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The American Republic, 1966. On television Americans watched Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., Petticoat Junction, My Favorite Martian, and Batman. The Beatles released Revolver, Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls was a best-seller, and Mame, with Miss Lansbury in the title role, was the toast of Broadway. Truman Capote, fresh from the success of In Cold Blood, gave his famous black-and-white masked ball at the Plaza, and Susan Sontag published Against Interpretation. The Methodist Church merged with the United Brethren Church to become the United Methodist Church, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, and three Gemini series rockets were launched at Cape Kennedy. The Supreme Court handed down its decision in Miranda v. Arizona in June, and in September the first episode of Star Trek was broadcast on NBC. In July Richard Speck murdered eight student nurses in a house on the South Side of Chicago, and in August Charles Whitman killed sixteen people and wounded thirty others with a high-powered rifle fired from the tower of the University of Texas at Austin. It was a year in which Gilligan’s Island and Flipper coexisted uneasily in the national consciousness with campus protest and alienated youth, in which pictures of dropouts and hippies in San Francisco contrasted oddly with the airbrushed glamour of the models depicted in advertisements in magazines and on television. It was the era of the Dean Martin Show and the Jack Benny Hour; of Barbara Garson’s MacBird and Megan Terry’s Viet Rock; of Danny Kaye, Stokely Carmichael, and Gary Player.
An American Senator in 1966
AT THE END of January 1966 President Johnson ordered a resumption of the bombing of targets in North Vietnam. In February the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under the chairmanship of Senator Fulbright, held hearings on the progress of the war. Bobby, about to leave Washington to go skiing in Vermont, urged the administration to negotiate an end to the conflict, and asserted that no lasting settlement would be possible unless the Americans invited “discontented” elements in South Vietnam (like the Communist National Liberation Front) to the bargaining table and admitted them to “a share of power and responsibility” in the government at Saigon.1 President Johnson, who was still convinced that the United States could win a military victory in Indochina, was furious. Although Bobby would in the ensuing weeks soften his remarks about the necessity of admitting Communists to a share of “power and responsibility” in the south, he continued to believe that the war was unwinnable. His doubts were reinforced when, in March, he lunched in New York with the French statesman Pierre Mendès-France, who told him that Hanoi and Peking could afford to pursue the war indefinitely, and that in the end they would exhaust America’s patience.
But there was more to Bobby’s life in 1966 than Vietnam. In June, the same month in which he dedicated a new swimming pool in Bedford-Stuyvesant, he made a triumphal tour of South Africa and several other African nations.2 The trip was extensively covered in the newspapers and on television, and Bobby’s own popularity soared. “Senator Kennedy,” Joseph Alsop wrote, “has now reached the status of an unprecedented political phenomenon.” Alsop likened him to “the young Theodore Roosevelt returning from Cuba” with all eyes upon him.3 By the end of the summer Bobby had moved “dramatically ahead” of Lyndon Johnson in public opinion polls, and people began to talk of the inevitability of another Kennedy administration.4
During the second half of 1966, however, Bobby found himself on the defensive, forced to devote much of his time to the sordid and unfashionable pursuits of conventional politics—hand-shaking, speech-making, king-making. In July he helped elect Sam Silverman, a former Paul, Weiss partner, to the New York City Surrogate’s Court. After the Silverman victory he turned his attention to the November elections. Nelson Rockefeller, who had taken the Governor’s Mansion from Averell Harriman in 1958, was standing for reelection as Governor of New York. Bobby weighed the merits of a number of potential opponents: Sol Linowitz, the Rochester lawyer and Xerox executive; Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., to whom Bobby was under a personal obligation (Roosevelt had helped Jack Kennedy win the West Virginia primary in 1960); Eugene Nickerson, a Long Island politician who, though he was more obscure than his competitors, would in Bobby’s view make as good a Governor as anyone. But Bobby hesitated to spend his political capital in the expensive effort of making a king, and in the fall his party, meeting at Buffalo, nominated Frank O’Connor, a machine politician from Queens. Bobby endorsed his party’s nominee without enthusiasm.
