The potential inherent in the churches, the synagogues, and the mosques, with their deep roots in the community soil, with their traditions of compassion and charity, with their capacity to nourish not only the body, but also the soul, was, of course, always very great; it would be difficult to conceive of a more effective agency than religion for dispensing hope to the hopeless. Jonathan Kozol has shown us how much these places mean in the poorest neighborhoods in America. “In one of the most diseased and dangerous communities of any city in the Western world,” Kozol wrote of the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, “the beautiful old stone church on St. Ann’s Avenue is a gentle sanctuary from the terrors of the streets outside.”14 To go there, he says, is to be immediately aware of the “presence of small children.” “They seem to be everywhere: in the garden, in the hallways, in the kitchen, in the chapel, on the stair.”15
So-called faith-based rescue programs, programs that emphasize religious notions of love, compassion, and individual self-worth, have demonstrated a remarkable ability to help people without homes, jobs, or both, gain the kind of confidence in themselves that leads to the rebuilding of shattered lives.16 These programs have rescued thousands of men and women from dependence, addiction, and despair and guided them to lives of self-reliance and self-respect.17 Even without the benefit of federal subsidies—for the federal government has until recently refused to support “faith-based” programs—the churches, the synagogues, and the mosques have done more to improve the lives of the downtrodden (as opposed to merely perpetuating their miserable status quo) than a host of federal welfare programs. If these institutions, rather than the dreary welfare office, could have been made the focal point for the distribution of some part of the nation’s public charity and compassion, who knows what the result might have been? For once the government might have done something to remedy the problems of poverty, homelessness, and unemployment that continue to plague the inner city without erecting a vast (and expensive) federal infrastructure to do so, for, of course, the bricks and mortar are already there. There are churches in every neighborhood in America, and synagogues and mosques in many of them. But the jealous tenets and petty animosities of the Enlightenment have been taken, in America, to their ultimate conclusions, their furthest extreme, and we have been led to believe that any cooperation between government and religion, whether in the education of children, the maintenance of public morals, or the feeding and clothing of the poor, will be fatal to the principles of our coldly secular state, and will inevitably set us on the road to the dictatorship of a theocracy.
The idea that government might usefully cooperate with religion, and provide the churches, the synagogues, the mosques, with a portion of those funds that now course through the byzantine channels of the federal welfare bureaucracy, would have been dismissed out of hand by even the most open-minded reformers of the sixties as a prima facie violation of the First Amendment. To be sure, government agencies have in the past helped to fund certain charitable programs sponsored by churches, but in order to qualify for these funds, such programs have typically been required to eliminate the very faith-based elements that account for their astonishing success.18 A federally funded faith-based rescue program would almost certainly fail the Supreme Court’s Lemon test, so called because of a 1971 case, Lemon v. Kurtzman, in which the Court held that government subsidies that “advance or inhibit” religion are unconstitutional.19 Bobby, contemptuous though he eventually became of much of the conventional wisdom of his day, could not break with the liberal consensus on so delicate a point as this. Although the arguments against the cooperation between church and state in the war on poverty were singularly unpersuasive, any attempt by Bobby to move very far in that direction would have cost him critical support in his own party. He would have been crucified, not indeed upon the altar of the First Amendment, but upon the altar of that frigid, fanatical ideal of absolute secularism that the First Amendment has been twisted into meaning.20
The Cross or the Capitol
EMERSON DID NOT dwell on the problem of failure in American life. His friend Thoreau did; Thoreau did not shrink from exposing the quiet desperation that underlies so many apparently solid, placid, respectable American lives. Emerson shrank from the oppressive reality. The world of second mortgages, compound interest, the lost job, the unfulfilling career, the wrecked marriage: it was unreal to him. “But when you have chosen your part,” Emerson said, “abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world.” Fair enough. But what of those men and women who, though unreconciled to the world, fail in their attempt to stand up to it, and are crushed by the power of those “badges and names,” those “large societies and dead institutions,” that Emerson chastises us for too easily capitulating to? What comfort can Emerson give them? Their money back? An autographed copy of “Self-Reliance”? A subscription to Dale Carnegie’s course? Melville was only the first critic to perceive how perilously close the apostle of self-confidence came to being just another riverboat confidence man.21
