Baldwin told of watching old friends degenerate, of finding them, “in twos and threes and fours, in a hallway, sharing a jug of wine or a bottle of whiskey, talking, cursing, fighting, sometimes weeping.”2 He told of a past, “the Negro’s past, of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it.”3 Tame stuff, perhaps, compared with the sentiments expressed by groups like the Black Panthers a few years later. But in 1962 Baldwin’s was as powerful a statement of black rage as most New Yorker readers had ever encountered. It shocked genteel liberals out of their paternalistic complacency; something, they said, had to be done.
The article moved Bobby to seek Baldwin out. The two had met before, briefly, at a White House dinner; now Bobby invited him to breakfast with him at Hickory Hill.4 Though he had in the past ridiculed Baldwin’s homosexuality—he and Jack used to quarrel over who had first thought to call Baldwin “Martin Luther Queen”—Bobby now developed a respect for the man, and asked him to arrange a meeting with a group of blacks to talk about the problems of the ghetto.5 The meeting took place on a late spring afternoon in 1963 at the Kennedy family apartment on Central Park South in New York. Burke Marshall accompanied Bobby. Several black artists and entertainers were present, among them Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, and Lorraine Hansberry. So, too, were two experts on urban problems: Kenneth B. Clark, the social psychologist, and Edwin C. Berry of the Chicago Urban League.6
Also present was a young man named Jerome Smith, a civil rights worker who had spent time in Southern jails and who had on several occasions been beaten to a pulp by white supremacists.7 He was less prominent than the artists and scholars who had gathered to meet the Attorney General, but he quickly established himself as the dominant presence in the room. He was not famous, Baldwin observed; he “didn’t sing or act or dance.”8 But he nevertheless became “the focal point” of the debate.9 Smith began by saying, in an angry, stammering voice—for he stammered when he was angry—that it “nauseated” him to be in the same room with a man who as Attorney General had been as negligent in the performance of his duties as Bobby.10 Unprepared for this hostility, Bobby politely ignored Smith and turned to the others in the room, to those whom he took to be the “reasonable, responsible, mature representatives of the black community” present. This was a mistake; the others insisted that he listen to Smith. And Smith was merciless. Kenneth Clark remembered his harangue as “one of the most violent, emotional verbal assaults” he had ever witnessed.11 The atmosphere in the room became, Baldwin said, “very tense, and finally very ugly.”12 Bobby himself, who appeared to Clark to be “extraordinarily insensitive” to the plight of black people in the United States, became, as the meeting proceeded, “more silent and tense, and he sat immobile in the chair. He no longer continued to defend himself. He just sat, and you could see the tension and the pressure building in him.”13 And yet Smith refused to relent, and the verbal pummeling continued. Smith said he did not know how much longer he could remain nonviolent. He said he did not know how much longer he could endure, with patience, with meekness, with humility, the indignity of being spat upon by whites, and of being beaten by them to within an inch of his life. Smith’s parting words were blunt: “When I pull the trigger,” he told the Attorney General, you can “kiss it good-bye.”14
The encounter in New York left Bobby not only shaken, but also profoundly angry. “I think he was always a little mad at me,” Baldwin said afterward.15 And yet however wounded Bobby might have been by the tongue-lashing he received on that late spring afternoon in 1963, in subsequent years he ritualistically subjected himself to similar abuse; he seemed almost to enjoy the degree of humiliation involved. And these encounters were exercises in humiliation, exercises in which Bobby very deliberately abased himself, made himself “low and humble in position,” and bore with meekness and humility the taunts and insults of others.16 After the funeral of Dr. King in April 1968 prominent black leaders, among them Ralph Abernathy, James Bevel, and Hosea Williams, gathered at Bobby’s suite at the Regency Hotel in Atlanta.17 There was, Andrew Young recalled, “a whole lot of undirected hostility present.” People were “just angry and bitter and grieving.”18 A quantity of profane language was used, and when “preachers get to cuss,” Young observed, they “cuss good.”19 But Young hesitated to silence his colleagues; he was “impressed” by the way Bobby accepted their calumnies. Bobby “listened,” Young said, “while we blew off steam … he wasn’t upset.”20
