Getting Right with Bobby.

The strange lure of Robert F. Kennedy

Robert Kennedy: His Life, by Evan Thomas. New York: Simon and Schuster, 509 pages, $28

In Love with Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy, by Ronald Steel, New York: Simon and Schuster, 224 pages, $23

In the 1960s, politics seemed bigger, bolder, more consequential. Back then, Florida was a training ground for the Bay of Pigs invasion and a focal point of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now it's just the home of hanging chads. Back then, John Glenn rocketed into space and the nation prayed that his capsule would not burn up during re-entry. Now Glenn gets a second space trip as a retirement gift, and the nation prays that he remembered his spare dentures. Back then, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon made a mark on American history. Now Bill Clinton just leaves a stain.

During that dramatic decade, politicians stirred our passions and gripped our collective memory even when they didn't accomplish much. Such was the case with Robert F. Kennedy. He spent much of his career ruthlessly helping his brother John win headlines and elections, then served as his attorney general in an administration that made little policy progress before ending abruptly with an assassin's bullet. RFK accomplished nothing of significance during his brief tenure in the U.S. Senate. Before his own assassination in 1968, he championed racial minorities and opposed the Vietnam War--but it was his enemy Lyndon Johnson who actually got Congress to pass civil rights legislation and Nixon who pulled America out of Vietnam (albeit gradually).

"Much of Kennedy's allure lies in the future conditional," Ronald Steel admits, "in what he would have been, what he would have done." In Love with Night explores this allure. It is less a biography than an essay on RFK's character and background, as well as the mythology that grew around him after his murder at age 42. Though Steel overlooks some of the darker episodes of Kennedy's life, his book offers a tough-minded analysis of a politician who worshipped toughness.

In Robert Kennedy: His Life, Evan Thomas offers a full-scale biographical treatment, based on impressive original research, including newly available archival material. He differs from Steel on some incidental details. For instance, Steel says that journalist John Seigenthaler ghosted RFK's 1960 book on labor racketeering, The Enemy Within. Thomas claims that Kennedy wrote it himself. Overall, however, they agree on the basic facts. Where they part company is the interpretation of those facts--most significantly, on the answer to the oft-asked question, What kind of president would RFK have made? Thomas says that even if he had failed in the White House, Kennedy "would have failed trying his utmost to lift up the poor and the weak." Steel takes another view: "Instead of being the 'tribune' of the underclass, he would have had to become what every president ultimately is: a power broker."

At one point in his prologue, Thomas unintentionally sides with Steel's more skeptical appraisal. Kennedy, he writes, "was a Zelig of power--at the vortex, it seemed, of every crisis of the 1960s." Zelig, the title character of Woody Allen's 1983 movie, did in fact meet many famous people, but was not at the center of historic events--that was another filmic Everyman, Forrest Gump. Zelig was the human chameleon who could assume the appearance and mannerisms of anybody he met. Though Thomas meant to say something different, he actually got it right: RFK was a shape-shifter as times changed and circumstances dictated.

Many remember RFK as a scourge of Republicans and a prophet of peace with communist countries. They forget that he worked for Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.) at the height of Tailgunner Joe's popularity. After McCarthy's downfall and the rise of anti-anti-communism, RFK would claim that he bailed out as soon as he learned of the senator's irresponsible tactics. In fact, he got along just swell with McCarthy, who had dated two of his sisters and had gotten generous campaign contributions from family patriarch Joseph Kennedy. RFK's problem was McCarthy's chief aide Roy Cohn. An experienced attorney, Cohn resented the rich newcomer, who in turn sneered at Cohn's barely hidden homosexuality. Kennedy had a rotten time, and Thomas conjectures that J. Edgar Hoover hastened his departure by tipping off Papa Joe to McCarthy's imminent self-destruction.

Others of RFK's acts of apparent political courage amounted to less than they seemed. In the late 1950s, he served as chief counsel to the Senate Rackets Committee, where JFK was a member. Together they went after the Teamsters. Since Democrats were even more dependent on labor unions then than they are today, such a tactic normally would have been risky. In this case, though, the Kennedy brothers picked the right target. A United Auto Workers official told Thomas that the attack was "good politics," noting that the AFL-CIO was cleaning up corrupt unions anyway and had already expelled the Teamsters. Thus the Kennedys came across as crusaders not beholden to organized labor, yet remained acceptable to most union bosses.