The great virtue of religion, of course, is not so much its ability to help men succeed, although, of course, it can help them succeed. The great virtue of religion lies in its ability to console men in the midst of failure, to permit them to function even in the midst of despair. Bobby, however, was curiously oblivious of the consoling powers of religion. If he was a devout Catholic, he was also a troubled one. He “did not talk much about religion,” vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman report.22 He found his “primary solace in Greek impressions of character and fate,” Schlesinger says.23 He continued to be a practicing Catholic. But he was uneasy in his faith.24
Part of the problem was politics. Bobby believed that the Church was too conservative, that it was out of touch with contemporary life. Hugh Carey told him that the Church was a “problem” in Brooklyn, and Bobby at once accepted the revelation as true.25 Bobby told Pope Paul VI that the Church was a “reactionary force” in Los Angeles.26 He wondered “why the kids who came out of parochial school” were “so conservative.”27 Though he regularly attended Mass, and wore a St. Christopher medal round his neck, the ancient traditions of his faith seemed to mean little to him; he was always urging the Church to become more “contemporary” in its orientation.28 He welcomed those Vatican II reforms that did so much to undermine a number of the Church’s oldest traditions. Bobby, the sympathetic celebrant of the cult of the polis, saw much less practical or spiritual value in the creed that had vanquished paganism and erected the banner of the Cross on the ruins of the Capitol. The deep piety of his boyhood was gone; he had become a secular man, one who was instinctively attracted to Greek ideals of citizenship and patriotism. The City of Man appealed to him in a way that the City of God did not. A Catholic from habit, he was a Greek by inclination, and to the end of his life remained curiously blind to the transformative power of religion. When in 1966 he set about asking the Paleys and Dillons of the world for help in Bedford-Stuyvesant, he neglected to call the bishop of Brooklyn. The bishop “very badly wanted to help,” according to a 1966 memorandum from Walinsky to Bobby. But he had not been asked to.29
I wonder whether there was not another reason why Bobby should have been ambivalent about the social virtues of religion. He had seen, in his mother’s life, the ability of religion not only to console but also to detach, to isolate. Perhaps it had been in Rose’s nature to incline toward solitude, to be always, in Red Fay’s words, “out of the loop,” a “very lonely person,” one who spent many hours by herself walking on the beach or lost in prayerful reverie.30 Perhaps her powerful husband, so adept at encouraging his children, had failed sufficiently to encourage her—failed to encourage her to develop those social impulses that had rather touchingly manifested themselves, when she was young, in her “Ace of Clubs,” a social group dedicated to the social and intellectual improvement of its members.31 Whatever the cause of Rose’s tendency to solipsism, she found, in religion, an excuse for indulging it more fully than was healthy, fo
und in it an excuse for evading the world rather than coming to terms with it. The variety of religious faith with which Bobby was most familiar was his mother’s, and her example must at times have made him doubt whether the creed that dominated her life was indeed the ideal one to draw people out into the world and give them the strength to act confidently in it.
Bobby did not break with all the Enlightened dogmas of his age. It was achievement enough to have broken with some. Like Disraeli before him, he found in the pre-Enlightened past the inspiration for a modern politics of compassion, and he softened the dogmas of nineteenth-century liberal individualism by recognizing how necessary it was to preserve certain of the older traditions of the West. Disraeli (and the other partisans of the Young England movement, of which he was the most illustrious representative) had hoped that religion might serve as the basis for a modern politics of compassion; in his novel Tancred Disraeli declared that Englishmen must look upon the Church of England as the “main remedial agency” in the “present state” of crisis: only the Church, he said, could supply the “machinery” by which “results might be realised.”32 Bobby, of course, looked not to religion for results, but to community, to the ancient Hellenic tradition of the polis. Although that choice seems now to have been a mistaken one, it should not be permitted to detract from the man’s larger achievement, that of demonstrating how pre-Enlightenment traditions could be made the inspiration for a post-Enlightenment politics.
