Today, history and nostalgia have left RFK locked in freeze frames at 42, an all-purpose hero, endlessly exploitable, forever young and appealing while every anniversary the band of counselors who once surrounded him grows ever longer in the tooth. Tough, sentimental, loyal, they will all be there this week in a fine two-hour documentary on NBC telling the old war stories: Bobby the kid, hunting Commies for Senator McCarthy and the Mafia for Senator McClellan; Bobby in the boiler room, Jack Kennedy’s enforcer, the brilliant and ruthless campaigner who made JFK president, saw him safely through the Cuban missile crisis and knelt at his grave after Dallas; Bobby as his own man, waking gradually to the moral imperatives of the civil-rights movement and Vietnam, then spooking Lyndon Johnson into premature retirement. To steal a phrase from the theater, the ’60s without him are as unthinkable as Hamlet without the ghost.
The more pertinent question is how much his legacy, under a quarter-century’s encrustation of myth, retains its vigor. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton wrapped himself tightly in the Kennedy mantle. He said that Jack Kennedy had been the role model who drew him into politics; an old photo of the candidate as a teenager with JFK in the Rose Garden suddenly appeared everywhere. More recently, when an aide gave Clinton a new book called “RFK: Collected Speeches” (434 pages. Viking. $25), the president said that Bobby was his favorite politician. In a brief foreword to “Robert Kennedy: The Last Campaign!’ (131 pages. Harcourt Brace& Co. $35), Clinton says, “I went to sleep full of hope-then woke to despair” the night Bobby died.
Among other things, RFK’s example showed a neophyte from Arkansas that it was possible to oppose the war in Vietnam without being a coward or traitor. On June 6, the anniversary of his death, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial will hold a mass open to the public at his grave in Arlington National Cemetery. President Clinton will speak that day, and the moment is sure to be moving. Beyond old litanies, however, the occasion should prompt a few contemporary questions. For the first time in 25 years the Democrats are securely in power, yet something essential to their confidence and drive is missing. Did it die with Bobby? Can the antique generators of the New Frontier still supply current and energy to the self-absorbed generation now intent on creating the “New Democrat?” How much can they-or will they-learn from Bobby’s legacy? That said, in many ways what Bill thinks of Bobby is less intriguing than what Bobby would have made of Bill and his prospects. An idle thought, but irresistible.
Bobby Kennedy didn’t go into politics as a liberal, but he came to be seen as one. He was rich, but he was born of the honorable ethnic and immigrant tradition that said you had to give something back to the country that made you. He and his brother Jack, millionaires both, used to joke about how much their programs were going to cost them. They didn’t believe a low rate on capital-gains taxes was the surest way to preserve the country. RFK was tough and combative, idealistic but pragmatic, a believer in the art of the possible. He shared FDR’s belief in using the powers of government to help the poor and powerless; he mistrusted cerebral liberals like Adlai Stevenson and Eugene McCarthy. His own political convictions were as muscular as his roughhouse style at touch football. He bridged gaps in race and class. “He wanted the hard hats as well as the bleeding-heart liberals,” says Fred Dutton, an old family friend and adviser. His tactics called for uniting them, not playing divide and conquer.
One of RFK’s strongest assets was his ability to grow, to change. The callow witch hunter for Joseph McCarthy broke with Tailgunner Joe over his unscrupulous investigative methods and ultimately helped the Democrats in the U.S. Senate draft a motion of censure against him. He started out as attorney general worrying about JFK’s political base in the white, Democratic South but wound up backing James Meredith at Ole Miss and the Freedom Riders in Alabama as they forced the pace of integration. Jack’s assassination transformed him in much the way polio transfigured FDR. Suffering gave him a new strength of empathy. Returning from a trip to the Mississippi delta, where he saw American children potbellied from malnutrition, he strode into the office of Orville Freeman, JFK’s secretary of agriculture, and said, “Orville, you’ve got to do something.” Originally gung-ho for the Green Berets, by 1967 he found himself calling for a bombing halt in Vietnam to give peace a chance. He was no trimmer. His opponents often called him wrongheaded. No one accused him of being soft.
As the civil-rights movement in the South and the war in Vietnam boiled over, his social conscience grew more and more troubled. But he wanted to offer something more than liberal exercises in moral witness. During a trip to a slum in Brooklyn, a black man told him contemptuously, “You’re just like all other politicians. We’ll never see you again.” Kennedy replied, “I’ll be back in one year.” When he returned, he brought with him his plan for the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Project, the highly successful prototype for the enterprise zones that President Clinton is experimenting with today. Both have talked about hope as if it were heart’s blood. One day, driving in an open car through South-Central Los Angeles, RFK looked at the black faces in the crowds and said to an aide, “If I don’t win, these people are not going to trust another white politician for a long time.” By the time of the California primary, he was on his way to assembling a broad coalition of voters from among the rich and poor, the powerful and the weak, elites and minorities, white- and blue-collar workers.
