port to ponder his future. Arthur Schlesinger was there, and so were Averell Harriman and Dave Hackett. Together the four men reviewed Bobby’s options. Though the possibility of a State Department post initially intrigued Bobby, Schlesinger and Harriman persuaded him that a man of his restless temperament would never be content in Dean Rusk’s foreign policy shop. That left one other possibility: moving to New York and running for the Senate. Though Bobby had ruled out a Senate bid in June, he was now prepared to reconsider his earlier decision. Within days Kennedy loyalists were canvassing New York politicians in search of support.
In order to secure the nomination, Bobby needed to do more than find a house and establish residency in New York (a house was quickly obtained for him in Glen Cove, Long Island). He was forced to turn to the bosses. Men like Charles Buckley of the Bronx, Peter Crotty of Buffalo, and John English of Nassau County were, in style and stature, the antithesis of the Kennedys; they were unimaginative machine politicians of the type that good Stimsonians had been struggling against ever since the days when Stimson himself and Paul Drennan Cravath had worked together to draft legislation designed to curb the power of the Tammany bosses.29 The Kennedys had, however, given abundant proof, in 1960, of their ability to do business with Daley-style machine politicians, and Bobby found himself unable to reject their support now.30 The bosses were willing to put their power and influence at his disposal at a time when respectable Stimsonians—Adlai Stevenson, Mayor Wagner, Mrs. Herbert Lehman—were skeptical of his candidacy.31 Stevenson, who was serving as Ambassador to the United Nations and was frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Senate himself, angrily turned away Steve Smith when the smooth-talking brother-in-law showed up at Stevenson’s apartment in the Waldorf Towers looking for a kind word and an endorsement.32 The presence of the bosses in Bobby’s camp, however necessary it might have been, made it all the easier for the Stimsonians to discredit Bobby, to revive unpleasant memories of a man whose sole concern was power, a man who had grabbed poor old Chester Bowles by the shirt collar and poked a finger in his portly belly, a man who had told New York’s liberals that he “didn’t give a damn” about their reform committees and that his only concern was to get his brother elected President.33 Only the most dramatic of mea culpas, only the most persuasive of demonstrations of fidelity to the Stimsonian faith, would overcome the animosity of the liberal Stimsonians in New York.
Bobby the mean kid brother, Bobby the McCarthy sympathizer, Bobby the bane of the Eleanor Roosevelt wing of the Democratic Party—this picture of Bobby as a “little Torquemada” (Gore Vidal’s characterization) had a plausibility in 1964 that is difficult to comprehend today. He won the nomination easily enough. But no sooner had he done so than a number of distressingly respectable people—artists, scholars, grand old liberals—broke party ranks and threw their support behind his Republican opponent, Kenneth B. Keating of Buffalo. Although Keating was neither a memorable nor an inspiring political figure, his record in the Senate was progressive enough to make him a credible opponent. He was an amiable, pink-faced granddaddy, and many felt sympathy for him as he prepared to fight for his political life in an unequal contest against an arrogant rich kid, Joe McCarthy’s brat, the Catholic Roy Cohn.34 Even so passionate a Kennedy supporter as Arthur Schlesinger conceded that Keating’s “vaguely liberal reputation” was justified by the “passable record” he had compiled in Washington.35 Gore Vidal helped form a Democrats for Keating Committee. Vidal’s antipathy toward Bobby might perhaps be ascribed to spite or envy; Schlesinger has suggested that Vidal, whose own quest for public office ended in failure, resented Bobby’s political successes and was piqued by Bobby’s failure to recognize him when the two met in 1960.36 More troubling, no doubt, were the defections of such respected scholars and honorary Stimsonians as Archibald MacLeish, Richard Hofstadter, Barbara Tuchman, and (this was really embarrassing) Schlesinger’s own father, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.37 John Roosevelt, the youngest son of Franklin and Eleanor, condemned Bobby for implying that his mother would have supported his candidacy.38 Stevenson himself noted the “widespread disaffection” that he detected among liberals, reformers, and organized labor.39 Even the NAACP climbed aboard the Keating bandwagon.40
As the election approached, Keating, who had been shrewd enough to repudiate Barry Goldwater, his party’s standard-bearer in 1964, could plausibly claim that he was a truer liberal, a truer progressive, than his ambitious young opponent. Bobby’s campaign, which had begun with great promise and a commanding lead in the polls, lost momentum. In the opening days the campaign had been fueled by the fire of his celebrity and the memory of his brother’s martyrdom. But these things could not sustain it indefinitely. Bobby’s odd and unpredictable humor, his evident struggle to reconcile his customary reserve with his love of the large crowds that gathered to cheer him—and the crowds were large in the beginning—made him a curiously appealing candidate. When, not long after Labor Day, Bobby arrived, five hours late, in the town of Glens Falls, he was “astonished” to find—for it was well after midnight—a thousand people waiting for him at the airport and thousands more in the town square.41 By October, however, the novelty was gone, and the flame of celebrity had expired; Bobby himself seemed at times to forget where he was, and acted less like a man who wished to triumph at the polls than one who wished to pay a perpetual homage to the memory of his brother.42 When the Warren Commission report was made public, Bobby spent the day in seclusion, unable to campaign.43
His attitude toward the Warren Commission’s work reveals much about the state of his mind during the Senate campaign. The period of mourning and melancholia was not yet over. Not only did Bobby not read the Warren report, he was reluctant even to talk about it, and once asked Arthur Schlesinger “how
long he could continue to avoid comment” on its conclusions.44 Although there was, of course, much to criticize in the Warren Commission’s work, Bobby was unwilling to speak out and thereby “reopen the whole tragic business.”45 Some thought this out of character: surely the question of who murdered Jack Kennedy ought to have perplexed a man as passionately devoted to his brother as he was more than it apparently did. And yet it’s not clear that Bobby bothered even to learn Oswald’s name; several years after the assassination he was still referring to “that fellow Harvey Lee Oswald.”46 Was he afraid that a more thorough investigation of the assassination would reveal facts that were better off left in obscurity? Did he fear revelations of Mafia ties and plots to kill Castro? Or did his indifference to the circumstances of his brother’s death stem rather from his conviction that to dwell upon an act so horrible, so blasphemous, so profane—a stain upon the honor of the world—was itself a kind of sacrilege, a form of disrespect? Jack Newfield, sitting next to him on an airplane, observed how Bobby’s eyes would avoid any reference to the assassination in a newspaper.47 He could “only speak around the event,” Newfield said, “or in euphemisms.”48 When Newfield asked him “when he began to read poetry,” Bobby replied, “Oh, at the very end of 1963, I think.”49
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