A short time later Bobby addressed an angry black audience in Oakland. It was, John Seigenthaler remembered, a “rough, gut-cutting” affair. Members of the audience variously denounced white people, the Kennedy family, obsequious blacks, and “technicolor niggers”; Bobby himself they derided as a talker, a hypocrite, “just another politician.”21 “Look, man,” one participant said to him when he attempted to speak, “I don’t want to hear none of your shit.”22 Unperturbed, Bobby “sat there and listened and took it.”23 Afterward, driving back to San Francisco, he said that he was “glad” that he had gone to the meeting. “They need to know,” he said, that “somebody [will] listen.” After “all the abuse the blacks have taken through the centuries,” he continued, “whites are just going to have to let them get some of these feelings out.”24 He had come a long way from the man who had once said he could have been smoking a cigar in Palm Beach.25
The Ritual Discipline of Humiliation
THE EMERGING THEME is one of ritual humiliation: it explains much in Bobby’s career that is otherwise inexplicable; his very campaigns for public office partook of it. There was a medieval quality to Bobby, a part of him that was in love with the idea of the mortified flesh. The body, in the idiosyncratic philosophy he evolved, had been created for punishment as well as pleasure. Hence his predilection not only for the most dangerous rapids of rivers and the sheer faces of mountains, but also for the frenzied crowds that reached out to touch him.26 In his own campaigns, and when he campaigned for others, he was literally bloodied by his supporters, and yet he continued to submit to them. “They tore at his buttons and his hair … they tried to pull him out of his convertible.” His bodyguard Bill Barry, a big man who had played football at Kent State, was forced “to hang on to him with all his strength.”27 “People were coming up to him,” Dolores Huerta recalled, “and they would grab him and hug him and kiss him on the mouth!”28 They would shout, “Un gran hombre … un gran hombre”—“a great man”—and “his hands were all bloodied where people had pulled him.”29 Teddy White, who traveled with Bobby during the ’68 campaign, remembered the “near-sexual orgy of exultation” of the crowd, the “frenzy of their love.”30 The “hands would reach for him, grabbing for a thread, a shoelace, a shoe; in the near-hysteria, anyone in the car with Bobby would become a bodyguard, protecting him.”31 At one point, White said, the “clutchers seized him and pulled so hard that in tumbling over the edge of the car he had instinct enough only to throw his elbow over his eyes to protect them; and slammed his jaw on the door of the car, breaking a front tooth and cutting open his lip.”32 His tie, his cuff links, even his shoes were taken from him, and still the “touching … and the pulling and the pushing and the screaming” continued.33
A lot of people [the television reporter Charles Quinn remembered] were crushed and fainted and got hurt, and we had some close calls in the motorcade when little kids fell under cars. It was hairy.… I have a vivid picture of a lady grabbing him by the tie and pulling him down by the neck; his little head bobbing up and down.34
It was more than a modern form of self-flagellation, it was a kind of fatal dance, as Bobby himself acknowledged when he said that each time he stepped into the mass of tangled, moving, pressing flesh he was playing a game of Russian roulette.35 The crowd, for its part, sensed his willingness to be a sacrifice, and attributed to the garlanded hero extraordinary and undefinable qualities, quali
ties that made it all the more eager to reach him, to grab him, to make some sort of tactile contact with him, as if the touch of his hands, swollen and scratched—as if his very skin and hair—were a cure for all our modern scrofulas.36
History teaches us to be cautious about labeling particular phenomena unique. Bobby grew up, Jack Newfield observed, “with cardinals, movie stars, diplomats, and financiers, but he was killed reaching for the hand of a $75 a week Mexican dishwasher.”37 Newfield implies that there is something singular in this, but of course, the phenomenon of aristocratic statesmen sympathizing with the cause of the downtrodden is at least as old as the Gracchi. Bobby, however, went further than any other major American statesman in trying not simply, like the Stimsonians, to mitigate the pain of the poor and the powerless, but to feel it himself.38 The Stimsonians, with their great-souled, Alexander-spared-the-daughters-of-Darius notions of charity, saw pain from a distance: Bobby looked it in the face. He told Newfield that he envied the fact that Newfield had grown up in a slum. “I wish I had that experience,” Bobby said.39 Much as Franklin Roosevelt sympathized with the Forgotten Man, and pitied the terrible privations that must have marked his growth to manhood, one may doubt whether he himself even for a moment wished that he had grown up anyplace other than on his Hudson River estate.