Like many of RFK's ostensibly political causes, the attempt to tackle the Teamsters was personal. Both Kennedys developed a strong animosity toward Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa, with RFK's attitude bordering on obsession. (Steel quotes an approving comment from Joseph Kennedy: "When Bobby hates you, you stay hated.") Acting on information from the Rackets Committee, the FBI filmed Hoffa taking bribes. Hoffa's trial, which RFK thought would end in a triumphant conviction, instead became an embarrassment. In a model for future cases, Hoffa attorney Edward Bennett Williams played the race card. After choosing a Washington jury that was two-thirds black, Williams kept a black associate at the defense table and even brought black boxing champ Joe Louis into court to greet Hoffa. The jury voted to acquit, which galled RFK, since he had been a prosecution witness. Eventually, he'd get his revenge, but he had to wait for it.

In his first 1960 debate with Richard Nixon, John Kennedy proclaimed, "I'm not satisfied when I see men like Jimmy Hoffa--in charge of the largest union in the United States--still free." Neither Steel nor Thomas mentions this extraordinary and disturbing line, in which a presidential candidate called for the imprisonment of a specific individual. This comment was an early hint that executive power and the Kennedy family would be a dangerous mix.

Another danger signal was the way RFK ran his brother's presidential campaign. Despite his later saintly reputation, he wasn't above the kind of dirty politics that helped bring Nixon down. Thomas briefly mentions allegations that Kennedy underling Paul Corbin secretly distributed anti-Catholic literature in the West Virginia primary, intending to pin the blame on JFK's primary opponent, Hubert Humphrey. According to a standard work on dirty campaign tactics, Bruce Felknor's Political Mischief, Corbin actually distributed the hate literature in Wisconsin, concentrating on Catholic districts where the recipients were sure to raise a fuss. Felknor adds that Corbin was acting under RFK's direction.

A more notorious RFK associate was Dick Tuck, who specialized in political sabotage. Thomas calls Tuck a "merry prankster." He forgets that when Donald Segretti pulled Tuck-like "pranks" for Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign--distributing fake literature, disrupting rallies, planting rumors--he ended up in prison, and helped add to Nixon's reputation as a nightmarishly evil politician, a reputation RFK has avoided.

Though RFK had never practiced law, his brother followed their father's advice and named him attorney general. Within two weeks of taking the helm at the Justice Department, RFK declared a "war on crime." As usual when government declares a "war," constitutional safeguards were the first casualty. "Don't tell me what I can't do," Thomas quotes him as telling his staff. "Tell me what I can do."

The result was a massive invasion of civil liberties, in which federal agents broke into homes and businesses in order to plant bugs and wiretaps. RFK met with a Treasury Department official in charge of training agents in trespass and surveillance. When the official balked at his new boss' demand to triple the number of trainees, Kennedy suggested that he retire. Thomas reports that the official stepped down and that enrollment for training in the fine arts of violating citizens' rights mushroomed.

It didn't stop with gangsters. Thomas casually mentions that Mortimer Caplin, head of the Internal Revenue Service under JFK and LBJ, was a friend of RFK's who had taught him at the University of Virginia Law School. But Thomas doesn't discuss Caplin's "Ideological Organizations Audit Project," under which the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of several right-wing groups. During this time, the IRS also audited Richard Nixon, while RFK's Justice Department investigated Nixon's mother and brother in connection with a personal loan from Howard Hughes. The inquiries produced no evidence of wrongdoing, but they did convince Nixon that the Kennedy family was harassing him. His resentment helped lay the foundation for Watergate.

During RFK's reign at Justice, J. Edgar Hoover continued to probe alleged communist "dupes," including Martin Luther King. Though RFK was nominally Hoover's boss, he did little to restrain him. Hoover knew all about President Kennedy's personal life, including the mistress he shared with a Mafia don who had taken part in CIA plots against Castro. As Bobby was painfully aware, Hoover could have destroyed the Kennedy administration by disclosing such information.

Robert Kennedy's domain reached beyond the Justice Department. His brother virtually made him an assistant president, involving him in foreign policy issues. As accurately portrayed in the movie Thirteen Days, RFK helped guide decision making in the Cuban Missile Crisis--though as Steel points out, he later took credit for a crucial maneuver that was actually the brainchild of National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy.

RFK treated foreign policy as an extension of law enforcement. In support of Third World "counterinsurgency," he enlisted American police chiefs to train their counterparts in Latin America and Asia. In light of Kennedy's later sympathy with radicals, Thomas notes that it was "more than a little ironic" that he supplied their oppressors with technical help: "The 'academy,' where RFK would show up to deliver graduation addresses, was an old barn in Georgetown. Inside, men in dark glasses with pitted faces blasted away on the shooting range at large cardboard cut-outs of men, each one stenciled Subversive."

RFK's world darkened on November 22, 1963--not only because his brother had died, but also because the presidency had passed to Lyndon Johnson, whom he despised. Immediately after the assassination, Bobby asked Bundy to change the locks on his brother's files, so that Johnson could not get at them. In the months to follow, writes Thomas, he "could not understand how readily some of JFK's former aides transferred their allegiance to his successor." Steel touches on the same point, adding sensibly: "The fact that this is the way public officials are supposed to behave in a democracy eluded him. Only in a dictatorship does the staff flee when a ruler dies."

