The Passage of Power (51 page)

His gentleness with children wasn’t only with his own. If he was sometimes still inarticulate with adults, he always knew exactly what to say to
them.
Particularly with children who were underdogs.
“Children
in neglect, privation, distress wounded him, like an arrow into the heart,” Schlesinger was to write. Coming across a group of about a hundred black boys and girls from an orphanage being herded through the corridors of the Justice Department by a rather indifferent tour guide, he watched for a moment, and then invited them to come into his office. He showed them pictures of his own children, telling anecdotes about them until the orphans relaxed, and started asking him questions. “Can you all see me?,” he said, and climbed up on his desk before explaining to them what his job entailed.
“Children
dissolved his reticences, released his humor and his affection, brought him, one felt, more fully out of himself and therefore perhaps more fully into himself,” Schlesinger wrote.

The gentleness wasn’t only with children after, in December, 1961, a stroke left his father permanently crippled and virtually unable to speak. Bobby maintained that Jack,
“because
he really made him laugh,” was “the best” with Joe Kennedy after the stroke, but others had a different opinion, although with
Bobby it wasn’t always about laughing. “Bobby
would
fly down to Palm Beach at 6
AM,
and be back at noon, just to say hello for fifteen minutes,” says White House Social Secretary
Tish Baldridge. During summers at Hyannis Port, he would exercise with his father every day in the swimming pool. Says one of Joe Kennedy’s nurses:
“During
the years that followed [the stroke], I watched Bobby strengthen his father, laughing with him, praising him, then he would swim away. His eyes would fill with tears, and a look of deep sorrow would cloud his face, but he would quickly compose himself, and begin once more doing what he could to assist him in his therapy.” Once, in Palm Beach, when Jack and Bobby were visiting him, the old man rose from his wheelchair to try to walk, but began to fall. Bobby grabbed him, but his father, in frustration, began to struggle, wildly swinging his cane at him. When, with the help of a doctor, he was finally back in his wheelchair, he kept screaming and shaking his fist at his son. Bobby leaned over and kissed him. “Dad,” he said, “if you want to get up, give me your arm and I’ll hold you till you get your balance.… That’s what I’m here for, Dad. Just to give you a hand when you need it. You’ve done that for me all my life, so why can’t I do the same for you now?”

There were hints in the way he acted with everyone who was a member of his family when there was trouble.

When, after the 1956 convention, his pregnant sister-in-law, Jacqueline, was rushed to a hospital in Newport, Rhode Island, at 2 a.m., it was not her husband but her brother-in-law, with whom she had never been particularly close, who was sitting by her bed when she awakened from the anesthetic.
“Jack
,” as another of Bobby’s biographers,
Evan Thomas, puts it, “was off cruising in the Mediterranean with two of his fellow pleasure-seekers, his brother Ted and Senator
George Smathers.” When Rose had called Bobby to tell him what had happened, he had driven through the night from Hyannis Port to be there with her. It was Bobby who told her that she had lost her child. When Jack, as Thomas puts it,
“did
not rush back,” it was Bobby who arranged for the infant’s burial. He never told Jackie that; when, years later, after they had endured other troubles together, she learned that it had been he who had done so, she said she wasn’t surprised to hear it.
“You
knew that, if you were in trouble, he’d always be there.”

And it was the way he acted sometimes with people who were not members of the family, like an elderly Supreme Court Justice, too old to remain on the bench: at one of
Felix Frankfurter’s last public appearances before he retired, the justice, confined to a wheelchair, made a rambling speech that went on for a very long time. Notes were passed, someone even whispered to him that he had spoken long enough; but he went right on. People were restless. One who wasn’t was Bobby Kennedy. Driving away, he said to a friend, “If that experience gave the old man half an hour of pleasure, no one in the room had such pressing business that he couldn’t stay for a few extra minutes.”

