Bobby: Good, Bad, And In Between.

The many incarnations of Robert Kennedy

The Phineas Understudy

In 1942, RFK left the Catholic Portsmouth Priory prep school amid a cheating scandal that has never been fully resolved and became a student at the resolutely Brahmin Milton Academy. There he became friends with the model for the tragic hero Phineas in John Knowles' A Separate Peace:

Shy, prickly, and demoralized, Robert Kennedy arrived at Milton, his sixth school in ten years, in the fall of 1942. Milton was a traditional feeder school for Harvard, which recommended it to Ambassador Kennedy, but the tone and culture were High WASP, unwelcoming to Catholic new money. Milton could have been a disaster for Bobby Kennedy. He arrived knowing no one and made little attempt to learn anyone's name. He simply called the &her boys "fella," as in, "hey, fella" Kennedy was instantly, and not affectionately, nicknamed Fella. In the recollections of his classmates, he was deemed to have "a chip on his shoulder," "a short fuse," and, just as unacceptable, "the wrong clothes? There were a few Catholics on campus, but most of them worked in the kitchen, or made beds. Almost all the students came to the school in eighth or ninth grade. Bobby entered in eleventh grade, after the cliques had already formed. His schoolmates insisted, somewhat defensively, that Milton was free of prejudice. "There were no ugly incidents," said Joy Luke, who went to the coordinate girls' school across the street. "But we were all aware his father was a bootlegger." RFK could have remained an outcast, but for a friendship he formed while playing football.

At Portsmouth, Kennedy had been a slow, small, but inordinately determined second-string halfback. As he neared his seventeenth birthday, Kennedy had filled out and hardened. He still looked scrawny in street clothes and walked head down, "like a bird in a storm;" as one of the Milton girls described him. But he was taut and wiry. While his legs were short and stubby, his torso was long and muscled, and his arms, particularly his forearms, were well developed. "Bobby is going to be the most robust and Jack practically admits to us--though not to Bobby--that Bobby could throw him now," Rose wrote Kathleen and Joe Jr. At football practice at Milton, he tore into tackling dummies "as if his life depended on it," recalled Sam Adams, another would-be halfback trying out for the team. Adams and Kennedy both made the second backfield, along with a younger boy; a tenth grader named David Hackett.

Hackett would become a schoolboy god, Milton's best football and hockey player ever, his schoolmates swore decades later. Little boys would follow him around, "like the Pied Piper," recalled Mary Bailey Gimbel, who was at the Milton Academy girls' school at the time. Hackett's appeal to Kennedy, however, was less as a boy hero than as an anti-hero, a romantic renegade. In his famous coming-of-age novel, A Separate Peace, John Knowles would use Hackett (whom he had met at summer school at Exeter) as the model for his doomed golden boy, Phineas. Phineas possessed a "scatterbrained eloquence," a "calm ignorance of the rules with a winning urge to be good." He was a "model boy who was most comfortable in the truant's corner." So, in real life, was Hackett. "Hackett seas offbeat," said Joy Luke. "If he couldn't find the right words, he'd try a different way." Hackett was an astonishingly graceful athlete and "a wild man. He'd do anything and get away with it, in a charming way," said Tom Cleveland, the more traditional campus "big man" of the era.

Hackett took an immediate shine to Kennedy. "We were both misfits," he later recalled. Hackett liked Kennedy's "impulsiveness and fearlessness," he said. He enjoyed his irreverent humor and admired the fact that, in a world of conformity, Kennedy was "willing to embarrass his friends." Bobby made no attempt to downplay his Catholicism; indeed, he tried to expose others, urging Hackett to join him at Sunday mass. Hackett was enormously impressed one Sunday when Kennedy, seeing that an altar boy was missing, suddenly hopped over the prayer rail. Quite unself-consciously, it seemed to Hackett, Kennedy began attending to the priest. Hackett was impressed with Kennedy's unwillingness to compromise to gain acceptance. Kennedy would not join in dirty jokes. He disliked bullying and would step in when an upperclassman tried to push around a younger boy.

Hackett gave Kennedy his fist real taste of friendship. They roughhoused together and played practical jokes. Hackett would be Kennedy's friend for life, long after the adolescent hero worship wore off. For once, Kennedy had a sense of belonging, even a measure of stature in Hackett's reflected glory. Kennedy's confidence grew; his grades improved from D to C with an occasional B....

