Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon
By Larry Tye, Random House, 608 pages, $32
He was murdered six months shy of his 43rd birthday.
He had served as attorney general for fewer than four years and as senator from the state of New York for three and a half. His campaign for the presidency lasted only two and a half months.
Robert Francis Kennedy’s written résumé is rather thin, but that is only to be expected of one who died so young. He deserves our attention not because of what he did, but because of who he was, what he represented and what we hope he might have accomplished had he lived.
There have been more bad books written about Robert Kennedy and his family than almost any other public figures. The Kennedys, as a group and as individuals, have been all too easy to caricature. They were too present, too packaged, much too pretty and, during their lives and after their deaths, subject to more than their share of salacious rumours, innuendo and silly, often vicious gossip. Hundreds of books have been assembled by cherry-picking anecdotes, third-hand reminiscences and unsourced accusations. Few have made adequate use of the copious historical records that are available to researchers, though, like all archives, the Kennedy papers are incomplete, imperfect and sanitised.
Larry Tye has done his homework. He has read the books and articles, interviewed hundreds of family members, friends, colleagues and acquaintances, and made use of newly released materials in the Kennedy Library and elsewhere to produce a nuanced, balanced, affectionate and mostly favourable portrait. The story he tells in “Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon” is familiar, but the vast array of materials he has consulted and the interviews he has conducted are enough to give it a new vitality.
Biographers and historians have been tempted to make sense of the twists and turns in Robert Kennedy’s life by dividing it in two. There was the ruthless, rabid, bad Bobby who worked for Joe McCarthy, then borrowed his tactics to go after Jimmy Hoffa and get his brother elected president. Good Bobby was born from the conversion experience that followed a soul-searching internal retreat he underwent after the assassination of his brother. Good Bobby was as committed to social justice, improving the lot of the poor, ending racism and bringing peace to the world as bad Bobby was to humiliating witnesses who dared to exercise their Fifth Amendment rights.
Tye, the author of a biography of Satchel Paige among other books, wisely avoids the two-Bobby stratagem. He presents us instead with a kind of bildungsroman of a young, privileged man who is forced to learn on the job and makes mistakes, of a rich man’s son who is thrown into positions he is ill qualified for. His father got him his first jobs, then insisted that his brother appoint him attorney general, though he had never tried a case in court, or even practised law, and had done only passably well in law school.
Three months into his term, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco convinced the president that his military and intelligence advisers were incompetent and untrustworthy, John Kennedy added new tasks to his brother’s portfolio, for which he was equally unprepared. The 35-year-old attorney general became not only his brother’s chief domestic and foreign policy adviser, but also his shadow CIA director, secretary of state and director of a clandestine war against Cuba, Operation Mongoose.
As the organising force behind Operation Mongoose, Robert Kennedy was, Tye argues, a chief instigator of the Cuban missile crisis he would later claim to have defused. While Congress and the American public were kept in the dark about the Kennedys’ covert war against Cuba, together with the assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, Operation Mongoose was no secret in either Havana or Moscow. “Mongoose — coming on the heels of the Bay of Pigs and other muscle flexing by the Americans — helped convince Khrushchev he was doing the right thing by installing missiles to defend the island against US aggression.”
In “Thirteen Days”, his book on the missile crisis, Robert Kennedy would take major credit for the peaceful and, for the Kennedy brothers, triumphant settlement. What he left out of his account was his hawkish stance when the missiles were first discovered on Cuban soil and the fact that the deal he helped negotiate gave Khrushchev precisely what he had wanted from the beginning: a no-invasion pledge and an agreement (kept secret) to remove American missiles from Turkey in return for the Soviets removing theirs from Cuba.
In his time as de facto deputy president, young Kennedy was, according to Tye, outmanoeuvred not only by Khrushchev but, during the civil rights campaign, by the governors Ross Barnett in Mississippi and John Patterson and George Wallace in Alabama. Fortunately, he learnt from his mistakes and matured into the roles he had been assigned. He came to understand, belatedly perhaps, that his and his brother’s initial reluctance to come to the aid of Southern civil rights activists had been counterproductive and that the racial divide was such that only strong, concerted federal action, the kind the Kennedys had so studiously hoped to avoid, was required.
His learning curve was steep. By age 38, when he was elected to the United States Senate, he had not only become the consummate Washington insider, but had also travelled to places few Beltway politicians had been. Everywhere he visited — Poland, South Africa, Indonesia, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, the Mississippi Delta, Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, the migrant labour camps of California — he made sure to get away from his handlers and talk to the children, the workers, the poor, the young, the disinherited and angry.
It was as a candidate for the presidency in 1968 that he came into his own. He had procrastinated too long and entered the campaign too late, but once in it, he made clear why he was running for president: to end the war in Vietnam, to fight racial divisions in the United States, to wage a true war on poverty. He found an eloquence, a grace, a self-confidence that had eluded him.
His final campaign ended with a primary win in California, then the gunshots that took his life. We will never know whether he would have amassed more delegate votes than Eugene McCarthy or Hubert Humphrey or more electoral votes than Richard Nixon. But his words, and the promise he held out of a nation at peace, committed to racial justice and an end to poverty, are worth remembering 48 years later. “What we need in the United States,” he had shouted from the back of a flatbed truck in Indianapolis on April 4, after announcing to the crowd that Martin Luther King Jr had been killed, “is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness but is love, and wisdom and compassion towards one another and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”
We are in Larry Tye’s debt for bringing back to life the young presidential candidate who spoke these words and, for a brief moment, almost half a century ago, instilled hope for the future in angry, fearful Americans.
–Ne York Times News Service
David Nasaw, the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of “The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy”.
