The Kennedy Complex.

Robert Kennedy: His Life, by Evan Thomas (Simon & Schuster, 509 pp., $28)

Ours is an age preoccupied by the notion of paradox in human character. The lives of simple, forthright people interest us only when enterprising writers are able to discover the incriminating clue, the louche confession, the suitably disguised signal from the hidden soul that it is, despite appearances, tormented. Biographer Edmund Morris seems to have been driven to despair because he was unable to uncover in Ronald Reagan any of those concealed intricacies of motive and desire that excite the interest of contemporary readers. Bookstore shelves are heavy with analyses of complicated presidential minds like LBJ's, Nixon's, and Teddy Roosevelt's; relatively straightforward figures like Eisenhower and Reagan command a more slender literary tribute.

It is therefore easy to understand why, in recent years, biographers have rediscovered Robert F. Kennedy, whose appeal has come to rest, at least in part, on his reputation for tortured complexity. His father called him the "runt" of Rose's litter, yet he went on to prove to a skeptical family that he was at least as talented as his older brothers. The son closest to Rose-the pious altar boy who absorbed something of his mother's religious instinct-was at the same time desperately eager to please Dad, even though in doing so he was forced to suppress his gentler qualities and make the paternal code of masculine toughness his own.

As Kennedy grew older the contradictions multiplied. The Cold Warrior became a critic of the Vietnam War; the apprentice to Joe McCarthy became an admirer of Che Guevara; the cold-eyed White House consigliere grew his hair long and spoke constantly of the need for compassion. He was, of course, like many of the Kennedys, something of an actor, and there was undoubtedly a theatrical element in his gestures of complexity. No Clintonian lip-biting, to be sure. But in the midst of a cheering multitude a look of pain sometimes crossed his face: The weak smile, the slightly narrowed eyes, seemed those of a man who, in the midst of his own triumphs, was saddened by the sight of so much hopefulness concentrated on a vessel as imperfect as he knew himself to be.

In his new biography of Kennedy, Evan Thomas documents these contradictions without enthusiasm. It is as though he were repeating a litany he knows has been recited once too often, and as a study of character his book does not supersede Arthur Schlesinger's authoritative Robert Kennedy and His Times. Schlesinger's mannered prose, with its high literary finish, proved a supple instrument with which to probe the recesses of Kennedy's character. Thomas, by contrast, excels at depicting the way Kennedy wielded power. An editor at Newsweek, Thomas is in many ways the ideal chronicler of Kennedy as power-junkie. In The Wise Men, written with Walter Isaacson, Thomas described how men like Dean Acheson and George F. Kennan formulated the strategies America used to fight the Cold War. In The Very Best Men he explored the world of the CIA. In the process, he developed a nuanced understanding of the way Washington works-and in many cases fails to work. Thomas's new book is, accordingly, less the comprehensive portrait suggested by its title than a narrower study of the lessons of power, as exercised by a man bred for public life in the very apogee of postwar American liberalism.

Kennedy was just 35 when his brother made him his attorney general and de facto prime minister, and nothing in his previous experience of politics-which was limited to investigative work for Senate committees and managing his brother's campaigns-prepared him for his new authority. Thomas challenges the notion that the Kennedy administration amounted to a series of discrete dramatic episodes-the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis-offset by a sometimes cautious but still noble pursuit of idealistic causes such as civil rights for blacks. He instead depicts the Kennedys as fighting a series of closely interrelated battles, and demonstrates how surprisingly little room they had to maneuver: Movement on any one front threatened to upset the precarious balances that prevailed on half a dozen others. The push for civil rights, for example, was complicated by the Kennedys' reluctance to irritate congressional barons and draw attention to American domestic problems at a time when a semblance of national unity was needed to fight the Cold War. A CIA plan to use the Mafia to "get rid of Castro" complicated Robert Kennedy's efforts to crack down on organized crime.