Hackett, curiously for someone so exalted by his peers, shared Bobby's outsiderness. A day student who lived not in the dorm but with his genteel, threadbare family in nearby Dedham, Hackett identified with the dispossessed. He and Bobby earnestly questioned why they should be the privileged ones; when Milton played the local public school, Hackett said he felt as if he was on the wrong side of the ball. Something stirred inside Kennedy as well. He had always sided with the downtrodden at school. Now he began to notice inequity in the wider world. On a trip home to Hyannis Port, Bobby began questioning his father about the poverty he glimpsed from the train window. Couldn't something be done about the poor people living in those bleak tenements? Kennedy Sr. dismissed his son's show of social conscience.

Increasingly, as time wore on, the talk between Bobby and Hackett was about joining the marines. The world war was never far away, even from a cloistered prep school. The chapel tower was manned as an observation post, to spot any enemy planes that might be flying nearby. Maps of the Southwest Pacific and North Africa--American battle zones--were hung in classrooms. Almost as soon as he arrived at Milton in the fall of '42, Bobby began agitating with his father to allow him to enlist. He wanted to catch up to his brothers.

The Red-Baiter's Right Hand Man

In January 1953, Bobby went to work as a lawyer on the staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations under its chairman, Senator Joseph McCarthy. His father got him the job by picking up the phone and calling McCarthy. (The senator from Wisconsin was soon joking to an aide that he wasn't sure Joe's campaign contribution was worth it.) In later years, the Kennedys would struggle to explain how RFK could have worked for the most reckless red-baiter in history. McCarthy's reputation for smears was well established by 1953. "I just cannot understand how you could ever have had anything to do with Joe McCarthy," the writer Peter Maas said to Bobby Kennedy in the mid-1960s. "Well, at the time, I thought there was a serious internal security threat to the United States," Kennedy responded, "... and Joe McCarthy seemed to be the only one who was doing anything about it." After a pause, Kennedy added, "I was wrong." Some Kennedy true believers were so incredulous that by the liberal late 1960s they were engaging in outright denial. Bobby Kennedy "didn't know Joe McCarthy from a cord of wood," Kenny O'Donnell told an interviewer shortly after Kennedy's death in 1968.

Actually, McCarthy was reasonably close to the family. An affable, hard-drinking Irishman, he took Pat and Jean out on dates. He warmed up by discussing communists for a half hour or so, then "kissed very hard," Jean remembered He was invited up to Hyannis, where he joined, or rather became, the fun. A family friend recalled watching the Kennedy kids hushing and taking home movies as they threw McCarthy, who couldn't swim, off the dock. Bobby invited McCarthy to speak to the law students at the University of Virginia. At dinner at Bobby's house, McCarthy became sodden with drink and pawed a woman. Bobby helped him to bed, but he refused to be embarrassed for him. It is likely that Bobby Kennedy sympathized and identified with McCarthy. Black Irish, and beneath the bluster, vulnerable and eager to please, McCarthy may have been a bully, but to Bobby he was at the same time an underdog who enjoyed provoking the establishment. McCarthy's Catholicism strengthened the bond. The Wisconsin senator had been a lazy and directionless first termer when a group of Catholic priests from Catholic and Georgetown Universities suggested to him that chasing communists would be a worthy cause, as well as politically profitable. The church's ferocious anti-communism appealed to RFK's black-and-white moralism.

Kennedy did not like McCarthy's chief aide Roy Cohn. Joe Kennedy had asked McCarthy to appoint his son as staff director of the Investigations Subcommittee, but McCarthy had instead chosen Cohn, a young Red-chaser who as an assistant U.S. attorney had helped convict atomic bomb spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Francis "Frip" Flanagan, a Senate staffer close to both the Kennedys and McCarthy, warned Cohn that Robert Kennedy was "disturbed" that he had lost out to Cohn as chief counsel. At their first meeting, Kennedy sullenly looked over his rival. According to Cohn, Kennedy belligerently began, "You puzzle me very much. Mort Downey [a famous entertainer and friend of Joseph Kennedy] thinks you're a great guy. But a lot of people think you're no good. I don't know which side to believe." RFK quickly joined Cohn's detractors. There was much to fault in Cohn: McCarthy's chief henchman was a bully and a smear artist. But Kennedy's loathing may have been more personal. He would from time to time display deep homophobia, and Cohn's homosexuality was unacknowledged but obvious. Cohn, heavy lidded and malevolent, returned the antipathy. He called Kennedy a "rich bitch" and gave him menial work. When Cohn and his fellow investigator and love object, David Schine, took a much-ridiculed inspection tour of American embassies in Europe, weeding out subversive literature and peering under beds for Reds, Kennedy seethed with disapproval. He later said that he complained to McCarthy about the way McCarthy and Cohn were running the committee. "I thought it was headed for disaster.... I told him I thought he was out of his mind and was going to destroy himself." Then, Kennedy said, he quit.