By the summer of 1964, RFK had recovered enough to seek a U.S. Senate seat from New York. Having always voted in Massachusetts, he had no real connection to the state, but the LBJ landslide was enough to carry him to victory over the GOP incumbent. (This result set a precedent for carpetbagging: Subsequent occupants of this seat included James Buckley of Connecticut and Hillary Rodham Clinton of Illinois and Arkansas.)

In the Senate, Kennedy styled himself as a spokesman for the downtrodden. He sponsored legislation setting up a community development corporation in New York's Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto. Steel and Thomas praise him for this initiative to create jobs, but both acknowledge that its effects were modest at best. And neither writer mentions that much of the credit belonged to his senior colleague in the Senate, Republican Jacob Javits.

RFK's efforts at establishing himself as a liberal icon were largely symbolic and occasionally ridiculous. Thomas, for instance, relates a moment when Kennedy told a group of Native Americans: "I wish I had been born an Indian." Thomas says that this statement was not mawkish pandering but a genuine expression of empathy. If you are inclined to believe such nonsense, you can cure yourself by digging out the old National Lampoon album with the song "Well-Intentioned Blues." Parodying Pete Seeger songs, Sean Kelly's lyrics expressed the longings of 1960s coffeehouse liberals: "I wish I was an Indian/A grown-up Sioux papoose/So when I get drunk on a beer and a half/I'd have a good excuse."

Steel suggests a straightforward explanation for RFK's courtship of the underprivileged: He wanted to be president, and he had to appeal to outsiders because LBJ owned the insiders. As the 1968 election approached, Bobby wasn't sure this approach was working, so he declined to run. Only when anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy made a surprisingly strong showing in the New Hampshire primary did he change his mind and enter the race.

RFK's presidential campaign, which ended with his murder in Los Angeles on the night of the California primary, spawned a couple of myths. The first is that he built a coalition of minorities and bluecollar whites that would have carried him to victory in the fall. Using data from the 1968 primaries, both Thomas and Steel show that contemporary news accounts greatly exaggerated RFK's appeal outside minority communities; the Archie Bunker-George Jefferson coalition, however appealing, was not to be. And though neither author makes a point of it, RFK would probably have lost to Nixon. In the last trial heat poll before RFK's assassination, Gallup found that while Hubert Humphrey was only three points behind Nixon, Kennedy trailed by 10.

Another myth, popular among Republicans and members of the Democratic Leadership Council, is that Kennedy was an early model neoconservative or Third Way Democrat. Indeed, a quick glance at certain Kennedy statements might leave such an impression. He called for a "new politics" that would "halt and reverse the growing accumulation of power and authority in the central government in Washington, and return that power of decision to the American people in their own local communities." In a campaign press release, he said: "The answer to the welfare crisis is work, jobs, self-sufficiency, and family integrity; not a massive new extension of welfare; not a great new outpouring of guidance counselors to give the poor more advice."

It's doubtful that Bobby really meant any of that. As both authors explain, polls in the late 1960s showed widespread support for such sentiments, so even the most pro-government politicians were talking that way. On specifics, RFK was an orthodox liberal. During his short Senate career, his average voting score from the Americans for Democratic Action was 92 percent. When he spoke of welfare reform, he didn't mean leaving businesses alone to create new jobs. Rather, he proposed sweeping new federal programs for employment, housing, and medical care.

It is odd that so many people think wistfully of what he would have done if he had lived. Most of the policies that he supported did become law during the 1960s and 1970s--and they became the very failures that the New Democrats later promised to reform. It is also striking that his memory evokes feelings of personal warmth among people who never knew him. He is remembered as a devoted family man despite widespread rumors of his extramarital activities (including a possible affair with Marilyn Monroe). He is recalled as a high-minded idealist, but he was also a ruthless political operator who could be callous to subordinates and cruel to enemies. "Now he was great with the problems of a group, like Indians, colored people, or people that were being religiously oppressed or the poor," Thomas quotes one associate. "But as far as a one-to-one basis, that wasn't his cup of tea at all."

Politicians of all stripes continue to invoke his name, hoping to "get right with Bobby" by associating themselves with his legend. A careful reading of these books can help us appreciate the difference between that legend and the man who inspired it. Death has a way of spawning such legends. With the real person lying securely underground, living politicians are free to inflate his reputation and hang on as it soars through the sky. Shakespeare got it wrong. The evil men do is oft interred with their bones, while good imagery lives after them.

Contributing Editor John J. Pitney Jr. is associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.