Then Bobby’s bandwagon turned into a funeral train. Once again, with no warning, the subterranean violence of the ’60s welled up and took him as it had swept away Jack Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. An eight-shot, .22-caliber, Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver in the hand of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was the instrument of this third catastrophe. “Is everybody OK?” Bobby whispered as he lay dying on the pantry floor of the Ambassador Hotel. Then followed the grim trip to Good Samaritan Hospital, the service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the train ride to Washington and the grave down the hill from Jack’s.
In enervating what-if game has bedeviled the Democratic Party ever since. What if Bobby had taken a different door in Los Angeles? What if he had gone on to Chicago safely? What if he had generated enough momentum at the Democratic convention to seize the nomination from Hubert Humphrey, who lost that fall to Richard Nixon by only 500,000 votes? No Hubert, no Nixon. No Nixon, no Watergate. No Watergate, no Jimmy Carter. No Carter, no Ronald Reagan and no Bush. No Bush … but there the fantasy dribbles out. The reality is that Bobby died, and except for the wobbly Carter interregnum, the GOP owned the White House for the next 25 years.
As a presidential force, liberalism was also cut down in Sirhan Sirhan’s fusillade. With RFK gone, the muscle fiber of liberalism went slack. Bobby’s coalition fragmented, the brainy, the elite going one way, the old-line types going another, with many in the middle defecting to the GOP. “No one started liberal-bashing until liberals started losing,” observes Richard Goodwin, one of RFK’s best word-men. And after Bobby, more traditional liberals lost big: first Humphrey, whipsawed in 1968 between the conflicting demands of the Great Society and Vietnam, then McGovern, sounding like Little Bo Peep with his “Come Home America” campaign bleat of 1972. After the aberration of Jimmy Carter, a Southern moderate, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis played true to form, once again making the L word stand for Loser. And out with the bath water of defeat went the once healthy liberal baby: a generosity of social conscience, a sense of being in a common fight for a common good, a conviction that a democratic society cannot thrive when its upper drawers are shut on the fingers of those lower down.
With the cold war over, the world at large has changed enormously since RFK’s time; yet at home, on certain days and from certain angles of vision, it presents an unsettling sense of deja vu. When Edwin O. Guthman, who served as RFK’s spokesman at the Justice Department, started collecting Bobby’s speeches for Viking, he discovered that many, particularly those about race, the cities, jobs, poverty and welfare, could be delivered almost verbatim today. Among other things, RFK told ordinary Americans that they had to accept responsibility for their own acts and destiny. “Change was one of Daddy’s favorite words,” recalls Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, who is now daughter-in-law to Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York and executive director of the RFK Memorial Center for Human Rights. The lesson wasn’t entirely lost. In Arkansas, Clinton absorbed it all. One day not long ago Ethel Kennedy told Phillip Johnston, the RFK Memorial’s director, how good it felt to hear Bobby’s message from the ’60s returned and replayed in the ’90s, this time from Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Now the new president has sorted through the past, recycling what can be salvaged from Bobby’s legacy, reinventing what cannot, creating something quite different. RFK would have understood the constraints that hobble him. One night in Indiana during the 1968 primaries he wondered aloud to Goodwin how much he could accomplish even if he won the nomination. Congress loves to thwart a president. The media is balky. The loyal opposition has its tricks. The voters themselves are fickle. Was it all worth it? Candidate Kennedy thought about it for a second, then allowed himself a grin. Obviously, it was. For Bobby and his clan, the first rule of politics was that you have to win power before you are actually in the game. Only then do you find out who’s really ahead.
If fate had been kinder, Bobby would be 67 now, 16 years beyond the presidency his loyalists award him posthumously in their fond dreams. How would he rate Bill Clinton? “I’m still not sure he is smart enough for the job,” says one of RFK’s highest and most trusted counselors. The assessment is premature and undoubtedly unfair. Clinton has more candlepower than any man to occupy the White House in quite a long time. But he can be undisciplined and disorganized, and he has a tendency to lurch forward only to pull back in awkward retreat. When RFK set sail, he meant to go somewhere new. He didn’t trim. These days when Clinton abruptly changes course, he runs the risk of looking like the same old-fashioned Democrats he sought to replace. Still, a rough session or two on “Nightline” is no worse than a bad hair day, and the president has ample room to recover. In the meantime, you can almost hear RFK coaching from above. Throw a football. Go climb a mountain. Lighten up, then buckle down. That’s the way he was. To bronze Bobby’s legacy like a baby shoe would be a mistake. He was too full of life to deserve heavy handling.