Kennedy's account may be only part of the story. The full explanation for his departure from McCarthy's committee in July 1953, only five months after he signed on, is probably more complex. FBI documents show that McCarthy actually considered making Kennedy staff director in May, but that other staffers were opposed and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover--with whom McCarthy checked every move--was at best indifferent. The FBI's Hoover was beginning to cool on McCarthy, sensing that the senator was about to overplay his hand and become a liability to the anti-communist crusade. It is likely that Hoover shared his concerns with Joseph Kennedy. Kennedy Sr. was in close contact with Hoover--at one time in the 1950s he had tried to hire Hoover away from the FBI as his own personal "director of security." Father would have warned son, expediting his resignation.

Out of work, Kennedy settled for yet another job arranged by his father, as his father's assistant on a presidential committee on government reform, headed by former president Herbert Hoover. Bobby spent his time impatiently listening to old men argue about reorganizing the Department of Agriculture. He quit after a couple of months and went back to work on the Investigations Subcommittee, this time as a counsel for the minority Democrats, who by now had turned on McCarthy. RFK's seat on the committee dais gave him a shot at Roy Cohn as McCarthy was self-destructing during the Army-McCarthy hearings in the spring and early summer of 1954. RFK stayed in close touch with Joe Sr.: "Bobby telephones his father regularly and, of course, everybody is listening to the McCarthy hearings," Rose wrote her daughter Pat on June 2.

Cohn would later claim that RFK returned to the committee for the precise purpose of "getting" his old nemesis. Sitting behind Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington, Kennedy fed questions to the senators designed to embarrass Cohn about a grandiose anticommunist plan of action written up by his friend David Schine. Cohn grew angrier and angrier as he watched Kennedy snickering and laughing while Senator Jackson picked apart the "plan." During a recess, Cohn stormed across the hearing room to Kennedy and threatened to "get" Senator Jackson. "You can't get away with it, Cohn," Kennedy snarled. The conversation rapidly deteriorated. "Do you want to fight right here?" Cohn demanded. He started to swing at Kennedy, but aides pulled them apart. With a tight smile, Kennedy turned away. The papers found sport the next morning: the headline in the New York Daily News was "COHN, KENNEDY NEAR BLOWS IN `HATE' CLASH." For all his bravado, Kennedy was shaken by the confrontation. After he left the hearing room, he went to find his brother Jack. His brother had warned Bobby against working for McCarthy. An aide saw them huddled together, speaking in low tones.

The Plotter

Robert Kennedy was a true believer in counterinsurgency. He coined the term, according to Michael Forrestal, a national security staffer who often worked with him. "Counterinsurgency might best be described as social reform under pressure," Kennedy wrote. Combating communism by building roads and hospitals appealed to his idealism and sympathy for the downtrodden. Training guerrilla fighters played to his storybook sense of history and reverence for "toughness"; among his heroes was Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, whose hit-and-run tactics had bedeviled the British during the Revolutionary War. Kennedy soon had Special Forces troops showing his children how to swing from the trees at Hickory Hill. On his desk at the Justice Department, the attorney general kept a green beret.

Kennedy had a romantic and naive faith in the possibilities of "psychological warfare" and "political action," as the CIA defined its cover attempts to stir the masses. RFK could not accept the fact that the KGB was better at these black arts than the CIA. When the Soviets resumed nuclear testing at the end of August, RFK demanded to know why the CIA couldn't bring angry homes into the streets of Europe, shouting against Soviet war-mongering. He summoned David Murphy, the head of the CIA's east European division, and demanded an explanation. Murphy tried to explain that the CIA could not simply order up a street protest. "Kennedy didn't understand our limitations," recalled Murphy. "He just pouted."