In September there was a brief respite; Bobby put aside the burdens of politics and went sailing off the coast of Maine. Word reached him there that General de Gaulle, on a visit to Cambodia, had offered to broker a peace between Washington and Hanoi. Bobby thought the offer worth exploring, and was disappointed to learn that Johnson had summarily rejected it. He spent much of the rest of the fall campaigning for fellow Democrats—O’Connor in New York, G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams in Michigan, Pat Brown in California, Paul Douglas in Illinois. It was not a good year for liberals. Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California, and many of the candidates for whom Bobby campaigned lost their races.5 In New York the Rockefeller machine spent some $11 million to defeat O’Connor, making it one of the most expensive gubernatorial contests in American history.
Exhausted from the rigors of campaigning, Bobby flew to the Bahamas to recuperate in the sun. When he returned to Washington, he faced still more bad news, allegations that as Attorney General he had authorized illegal wiretaps on telephones and other impermissible forms of electronic surveillance. Nor was this his only problem. William Manchester had recently completed his manuscript on the assassination of President Kennedy; Look had secured prepublication serialization rights; the book itself was scheduled to appear in bookstores in 1967. Jacqueline Kennedy did not want the book published. Indeed, she did not want any history of the assassination published.6 Bobby reluctantly agreed to press her cause. In November, the same month in which he feted Averell Harriman at Hickory Hill, Bobby showed up at the Berkshire Hotel in New York, where Manchester was staying in a suite maintained by Look, and demanded a meeting. Manchester refused to open the door to the suite, leaving Bobby to pound on it in impotent fury.7 Rebuffed by Manchester, the Kennedys went to court. Jacqueline Kennedy authorized Simon Rifkind, another Paul, Weiss lawyer, to seek an injunction preventing publication of The Death of a President on the ground that Manchester had breached his contract with the Kennedys. (The Kennedys’ ties to Paul, Weiss, among the most liberal of New York’s preeminent law firms, had been strengthened when Theodore Sorensen became a partner there in January 1966; Adam Walinsky’s father-in-law was the firm’s real-estate partner.8) Bobby, on the slopes at Sun Valley, condemned what he called Manchester’s greed (Look had agreed to pay him $665,000 for the serialization rights) even as he privately acknowledged that the affair was damaging his own reputation.9 (The accusation of greed was unfounded; Manchester would eventually donate more than a million dollars in royalties from The Death of a President to the Kennedy Library.)10
As 1966 drew to a close Bobby talked about getting out of the United States for a time; the struggles of the past few months had left him tired and dispirited.11 “I gotta get out of the country,” he told friends.12 A European itinerary was soon put together. The trip, a combination of business and pleasure, would give him a chance to see old friends like the Radziwills, Rudolf Nureyev, and Margot Fonteyn.13 There was a lunch at Blenheim with the Duke of Marlborough; a dinner party in Paris given by Hervé Alphand, the former French Ambassador to the United States, and his wife, Nicole (Pierre Cardin, Shirley MacLaine, and Catherine Deneuve were among the guests); dinner with Candice Bergen at a cozy little place on the Left Bank; drinks with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Rome; and a shopping tour with Contessa Crespi.14 There was, too, a series of obligatory calls on heads of state and other movers and shakers in the highest political and diplomatic circles. During the course of the trip Bobby met Prime Minister Wilson, President de Gaulle, Ambassador Bohlen, Chancellor Kiesinger, Mayor Brandt, Premier Moro,
Cardinal Cicognani, and the Pope.15
The Idea of Community
THUS THE PUBLIC life of a powerful American Senator thirty years ago. What of the intellectual life, the life of the mind? Bobby has consistently been celebrated by his admirers as one of the most creative political personalities of his day, a man whose capacity for intellectual growth distinguished him from the other politicians of the period. “Most people,” Tony Lewis said, “acquire certainties as they grow older; he lost his.”16 Bobby “grew” more than anyone Lewis had ever known. Arthur Schlesinger said that Bobby possessed to an “exceptional degree” what T. S. Eliot called an “experiencing nature,” one that permitted him to respond to the turbulence of his times “more directly and sensitively than any other political leader of the era.”17 Jack Newfield was awed by