Bobby, we hardly knew ye.

In Love with Night

The American Romance with Robert Kennedy

Ronald Steel

Simon and Schuster, $23, 210 pp.

I once attended a preseason professional football game in Philadelphia- I believe it was the summer of 1965-at which Robert Kennedy was the guest of honor in connection with a charitable fundraiser. Kennedy was introduced at half time, said a few words, and then with two or three other men, walked around the running track that circled the field. The crowd stood and roared-and roared. And, as he walked, Kennedy's scrawny, somewhat hunched, figure grew and glowed, until he towered over the men walking with him. This wasn't me-I wasn't a special fan of the Kennedys, and I wasn't cheering-but yet the figure glowed.

Max Weber called it charisma, the strange power possessed by prophets and saviors, by heroes and demagogues, by the Gandhis and the Hitlers alike. Robert Kennedy surely had it. Why he had it is the puzzle that the distinguished biographer and historian Ronald Steel sets himself to explain in this elegant little volume-why "American liberals, and even many conservatives, fell in love with Robert Kennedy"; why he "remains the standard by which millions measure, and find wanting, today's politicians"; why a generation after his death, as a reporter recently wrote, "the yearning for Robert Kennedy-or somebody like him-is an open wound in some parts of America."

It cannot be said that Steel succeeds. He has culled the vast published literature on Kennedy to produce a shapely biographical essay, a skeptical account of the creation of a legend. But he does not come close to explaining what an alarmed Barry Goldwater, in 1966, called the "religious fervor building up about this guy"-the peculiar messianic appeal of a politician who, as Steel writes, "had a squeaky voice, wore ill-fitting clothes...appeared even shorter than his average height because of a pronounced stoop...[who] lacked skills of delivery and had none of the orator's ability to move crowds."

Certainly, there was not much to like about the viciously competitive young man who rose to become the all-powerful de facto deputy president in his brother's administration. The socially awkward athletic wannabe became the ruthless prosecutor who vied with Roy Cohn for the top job on Joe McCarthy's investigative committee, and later wept at the news of McCarthy's death and accompanied the body to its burial plot. Like Ahab, he hounded teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa for more than a decade, bending every rule of evidence and prosecutorial ethics until he finally landed his prey.

Later, as attorney general, when he learned that J. Edgar Hoover was on the trail of Ellen Rometsch, an old paramour of Jack's who also happened to be an East German spy, he summarily deported the lady and threatened the Washington Post with an antitrust suit if they published an account of the incident. Executives from the steel industry who opposed the administration's economic program were targeted for harassing tax investigations. Kennedy was the architect of Operation Mongoose, the terrorist operation in South Vietnam that Graham Greene skewered in The Quiet American, and oversaw the many attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. His support for civil rights activists was always tardy and resentful.

It is Kennedy's intensity, his brooding sense of Gaelic-Catholic guilt that elevate him from soulless operative to tragic figure. Jack's assassination came like a bolt of retribution, especially since Kennedy never quite convinced himself that it had not been engineered by Castro or the Mafia: "It was Bobby who had hounded the Mafia; who had goaded the CIA to get rid of Castro; who knew of his brother's connection [through his mistress Judith Campbell] to the very Mafia don the CIA had hired to kill the Cuban leader. The psychic weight of such a burden of knowledge and responsibility must have been enormous....This is the horrible irony he carried with him and kept secret until the day he died. He had trafficked in the darkest realms of conspiracy and murder, and he had brought this fate upon himself. It was the classic definition of Greek tragedy."

Robert sank into a deep depression after the assassination, but as soon as he recovered began setting up a virtual Kennedy government-in-exile in quiet opposition to Lyndon Johnson, for whom he had the coldest of hatreds. It was all the more humiliating to have to call on Johnson to rescue his faltering New York senatorial campaign against the bumbling but likable Republican incumbent, Kenneth Keating. For a man of such legendary political skills, the New York campaign was oddly off-the- cuff, casual to the point of carelessness. But once elected, Kennedy shrewdly began to limn the Democratic "third way" later seized upon by Bill Clinton, the leaders of the New Democratic Coalition, and more recently by Tony Blair. His well-known Bedford-Stuyvesant renewal project emphasized business involvement and small, self-sustaining commercial projects, in pointed contrast to the sweeping government programs so loved by Johnson.

Steel's sympathies for Eugene McCarthy are everywhere apparent in his account of the 1968 campaign. (He even implies, without documentation, that Kennedy hoped to displace Hubert Humphrey as Johnson's running mate, which is implausible.) Kennedy's late entry into the race, after the New Hampshire primary in which McCarthy had proved Johnson to be vulnerable, was cynically opportunistic.

But Steel makes a strong case that Kennedy was not going to win the nomination, even after the fateful victory in California. Although he had beaten McCarthy in most of their head-to-head encounters, his victories were narrow and heavily dependent on black and Hispanic voters. (The alleged coalition between working-class white ethnics and blacks was a Kennedy spinmeister's myth.) He made a poor showing in Oregon, the one predominantly suburban state he ran in, and might well have lost outright to McCarthy in New York, where antiwar sentiment was strong. His support among party bosses, who still controlled the convention, was uncertain and wavering.

The Kennedy brand of charisma, Steel writes, "is not eternal; it must continually be reaffirmed. Although not necessarily destroyed by death, it cannot easily survive defeat." If he had lost the nomination, the implication is, Kennedy faced a drab future as aging presidential pretender, living off the family myth at the distant margins of his party. It is to Sirhan Sirhan's bullet, Steel suggests, that we owe the legend of Bobby Kennedy.

Steel's essay demonstrates the value of the short biographical form. Ignoring the current fashion for swollen tomes that track their subject's every utterance and bodily spasm, he pulls together the major threads of what is known about Robert Kennedy and presents them crisply and gracefully. If the presentation occasionally borders on the hostile, the biases are readily apparent.

But on the central question of charisma, on the why of this unprepossessing figure's power to transport crowds to realms of ecstatic frenzy, Steel sheds no light at all. Bobby had the magic; the legend lives, and the mystery abides.

Charles R. Morris's most recent books are American Catholic (Times Books, 1997) and Money, Greed and Risk (Times Books, 1999).