Other government officials could see not only the limitations of trying to win the war of "hearts and minds," but also the dangers of trying. One of RFK's pet ideas was to try to train the police forces of developing countries, particularly those of Latin America. On September 11, 1961, RFK sent a memo to the president urging him to order the FBI and Pentagon to "determine whether all necessary steps are being taken by the internal police to deal with communist infiltration and whether the military or police are prepared to deal with mob riot, or guerrilla bands that may become active ... "In January 1962, the White House set up the Special Group (CI) ("CI" stood for "counterinsurgency") to prod the various government agencies into greater efforts in the struggle against communist subversion. "He thought that by making their cops more like ours, we could stop communism," said Charles Maechling, a State Department official who served as staff director of the Special Group (CI) and had the thankless task of communicating RFK's wishes. The State Department diplomats had their doubts. They knew, from firsthand observations, that the fragile democracies of Asia and Latin American had "no control over their security services," said Maechling. By making them more "professional," the well-meaning Americans risked simply making them more efficient engines of repression.

"There was no evidence that Bob saw the risk of this," said Maechling. He did not want to hear the doubts of the quavering diplomats summoned before the Special Group (CI). Feet up and tie down, he would sullenly greet equivocations with hostile, somewhat random questioning, "He was not so much abusive as abrupt and off-the-wall," said Maechling, who witnessed many interrogations. "He rarely swore. He was just inarticulate. The bureaucrats would react with panic." Kennedy, with his fondness for policemen (Chief William Parker of Los Angeles was a particular favorite, in part because he was a bitter foe of FBI's Hoover), would bring in police chiefs from the heartland to train their foreign counterparts from Latin America and Asia. The "academy," where RFK would show up to deliver graduation addresses, was an old car barn in Georgetown. Inside, men in dark glasses with pitted faces blasted away on the shooting range at large cardboard cutouts of men, each one stenciled Subversive. "We didn't teach them to torture. We tried to teach them not to," said Maechling. "But they didn't want our advice. They wanted our equipment." Armed with walkie-talkies and American record-keeping systems, the Latin policemen became more effective at propping up local oligarchies by chasing down leftist students and labor organizers. Along the way, the "reform" impetus vanished.

It is more than a little ironic that Robert Kennedy, who naturally identified with radical students challenging the establishment, should have unwittingly provided technical assistance for their oppressors. But as attorney general and the president's all-purpose number two (or Number One-and-a-Half, as he was also known by reporters fascinated by the brother act), Kennedy was spread too thin to really notice. At the Justice Department, where he could count on loyal deputies and had time to ponder and follow up, he was a truly effective leader. But as a member of the Special Group (CI--nominally, not even the head of it--he was nothing more than a shrill goad.) He usually answered back, often without having read the background materials. His lack of sophistication, impatience, and messianic impulse overcame his natural shrewdness and empathy. George Ball, who replaced the unfortunate Chester Bowles as undersecretary of state and regarded counterinsurgency as overintellectualized and often counterproductive, objected when RFK demanded that the United States do something to stop the spread of Chinese communist subversion in Zanzibar. Ball responded with a memo that, he recalled, said something like, "God watches every sparrow that may fall, so I don't see why we have to compete in that league." Kennedy, said Ball, "got his back up." RFK could be truly petulant, once knocking over a chair in anger On another occasion, right after a newspaper story called him "Washington's No. 2 Man," the Special Group (CI), in a rare moment of open defiance, failed to do Kennedy's bidding on a minor matter. "Well, shit," Kennedy sulked, "the second most important man in the world just lost another one." He slammed down his notebook and walked out of the meeting. The effect of this puerile behavior was predictable: Some bureaucrats passively resisted. Others overcompensated and tried to do too much. Robert Amory, the head intelligence analyst at the CIA, recalled that "the chief of staff of the army said that every school in the army should devote a minimum of 20 percent of its time to counterinsurgency. Well this reached to Finance School and Cooks and Bakers School, and they were talking about how to wire typewriters to explode ... or how to make apple pies with hand grenades inside them. It just really was a ridiculous thing." ...