Bobby’s “capacity to grow and change”; he contrasted it with the less credible transformations undergone by Nixon, Reagan, and Dole: “Below the surface of these packaged politicians,” Newfield said, “there was no authentic growth.”18 We have, in a previous chapter, seen how Bobby believed that a crisis of confidence lay at the heart of the tragedy of the ghetto (as well as of many other places in American society), and we have seen that he further believed that this deficit in self-confidence could be made good only through the compassion of others. But quite obviously he himself could not visit every slum; he could not touch the life of every person who had been scarred by pain or seared by terrible experience. He could not personally persuade each drug addict, each delinquent, each hardened criminal, each teenage mother, that he or she had been created in God’s image, and had a life that was worth living. He needed to find some more comprehensive dispensary of hope and affirmation, needed to find a broader means of effecting the “cure through love” that he envisioned.
During much of 1966 he was still groping toward a solution. His notes in committee show him struggling with the question of how to formulate a comprehensive response to what he called the “pathology of the ghetto.” It was not simply a matter of creating self-confident and self-reliant citizens in the inner city. It was, in a more important sense, a matter of demonstrating that the nineteenth-century tradition of liberal individualism, the tradition of Emerson and Lincoln, was not an anachronistic one. According to critics of liberal individualism, the cult of the individual had no place in twentieth-century American life.19 The nineteenth century’s faith in the powers of an archetypical “American Adam,” with his limitless horizons, his extensive opportunities, his relative freedom from restraint and coercion, had ceased to be compelling in the more complicated world of the twentieth century.20 The early-nineteenth-century American, it was argued, was far freer to shape his destiny than his twentieth-century counterpart; he was not beholden, as his twentieth-century descendant was, to institutions over which he had no control; he was not at the mercy of vast corporations, a larger and more intrusive government bureaucracy, an educational establishment for whose credentials he must pay dearly if he was to have any hope of success. In this larger, more impersonal, more bureaucratic world, the typical American had far less opportunity than the free and unshackled “American Adam” of Tocqueville’s time; hence the need for a neo-feudal welfare state presided over by benevolent technocrats.
Were its critics right? Was the nineteenth-century tradition of liberal individualism an archaic throwback to an America that no longer existed? Only sentimentality could make us think so. The railroad-building, factory-creating nation that gave the world Emerson and Lincoln was not an overgrown village. Americans in the early nineteenth century were oppressed by many of the same confidence-killing things that weigh upon them so heavily today. They, too, felt the pressure of mortgages, bills, employers, and tax collectors. In Walden (1854) Thoreau wrote that on applying to the assessors at Concord he was
surprised to learn that they cannot at once name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear. If you would know the history of these homesteads, inquire at the bank where they are mortgaged. The man who has actually paid for his farm with labor on it is so rare that every neighbor can point to him.… What has been said of the merchants, that a very large majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of farmers. With regard to the merchants, however, one of them says pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but merely failures to fulfill their engagements, because it is inconvenient; that is, the moral character breaks down. But this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter, and suggests, beside, that probably not even the other three succeed in saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than those who fail honestly. Bankruptcy and repudiation are the spring-boards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersaults.21