In “the greater part of the Benefactors to Humanity,” Keats wrote, “some meretricious motive has sullied their greatness—some melodramatic scenery has fascinated them.”40 It cannot be denied that Bobby himself craved the kind of “melodramatic scenery” of which Keats spoke. For years his imagination had been circumscribed by the narrow limits of the Stimsonian creed in which he had been bred up; he had at length gained his freedom, and in this newly liberated state found himself impelled by an impetuous desire to plumb the depths of experience, to probe the limits of the universe. With a ferocious appetite he delved into books, shot the rapids of rivers, climbed mountains, recited Shakespeare, provoked the frenzy of crowds, explored poverty, toured the world and found out countries, and dreamed of being a revolutionary hero. His pilgrimages to the most abysmal places of human suffering threatened to become simply another facet of a romantic effort at universality, a vain and Faust-like quest for impossible experience. Jacqueline Kennedy said of her husband that he “lived at such a pace because he wished to know it all.”41 The statement was truer of Bobby than it was of Jack. Like so many apparently stoical men, Bobby was at heart a sensualist.42 Just as he had become addicted to the narcotic of the campaign, to the windswept airport tarmacs, the sun-soaked crowds, the roar of the jet airplane engines, to that constant sensual stimulation that, Pascal said, is the primary reason men seek public office, so had he also become addicted to other rare and curious forms of existence.43 He was now, more than ever, Schlesinger said, “a collector” of personalities: one “never knew whom to expect at Hickory Hill—novelists, entertainers, columnists, decathlon champions, astronauts, football stars, diplomats, politicians, mountain climbers, international beauties, appearing in every age, sex, size, color.”44 The more exquisite forms of human suffering threatened to become simply another exotic delicacy in his extensive menagerie, another means of stimulating an already overindulged palate, one more Lucullan delight in the epicure’s feast of experience.
And so the worst that can be said of his emerging philosophy of ritual humiliation, his evolving theology of compassion, has been said; that it was marred by vanity, and egotism, and romantic desire, and mere sensuality; that it was tinged with ambition. The good in it was not therefore wholly lost. His journey into the darker territories of human suffering—his desire to expose himself to the pain of others, even when it meant humiliation for himself—had a value that transcended his own egotism. The effect of Bobby’s compassion may have been limited, but the insight he gained into the role of compassion in society was an important one. He did not really believe, when he was in the barriada in Brazil and begged the barefoot children to stay in school as a favor to President Kennedy, that this gesture, the impulse of a moment, would have any lasting effect on the lives of the children who swarmed around him. That is precisely why he is said to have been so dejected afterward: “On the plane north he sat by himself, his head buried in his arms.”45 The people he encountered in the slums, the ghettos, and the barrios were, he believed, uttering a “cry for love.”46 But the love he bore them was of necessity too brief, too remote, too impersonal, to transform their lives in the way that a more durable love sometimes can. He recognized the problem: In the slum, the ghetto, the barrio, as well as in other parts of American society, self-confidence had diminished as the traditional bearers of durable love, the institutional vessels of compassion—the families, the schools, the churches—cracked and broke. This circumstance, more than any of the “structural” economic conditions described in the bureaucrats’ reports, was at the root of the apathy and underconfidence that characterized so many of the inhabitants of the inner city. The children of the ghettos were not born with dead souls. In a conversation with Robert Coles, Bobby observed that slum children had, at the age of three or four, “a certain vitality and beauty in their faces that well-fixed middle-class children being pushed around in their baby carriages on Fifth Avenue did not have.” But by the age of eight or ten or twelve the faces of these children began to change as the children themselves sensed the “oppressiveness” of the world in which they were fated to grow up.47 Bobby went among them, and tried, as he said, to “bind up [their] wounds.” But there was only so much he could do.