“It’s
pretty easy to see somebody compete fiercely and see a grimace on his face or see what looks like a snarl as he really is … just trying as hard as he
can … and trying harder than he thinks he can,” says
Charles Spalding, who had known Robert Kennedy since he was a boy. “You can see that and then you translate that into terms of ruthlessness. But what you don’t see is the softness because it’s been disciplined not to show.” It didn’t show much now, when the runt of Old Joe’s family was attorney general of the United States. “It was
his
most tenaciously maintained secret: a tenderness so rawly exposed, so vulnerable to painful abrasion, that it could only be shielded by angry compassion at human misery, manifest itself in love and loyalty toward those closest to him,”
Richard Goodwin says. Joe’s son may have taken great pains to conceal that tenderness, but it was there.

D
URING THE TWO YEARS
since he had come to power, moreover, new colors had been added to the portrait: elements of personality of which there had previously been no indication at all in Robert Kennedy.

Some had been added to what had always been one of the portrait’s least appealing features: the Manichean “black and white view of things,” Robert Kennedy’s previous tendency to see the world and individuals as either evil or good.

In no area had this view been more stark than in his attitude toward Communism and the
Soviet Union. His enlistment with Joe McCarthy and his belief in McCarthy’s cause had been just one token of it. In 1955, he had taken a trip—arranged, of course, by his father—to the Soviet republics in Central Asia with Supreme Court Justice
William O. Douglas. (Douglas, who had previously spent time with Bobby, was reluctant to take him along, but Joe Kennedy insisted.) A foreign service officer reported hearing the same story from local officials at each stop. “We liked Justice Douglas.… But [great sigh, looking at the ground] with him there is Mr. Kennedy. He seems always to be saying bad things about our country.” The young man, Schlesinger was to write, “carried mistrust to inordinate extremes.” Claiming that Russian food was dirty, he ate as little of it as possible, “subsisting,” during the month-long trip, “mainly on watermelon.” When their guide brought them a container of caviar, he was so suspicious that he wouldn’t even taste it. When, in Omsk, he became ill, running a high fever, he said, “No communist is going to doctor me”; only Douglas’ insistence—“I promised your daddy I would take care of you”—persuaded him to allow a physician to examine him. Administering not poison but penicillin, the doctor told Douglas, “This is a very disturbed young man.” He arrived home so pale and thin from illness and lack of food that when Ethel saw him, she shouted at Douglas: “What have you done to my husband?”

Two years later, neither his attitude nor his manners had changed, as State Department aide
Harris Wofford found when his boss,
Chester Bowles, planning a Central Asian trip of his own, sent him to Kennedy for advice.
“Already
Bobby’s reputation was that of an arrogant, narrow, rude young man,” Wofford
was to recall. Shown to a chair on the far side of Kennedy’s Rackets Committee office, he was kept waiting for almost an hour while Kennedy “ate his lunch, talked on the telephone, worked on his papers.” Finally waving to Wofford to approach, he “gave a short, glum account of [his] Russian trip, warned that they spied on you day and night … and said he had nothing special to suggest. Then he went into a diatribe against the Soviet regime, which he explained was a great evil and an ever present threat, and bade me good-bye.” Inclined though Wofford had been to support Jack Kennedy for President, the encounter gave him pause: “If the senator was not guilty by association with his father, there was this insufferable brother.” Within the first few months after Bobby became attorney general, however, he was not only meeting frequently and secretly with Soviet diplomat
Georgy Bolshakov but had made a friend of him, using him as a back-channel conduit for personal messages between Jack Kennedy and
Nikita Khrushchev. By 1962, the role he had played in devising compromises over crises in Berlin and
Laos had made the Russians trust him enough so that they let Washington know they would be pleased if he was appointed ambassador to Moscow. Although Bobby tossed off the proposal with a quip—“In the first place, I couldn’t possibly learn Russian; I spent ten years learning French”—it was evidence of how much, in his biographer Thomas’ words, “the bullyboy of the 1940’s and 1950’s, so quick to pick a fight,” had “quite quickly developed a more balanced, neutral way of dealing with the Kremlin.” Part of this moderation came, of course, “on the direct orders of his brother,” but part was due to something in Bobby himself. “While his first instinct was” still “to strike a blow, his second was to listen carefully” and try to find a way in which both sides could preserve face—and peace.