When Kennedy could not get what he wanted from the bureaucracy, he worked around it. Long before Oliver North, the maverick marine colonel on President Ronald Reagan's national security staff, popularized the term "off-the shelf operation" during the Iran-contra hearings of 1987, Robert Kennedy was running private, custom-made covert actions. A small but illustrative example is his handling of American support for a revolutionary leader named Eduardo Mondlane, whose Liberation Front was trying to free Mozambique, still an African colony, from the Portuguese in the early '60s. Mondlane came to Washington in the spring of 1963 to lobby for support, essentially setting up a Cold War auction (he was already getting aid from East Bloc countries). At the State Department, Dean Rusk would not see the African revolutionary: the United States could not back a rebellion against Portugal, a NATO ally. But RFK met with Mondlane and was impressed with his charisma. He needed to find a way to funnel money to Mondlane while preserving the "deniability" of the United States government. A rare Dictabelt recording of a telephone conversation between RFK and JFK, made public in 1998, shows the almost offhand way these matters were handled in the Kennedy administration. The president and attorney general were discussing sundry personnel matters when Robert Kennedy abruptly brought up Mondlane and the need for deniability. "Now one other thing," RFK began. "Uh ... I've had some conversations the last couple of weeks with a fellow named Mondlane ... He's a terrifically impressive fellow." Secretary Rusk, RFK explained, had "to be able to sit down with the Portuguese and say none of these people [Mondlane and the Mozambique Liberation Front] are getting any money." The attorney general suggested that a private foundation could be enlisted to provide some of the cash, but the rest would have to come "from us" (all told, about $100,000; RFK mentioned the Ford Foundation as a possible resource). RFK proposed that either Averell Harriman, an under secretary of state, or John McCone, the head of the CIA, could oversee the operation--not in their formal capacity as State Department or CIA officials, but "just as someone to use their own judgment" (Both Harriman and McCone were personal friends who maintained direct contact with the attorney general.) RFK said that Mondlane would be meeting with the heads of some African nations at an upcoming meeting. The president's taping system recorded the following exchange:

The president: `Course we wouldn't want him [Mondlane] to be saying that he got anything from us.

RFK: No, but you wouldn't have that, you see. You'd have it through some private foundation.

The president: Yeah.

RFK: Then they could have cut-outs on it.

The president: I see

RFK: And John McCone can handle it. So it wouldn't have to come from the Agency.

This sort of frank talk about cut-outs and go-betweens to mask the true source of the money and thus preserve deniability, is the sort of exchange the Kennedys would record only by happenstance and never write down. But it was integral to their relationship and operating style.

The Man of Conscience

One particular passage from Camus' writing caught Robert Kennedy's attention. In his daybook, he scrawled: "Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you believers don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?"

Kennedy's sensitivity to the suffering of children explains some of his fascination with the quote, which he used on the dedication page of To Seek a Newer World, a collection of his speeches and thoughts published in 1967. But he was also animated by the lesson he had drawn from existentialism: that the way to deal with despair and the heaviness of fate was by acts of individual courage.

Nowhere was injustice more stark, or the prospects for change bleaker, than in South Africa in 1966. The country's white ruling class had stripped the blacks of freedom and a chance to earn a decent living. Protest from the First World was muted; the United States government, like others in the West, regarded South Africa as an outpost against communism, which seemed to be gaining ground on the continent in the early and middle '60s. The reform movement within Africa was tiny and frightened. Margaret Marshall, a young student activist in South Africa at the time, recalled the loneliness: "South Africa was in its most mean, oppressive period. It was a nasty time. There was real fear--the first reports of torture. The world seemed to have ignored us. We invited [UN Secretary General] Dag Hammarskjold and U Thant. No one came. Visitors who did would say, I didn't realize it was so complicated. But Bobby Kennedy was different ..."

Marshall's group, the National Union of South African Students (N-SAS) invited Kennedy to give the annual Day of Affirmation speech at the University of Cape Town in June 1966. Kennedy's interest was immediately piqued by the chance to speak out. He accepted the invitation--"as a dare" recalled his friend Lou Oberdorfer, "like climbing Mount Kennedy."

He had second thoughts. What if the South African regime used his appearance as an excuse to crack down harder? By indulging his own need to prove his courage and defiance, would he be putting others at risk? Kennedy's disquiet was played out during the drafting of the Day of Affirmation speech. He would tone down Adam Walinsky's heated prose, only to have his aide try to slip fiery words back in. When Kennedy finally blew up, Joe Dolan suggested that he get rid of Walinsky rather than struggle with him. "Oh, Sorensen was worse," Kennedy sighed, thinking about his brother's talented wordsmith who could be prickly, too, about defending his prose. Walinsky was not fired, but was layered: Richard Goodwin was brought in to help craft the speech--which would be remembered as Kennedy's best.