16
Early in 1967 there were rumors that Hanoi had changed its position on negotiations with the United States; that it had dropped its insistence that a series of improbable conditions be met before it would come to the bargaining table; and that it was now insisting upon a single condition, that the United States halt its aerial bombardment of targets in the north. Bobby, in Paris at the end of his European tour, heard as much from Etienne Manac’h, an official in the Ministère des Affaires étrangères who was in close communication with the North Vietnamese Mission at Paris. Bobby was accompanied to his meeting in the Quai d’Orsay by an American diplomat, John Gunther Dean, who concluded that the French official’s source was important enough to warrant a cable to Washington. Upon returning to the embassy, Dean dispatched a report to his superiors at the State Department. By the time Bobby’s airplane touched down in the United States, the story was out: the North Vietnamese had made an important peace overture through the unlikely channel of a French diplomat and an American Senator in Paris.1
President Johnson believed that any indication of America’s eagerness for peace threatened to upset his prosecution of the war; in a meeting with Bobby a few days after the “peace feeler” story broke, he accused the Senator of having himself informed the newspapers of his conversations in the Quai d’Orsay. Bobby denied it; he said that the President’s own State Department was responsible for the press reports. “It’s not my State Department, goddamn it,” the President replied. “It’s your State Department.”2 A presidential tirade followed. “I’ll destroy you and every one of your dove friends in six months,” Johnson said. “You’ll be dead politically in six months.” Time magazine claimed that Bobby responded to Johnson’s threats by calling the President a son of a bitch to his face. But this was apparently an exaggeration. Bobby did, however, tell the President that he did not have to “take” the kind of abuse to which the President was subjecting him.3
Was Bobby, as President Johnson maintained, a “dove” on the question of Vietnam? One might more accurately say that he was continuing to press, as he had pressed in the past, for a political solution to the conflict—a negotiated peace, a settlement along the lines of the one that Averell Harriman had negotiated for his brother in Laos half a decade before. At their February meeting Bobby urged the President to halt the bombing of targets in the north, agree to a series of cease-fire arrangements, and permit the presence in South Vietnam of international peacekeeping troops, which in time could replace the American forces stationed there. But he failed to persuade the President to adopt these proposals. (“There just isn’t a chance in hell that I will do that,” Johnson said, “not the slightest chance.”4) Privately Bobby wondered whether there was any point in even trying to work constructively with the President. The two men had, Schlesinger said, “reached the end of the road.”5
While continuing to advocate a political settlement, Bobby began to denounce the war with a passion and a zeal that had been absent from his earlier pronouncements. In the Senate he rose to condemn the “horror” of the war, and he asserted that every American was morally responsible for the chemicals that scarred Vietnamese children and the bombs that destroyed Vietnamese villages. He said that what Americans were “doing to the Vietnamese” was “not very different than [sic] what Hitler did to the Jews.” Critics, among them Richard Nixon, accused him of “prolonging the war by encouraging the enemy” and denounced him for using Vietnam to further his own ambitions.6 Bobby himself was undaunted.
The Less Courageous Act
THE MELANCHOLY SPRING of 1967 gave way to a hot and violent summer. Deadly riots in Newark were followed by still deadlier riots in Detroit, and there were violent clashes in the streets of Boston, New Haven, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Tampa. In a distressing turn of events, civil unrest occurred even in cities that had made extensive use of Great Society urban aid programs.7 President Johnson responded to the crisis by appointing a commission to investigate the underlying causes of the violence. Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois was made chairman, and a number of Stimsonian respectables (John Lindsay, Cyrus Vance) were appointed to give it an air of credibility. Bobby doubted whether it would do any good.8 The cities were crying out in pain, and so even were the suburbs. It was a time of “social hemorrhaging,” Joan Didion wrote, “of commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled.”9 It was unlikely that yet another assemblage of wise men could do anything to remedy the deeper evils that had taken root in the country.
Although the events of the summer confirmed Bobby’s view of the seriousness of the crisis of the ghetto, he did not pique himself on his prescience. The cities had ceased to be his principal concern. Adam Walinsky was wrong: the ghetto would not carry him to the heights. Never again in his career would Bobby display such boldness of conception, such originality of thought, such richness of imagination, such contempt for established opinion, as he did when he challenged the welfare state. But that act of rebellion, however courageous it might have been, did not bring him the glory he craved. It was the decidedly lesser act of opposing the war in Vietnam that made him into a hero and a presidential candidate.