Confidence Games
HOWEVER LIMITED WAS the efficacy of the compassion he was able to convey through his own ritual exercises in humiliation, he had identified the importance of compassion—as cultivated in families, schools, churches, and neighborhoods—in nurturing the self-confidence that makes self-reliant citizenship possible. It is difficult for us today to put any great degree of faith in a concept like “compassion”; so frequently has the word been invoked in empty sermons and vacuous editorial writing that it has altogether lost its intellectual edge, its moral point. Bobby’s own contribution lay in his attempts to restore its edge. He helped to recover the older meaning of the word—and to endow it with new importance. Emerson, in the severe individualism of his creed, had supposed that a man was complete in himself, and that he had only to look inside himself to discover the strength that makes the good life possible. There is in Emerson’s thought a suggestion of the radical Protestant idea that an individual must find his own way to salvation; that he must find God in himself, or not at all; that he must save his soul through his own efforts, and not through the mediation of institutions like the family, the church, the school, the community. Though “I prize my friends,” Emerson wrote, “I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own.”48 “I chide society,” he said, “I embrace solitude.”49 Emerson was suspicious of churches, schools, friendship, even marriage; for Emerson, the greatest man was never less lonely than when completely alone. One sees this radical aloneness in Lincoln, the Emersonian hero who, growing up among people greatly inferior to him in genius and ambition, never learned to rely on anyone other than himself. Lincoln did not depend on his family and friends the way other men do. Judge David Davis, who rode the Illinois circuit with Lincoln in the 1840s and 1850s (Lincoln later elevated him to the Supreme Court), recalled that “when all the lawyers of a Saturday evening would go home to see their families and friends, Lincoln would find some excuse and refuse to go.”50 Lincoln could, it is true, open himself up, as private men are sometimes able to do, in a crowd.51 In his public performances—in his storytelling and his speech-making—he exuded a warmth he was incapable of displaying in his private life.52 But if he was a man capable of touching, to the depths of their beings, men and women whom he did not know, he was separated from his friends and his family by an impenetrable barrier. He was, his law partner William Herndon concluded, not merely a private but a cold man.53
Most people
are not like Lincoln; their fruits will ripen only where love and compassion have stimulated and nourished them. So bewitched was Emerson by the spectacle of individual genius that he failed to recognize the processes by which such genius is (in most cases) uncovered, the social processes by which an individual’s imagination and talents are unlocked and revealed to the world in their fullest splendor. “Everyone,” Nietzsche said, “possesses inborn talent, but few possess the degree of inborn and acquired toughness, endurance, and energy actually to become a talent, that is to say to become what he is: which means to discharge [one’s talent] in works and actions.”54 The development of individual genius is not always or even usually a matter of spontaneous combustion; it occurs, rather, as a result of the love and compassion of others: Most people are not born self-reliant; they are instead persuaded, by a compassionate parent, teacher, or priest, to become self-reliant; they are persuaded, in other words, that in spite of their doubts and fears and worries, they have a self that is strong enough to be relied upon. It is a lesson of Shakespeare’s: if you treat Christopher Sly like a lord, he will soon enough act with the confidence of one.55
It is not surprising that Bobby should have been more sympathetic than Emerson to the idea of compassion. Emerson inherited, even as he struggled to escape, the old Puritan problems and preoccupations; Bobby was a product of a less austere Roman Catholic tradition that emphasized the important role institutions (such as the apostolic succession) and other human beings (such as priests) play in transmitting to individuals the divine compassion that Christians perceive in the figure of Christ. Bobby had seen this principle of compassion at work in his own life and in the lives of his brothers and sisters. It was in part because his father had instilled in his children the belief that they could be successful that they actually became so. “Aren’t you foolish,” Joseph Kennedy wrote to the young Jack Kennedy, “not to get all there is out of what God has given you?” “You have the goods,” Kennedy told his son, “why not try to show it?”56 By making his sons believe that they could do great things, Joseph Kennedy enabled them to do great things. Bobby said that his father “called on the best that was in us.” “We might not be the best, and none of us were, but we were to make the effort to be the best.”57 “If it hadn’t been for that,” Jack said, Teddy would “be just a playboy today.”58 Some might question whether Teddy ever became anything more than that. But the fact remains that at the age of thirty this otherwise unremarkable young man was elected to the United States Senate.59 It is of course true that Teddy had money, connections, and a presidential brother on his side, but he also possessed—it is impossible to deny it—an unusually high degree of self-confidence. In The Fruitful Bough, a privately printed book edited by Teddy, Bobby declared: “What it really adds up to is love—not love as it is described with such facility in popular magazines, but the kind of love that is affection and respect, order, encouragement, and support.”60 Joseph Kennedy constantly sought to reinforce his children’s confidence in themselves with loving support—even when they made mistakes, even when they were under great pressure.61 Of course, all parents—or most parents, at any rate—try to do this, but few can have done it as persistently, as successfully, as religiously, as Joseph Kennedy. One may call him a Sinister Capitalist if one likes, but one cannot deny that he was a wonderful parent. “I still don’t know how I did,” Jack Kennedy joked after talking to his father by telephone at the time of the second debate with Nixon. “If I had slipped and fallen flat on the floor, he would have said, ‘The graceful way you picked yourself up was terrific.’”62 Joseph Kennedy’s letters and telegrams to his children are among the best things he ever wrote. When Kick Kennedy was struggling with the question of whether to accept Billy Hartington’s proposal of marriage and marry outside of the Roman church, her father cabled her:
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