The South African government regarded Kennedy's trip as a publicity junket and canceled the visas of 40 journalists who planned to accompany him. No government official was at the Johannesburg airport to greet him when he arrived on Saturday night, June 4, shortly before midnight. A huge crowd broke through the glass doors and engulfed RFK, tearing off his cufflinks. Fist-fights broke out between anti- and pro- apartheid demonstrators.

An anxious Margaret Marshall welcomed Kennedy on behalf of the students' union. She would be his guide for the next five days. "I was the vice president of NUSAS because all the men had been sent to prison," she recalled. Five days earlier, the president of the students' union, Ian Robertson, had been "banned"--forbidden to meet in a room with more than one person--for five years. "Robertson's banning terrified me," said Marshall. "I was 20 years old, thinking about the threat of no work, no passport, and no university." Kennedy appeared equally nervous. Stopping over in London, where was interviewed by the BBC, he had seemed distracted. "We're only here on earth for a short time" he said, as he stared past the camera. With Marshall, he was tentative and solicitous. "He didn't walk in and say this is the way it's going to be," said Marshall. "He kept asking, `Is this going to hurt anyone? I can do this, but is anyone going to pay the price for me?' He worded that he was going to put me at risk. I said, `Don't protect me.'"

In the biting cold of a South African winter's day, a crowd of about 15,000 surged around the auditorium at the University of Cape Town. Loudspeakers were placed outside to relay the speech, but South African security forces cut the wires. An empty chair was left for the banned Robertson. Kennedy's eyes were glistening with tears as he rose to speak. On this Day of Affirmation, he spoke of personal freedom and the "sacred rights of Western Society" that separated "us and Nazi Germany ... Athens and Persia" He warned against the "danger of futility: the belief that there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills" Steadying his quavering mice, he declared that many of the world's great movements began with the work of a single man. "Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation ... It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lots of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and dating those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

When he had finished there was silence. Like a child, Marshall recalled, he looked around him, "as if to say, was the speech OK?" Then, with a rush, a roar of applause crashed over him. Marshall could see that he was immensely relieved, "high and exhilarated" For the next three days, he toured the country, increasingly emboldened. He stood on the roof of his car and led curious blacks in singing choruses of "We Shall Overcome." With Ethel, he set forth on walking tours, first of the upper-class neighborhoods, stopping black servants in the street to shake hands and say "I'm Robert Kennedy from the United States and this is my wife Ethel." Frightened by an entourage of white people bearing down on him, one black man gave a yelp and ran away. As word of his visit spread, blacks crowded around him to touch him--whites never touched blacks in South Africa--and began holding high the lucky hand that had shaken Robert Kennedy's. Kennedy insisted on visiting the black townships, quizzing Marshall all the while. (Kennedy: "Where's the fire station?" Marshall: "There isn't one") On a visit into the bush to see Chief Albert Luthuli, a founder of the banned African National Congress, he played a record of his brother's civil rights speech in June 1963 (racial equality is "a moral issue as old as the Scriptures ... as clear as the American Constitution ...") "Master, master!" cried the locals as they crowded around his car. "Please don't use that word," asked Kennedy, embarrassed. Meeting secretly with Ian Robertson, he taught the banned student leader how to jump up and down on the floor to disrupt electrical eavesdropping devices. Confronting conservative students who found biblical support for apartheid, he asked "What if God is black?"

On the next-to-last night, Kennedy went to a raucous and unusual mixed-race party of his hosts in Johannesburg, a wealthy South African couple, Irene and Clive Mennel. The party rolled on until 4 a.m. (Kennedy, as usual, rarely slept; Marshall recalled him stretched out on the floor of the plane, wearing eyeshades.) At 5 a.m., Irene Mennel went to Kennedy's room to awaken him for the day's events. The guest room was next door to the bedroom of Mrs. Mennel's two-year-old daughter, Mary. Kennedy had heard Mary crying in the pre-dawn darkness and gone to comfort her. Mrs. Mennel found Kennedy peacefully sleeping on Mary's bed, cuddled with the little girl.

From the book Robert Kennedy: His Life by EVAN THOMAS. Copyright [C] 2000. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.