The Pleasures of Empire
MORE THAN FIFTEEN years had passed since he and Jack Kennedy had visited Vietnam together. In 1951 the two brothers had made a grand tour of the Orient, and French Indochina had been among the last stops on their itinerary. The disaster of Dien Bien Phu was still in the future, and it was the corrupt and romantic Saigon of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American that the young Kennedys encountered: ceiling fans and drinks at the Continental, vermouth cassis and gunfire in the night, silk-trousered figures moving with grace through the humid noon, and golden rice fields shimmering in the late-afternoon sun.10 It was, for both of them, an introduction to the pleasures of empire. The faults of the American Empire have been copiously cataloged; its pleasures have never been properly documented. Which is odd: those pleasures had a good deal more to do with its success than any number of diplomatic cables and State Department white papers. Since Virgil’s time men have complained at tedious length of the burdens of empire, but few who have stared empire in the face have had the presence of mind to refuse its pleasures. The hope of gain, the love of power, the feeling of self-importance, are only a part of the explanation of empire; the other part has always lain in the pleasure man takes in strange and exotic things.
Ever since Alexander went east in the name of glory and conquest, th
e imperial man has found pleasure not merely in the strangeness of Persepolis, or even in the release from the burdens of his own civilization that life in a remote capital and a distant province affords. He has derived pleasure, too, from the experience of being, in a strange place, an exotic being himself, a sahib, a great man among little people, a lord among the coolies: thus Lawrence in Arabia, Clive in India, Kurtz in central Africa. Sojourns in the world’s backwaters have brought out the patrician instinct latent even in very egalitarian natures. In his mind the egalitarian man may be committed to the principles of the democratic civilization he represents, but in his heart the sahib loves the feeling of being superior to the simpler, less complicated, more primitive beings whose pressing poverty surrounds him. The most innocent traveler is sensible of the gulf that separates him from the mass of humanity that sends forth the men and women who make his bed, polish his shoes, and mix his drinks. The less innocent traveler is not only sensible of this gulf, he thrives on it.
Nowhere is the complicated allure of the exotic more evident than in the farthest reaches of the East, where in the humid and fragrant air a belief in the white man’s burden merges easily and ineluctably into a belief in the white man’s prerogative, and where in the tropical heat the essential rightness of democracy becomes indistinguishable from the essential rightness of a vermouth cassis at the Continental. In Lord Jim Conrad described how corrupting was the effect of the East on a certain type of European man. Such a man at first became attached “to the eternal peace of the Eastern sky and sea,” to the “softness of the sky,” to the “languor of the earth,” to the “bewitching breath of the Eastern waters”; at last he became addicted to the simple “distinction of being white.”11 In A Passage to India, Forster depicted Englishmen who at Chandrapore were as “little gods” in their smooth-skinned whiteness; he described how painful it was for these pink-faced divinities to retire to little suburban villas in England, where they lived out their lives far removed from their former glory.12 Nor was the hierarchical Englishman alone in being susceptible to the bewitching mixture of sensual charm and native subservience of the East; the egalitarian American was not less susceptible. Alden Pyle, the quiet American of Greene’s story, annoys the jaded journalist Fowler precisely because he is so authoritarian a democrat; when Pyle speaks of liberty, he does so in the patronizing manner of one who has been bred up on principles of noblesse oblige. Joseph Alsop was in love not simply with Chinese silk and porcelain, but with the memory of a place where he had been more fully an aristocrat than he could ever be—than anyone could ever be—in the United States. Even the prosaic McNamara succumbed to the East’s flattering charm; in an otherwise colorless memoir of the Vietnam era he dwelt uncharacteristically on the poetry of the place, on the whirring ceiling fans of the Presidential Palace and on the beauty of Madame Nhu, a woman who knew well enough how to charm the Western man by making him feel important, potent, desirable. A few years ago I chanced to read an unpublished manuscript by a man who as a young State Department officer in the early sixties had been posted to Saigon to assist the Ambassador. Like Alsop, McNamara, Pyle, and all the others, he had quite obviously become a victim, a victim of the most pathetic kind. I suppose even a more stoical soul than he was would have found it difficult not to be carried away by the pleasures of that vanished world, by the sensation of being a member of the charmed circle to which one’s status as an American, a diplomat, and a white man gave one an automatic entrée. It was all plainly, ingenuously there: the games of tennis with the powerful, the unending round of garden parties and grand meals with the local elite, the diplomatic intrigue, the exhilarating sensation of participating in matters of high state, the obligatory affair with a beautiful Vietnamese woman, a femme fatale on the model of Madame Nhu. The manuscript made it abundantly clear that the burdens of empire had become indistinguishable from its pleasures, that the empire was about something more than power—that it was about a perverse form of joy.
The Last Patrician Page 21