America was always a nation of desperate men. The very things that do so much to undermine our spirits and sap our confidence today existed, in only a slightly different form, a hundred and fifty years ago. Mortgages, debt, bankruptcy, the interest rate, the necessity of making a living, the necessity of paying taxes did as much to limit freedom of action and inhibit the development of a self-confident attitude toward the world in the nineteenth century as they do today. Social class, ancestry, and religious affiliation were often a far heavier burden then. If the world is more complex today, it is no more antipathetic to the individual’s desire to express himself freely and self-confidently in it. And yet there was, Bobby knew, an important difference between Emerson’s world—the world of the early and middle nineteenth century—and our own. A hundred and fifty years ago the confidence-crippling effects of bills, mortgages, debts, tuition, and taxes were mitigated by an institution that we in the twentieth century have allowed to fall into disrepair and desuetude—or so Bobby argued. He argued that our contemporary civilization, in destroying the small communities and neighborhoods that once flourished in the land, robbed us of the very things that had once made Americans such a spectacularly self-confident people. In destroying the close-knit civic units, the little platoons to which Americans had once belonged, and which had once given them comfort in the midst of their desperation, our modern civilization had destroyed the very things that had once sustained and nurtured self-reliant citizens.22 Bobby concluded that if Americans were, in the middle of the twentieth century, suffering more acutely from feelings of anxiety and worthlessness than they had in the past, it was in part because they no longer lived in the kind of communities that had once given them a sense of stability, a sense of order, a sense of belonging, a sense that there existed around them a network of friends, neighbors, churches, clubs, and associations to which they could turn for help and guidance, and that could in turn lift up their spirits and stimulate in them a feeling of confidence in their powers.
The individual and the community were closely connected in Bobby’s mind: a compassionate community could liberate an individual from his crippling pain, and so give him a degree of control over his destiny; liberated individuals, in turn, could contribute to the vitality of the community that had nurtured them. Bobby believed that participation in the life of the community worked to awaken the soul, stimulate the moral sense, and strengthen self-confidence. The question he asked in 1966 was how a sense of community could be restored in America’s neighborhoods, how people could be made to feel again a sense of “larger common purpose.”23 How, Bobby wondered, was it possible to tap the “nucleus of leadership and community concern” that existed in even such a place as Bedford-Stuyvesant, a “decaying, dying city,” the “worst slum” in America, a place where thirty percent of the housing was classified as deteriorating or dilapidated, a place where the rates of crime, venereal disease, alcoholism, and infant mortality were far above national and even New York City averages?24
The mechanism upon which he eventually settled was the community development corporation.25 The prototypical community development corporation was the Bedford-Stuyvesant restoration project itself. Bobby outlined the basic theory of these corporation
s during the Ribicoff hearings in August 1966, when he took the “unusual step” of testifying before a subcommittee of which he himself was a member.26 In testimony in which he quoted Aristotle and Lewis Mumford, Bobby lamented the destruction of the “thousand invisible strands of common experience and respect which tie men to their fellows.”27 He lamented the decline of the “civic pride” and “human dialogue” that enabled each citizen to feel his “own human significance in the accepted association and companionship of others.”28 “The whole history of the human race, until today,” Bobby declared, had “been the history of community.” But community was now “disappearing,” disappearing “at a time when its sustaining strength” was “badly needed.”29 An older America, an America in which “the values of nature and community and local diversity” found “their nurture in the smaller towns and rural areas,” had vanished; it had been replaced by a bigger and more impersonal world, one in which Americans were condemned to live their lives “among stone and concrete, neon lights and an endless flow of automobiles.” Detached from the vital warmth of community, men became “more and more both perpetrators and victims of coldness, cruelty, and violence.”30
Bigness, loss of community, organizations grown far past the human scale—these [Bobby declared] are the besetting sins of the twentieth century, which threaten to paralyze our very capacity to act … our ability to preserve the traditions and values of our past.31
All Americans, he declared, had “suffered somewhat the loss of personal identity” brought about by “the disintegration of the neighborhood as the basic unit of local democracy.”32 Even the affluent “child of the suburbs” had “suffered from the loss of community”:
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