Some of the Kennedys' problems were of their own making. J. Edgar Hoover's knowledge of the president's dalliances freed the FBI director to rule his bureau as a semi-independent fiefdom-and enabled him to frustrate the Kennedys' intentions in a number of areas. Thomas's extensive interviews with those who staffed the New Frontier bureaucracies demonstrate, too, that Robert Kennedy was a less effective manager than has often been supposed. "I wish so very much I had two Bobbies," Thomas quotes President Kennedy saying near the end of his life; in fact, as Thomas makes clear, by the fall of 1963 the attorney general was doing the work of at least two Bobbies and was spread dangerously thin. Running from crisis to crisis, Kennedy would show up at meetings of startled administrators and angrily demand action, then storm off to the next brushfire, leaving mayhem and misunderstood mandates in his wake.

"They used to sail with road maps, not even proper charts," Douglas Dillon, JFK's treasury secretary, sputtered of the Kennedys' boating habits. They approached the task of governing in much the same way, relying not, as impressed outsiders believed, on careful planning and organization (the "well-oiled Kennedy machine") but on hastily improvised responses. They avoided established lines of command when they could use informal back channels instead.

Like Garry Wills in The Kennedy Imprisonment, Thomas shows that this loosely choreographed leadership style, so successfully applied to the business of winning elections, was unequal to the task of administering an empire. A light managerial touch is sometimes a good thing-but not when it allows important deliberations, like those of ExCom during the Missile Crisis, to degenerate into what Acheson called a "floating crap game." The bureaucracies over which the Kennedys presided were vast and frequently unresponsive, and the ponderous pashas who ruled these domains were unimpressed by the Kennedys' charm and insensible to their threats. The possibility of nuclear war limited options in foreign policy just as political realities limited options in the domestic sphere. The reader comes away with a sense of how resistant events are to even the most vital forms of charismatic energy.

Robert Kennedy was, it turns out, keenly aware of the limits he confronted. When he visited undernourished children in the Mississippi Delta in 1967, he returned with a deep sense of the futility of politics. To the wife of a staffer Bobby exclaimed, "You don't know what I saw! I have done nothing in my life! Everything I have done was a waste! Everything I have done was worthless!" Yet even in the depths of despair after his brother's murder, Kennedy seems never to have more than trifled with the idea of leaving politics, and less than a year after Dallas he ran successfully for a New York Senate seat. Even as he pondered the sterility of power-the gilded impotence of office-Bobby was unable to tear himself away.

So many portraits of Robert Kennedy, while calling attention to his personal flaws, manage somehow to affirm the Kennedys' faith in the transcendent nobility of politics, their belief that public service was, as their hero Lord Tweedsmuir declared, "the greatest and most honorable adventure." Thomas comes closer to the Tolstoyan view that power is a narcotic for the vain, the opium of the beautiful people, and his book quietly subverts the idea that the Kennedys came anywhere close to mastering the chaotic forces of mid-20th-century history.

Kennedy helped fight the war against Marxian socialism during one phase of his career even as he questioned American liberalism's embrace of the milder socialism of the welfare state in a later phase. Thomas, however, does not credit Kennedy with either a coherent view of history or an original philosophy of reform. Kennedy did "not sound a clarion call" to reform the welfare state, Thomas argues, and his thinking contained "a good deal of 1960s liberal boilerplate." Still, one suspects there was more than boilerplate at the heart of Kennedy's criticisms of a New Deal approach that had outlived its usefulness. His own experience of federal impotence in the face of certain problems may have been precisely what convinced him that individuals and communities needed to do some of the hard work of solving problems on their own, and made him look for new ways to involve private enterprise in the effort to revitalize the inner cities. As Kennedy told an Indiana audience in 1968, "We can't have the federal government in here telling people what's good for them."

The sadness in the sun-strained eyes-in part the play-acting of a man who knew how to beguile ingenuous journalists-may also have been the outward manifestation of a deeper paradox: Kennedy found himself obliged to act as a garlanded torchbearer for a liberalism he knew to be flawed and impractical. It may be that his greatest achievement lay in the way he inspired the highest liberal hopes at the same time he sought to define the limits of what Washington can do.