And people who remembered “the old Bobby” were startled also by what he did with his new job—the post of attorney general of the United States which his brother had handed to him although he seemed utterly unqualified for it: a lawyer who had never tried a case in court.

In hiring a staff, he selected men who possessed not only the qualifications he lacked, but stature far above his. His top deputies—the famous Byron “Whizzer” White, the all-American football player and Rhodes Scholar;
Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach, former editor-in-chief of
The
Yale Law Journal
and Rhodes Scholar; the renowned legal authority
Archibald Cox, holder of an endowed chair at Harvard Law School;
Burke Marshall, former editor of
The Yale Law Journal
and an attorney deeply respected in the Washington legal community—were, as one historian described them, among
“the
sharpest lawyers of his generation.” Another historian called them one of
“the
most impressive groups ever assembled in the top jobs of one government agency,” and the selection showed something about Bobby, too: that, as
Evan Thomas puts it, “he did not feel upstaged by men who had more experience, credentials, than he.” The legal scholar
Alexander Bickel, who had once criticized his McCarthylike tactics, now said,
“One
immediately had the sense of a fellow who wasn’t
afraid of having able people around him and indeed of a fellow who had an ideal of public service that would have done anyone proud.”

Younger and more inexperienced than they were, he nonetheless inspired them. One of White’s newly appointed assistants,
Joseph Dolan, remembering Kennedy as the bully from the Rackets Committee,
“thought
he was an absolute disgrace [there]. I thought I was going back to save the country from Robert Kennedy.” But Dolan saw something different now. Bobby was still given to quick, impulsive, harsh judgments, he saw—until he realized that the subject he was dealing with was important. Then he would stop, catch himself—as if, by an effort of will and self-discipline, he was making himself change. “Once he realized something was significant, he became the most deliberate, most thoughtful, most intense man.” Listing, years later, the qualities that had made him admire, and want to follow, Robert Kennedy, Archibald Cox would include
“his
willingness to listen and reconsider his initial reactions.”

Standing behind his desk, jacketless, shirtsleeves rolled up, necktie pulled down, talking to them about what he thought the Justice Department should be doing,
“he
had,” one of them says, “a way of creating an impression that if he thought something was wrong, he’d do something to right it. He had a way of saying it, a lilt to his voice. I can still hear it, a little higher pitch.… He had a passion.” Says another: “He had that quality of leadership that made us all play above our heads,” the quality of “bringing out the very best in everyone who worked for him.” He inspired them, and bound them to him, by his commitment to social justice, by an instinct for what was right, and by his insistence on doing it—at once.
“Bob
never pauses to regroup and say, ‘Now what shall we do?’ ” Dolan recalls. “When he is saying, ‘What shall we do now,’ he is doing something.” “Don’t tell me what I can’t do,” he told them. “Tell me what I can do.” They learned he was willing to take on the most unpleasant tasks himself, that if one of them made a mistake, he would stand behind him. They started to roll up their own sleeves, to pull their own neckties down. Bobby was always quoting Shakespeare to make a point, and after he recited some lines from
Henry V
one day to tell them what he thought of them, they were very proud, and they started to call themselves
“the
band of brothers.”

Aides outside this inner circle were treated with the same lordliness with which he treated everyone else. He was, one biographer notes,
“in
the manner of the very rich, rather spoiled.” Some staffers were “less [than] amused about getting his laundry” or carrying his shirts, which he changed several times a day. “If you want to be secretary of state, you have to know how to get those shirts out of their plastic bags,” one said. But, roaming the halls of the Justice Department, bursting into the offices of lawyers who had never seen the attorney general up close before, asking them about their work, he filled the vast building with new life.
Ramsey Clark, the son of a former attorney general,
Tom Clark, was working for Kennedy now, and he said,
“It
was a quiet and sleepy place until January of ’61 …. Then it came
alive.
” Flying around the country to visit departmental
outposts, Bobby took a special interest in the work of young lawyers.
“That
was one of his great gifts,” says
Robert Morgenthau, the new United States attorney in New York, “to make people feel they were part of the team.”