IN LOVE WITH NIGHT:
The American Romance With Robert Kennedy
By Ronald Steel
Simon & Schuster, 220 pages, $23
The title of Ronald Steel’s new book on Robert Kennedy is taken from Shakespeare, from lines Juliet speaks about Romeo that Jacqueline Kennedy had chosen to describe her slain husband, John. Subsequent revelations about John Kennedy’s reckless and relentless womanizing now make references to nocturnal love a somewhat dangerous form of praise. And over a broad range of more substantive topics, most especially his Vietnam policy and his posture toward the civil rights movement, the scholarship on JFK over the past two decades has tended to shatter the Camelot mythology, which was in fact grafted onto his legacy after his assassination. Steel now brings the same shattering analysis to the life of Bobby Kennedy.
Bobby Kennedy has always had his critics. And since all historical heroes who are not fictional characters are destined, under scrutiny, to be exposed as flawed creatures, Steel’s exposure is hardly unexpected. Nevertheless, the combination of Steel’s scholarly reputation–his book on Walter Lippmann is generally regarded as a modern-day classic–and his considerable gift as a prose stylist who knows how to bring history to life make “In Love With Night” particularly threatening to defenders of the Kennedy mystique. For those who believe that Bobby Kennedy’s death in 1968, like Jack’s in 1963, prevented the liberal tradition from fulfilling its promise during the last third of the 20th Century, Steel’s account will prove devastating.
The book’s early chapters cover the familiar terrain of Bobby’s early career, which scores of chroniclers have charted in greater detail. Regarded by the elder members of the Kennedy clan as the runt of the litter, Bobby dedicated his life to the family’s ambitious project, which was nothing less than to become the modern American dynasty. After four lackluster years at Harvard and a brief tour in the Navy, he assumed his abiding role as faithful servant to his older brother, managing Jack’s campaigns for the U.S. House in 1946 and the Senate in 1952. His salient feature, apart from an utterly ruthless pursuit of Jack’s avowed presidential birthright, was a nearly fanatical capacity for hatred. This was first exhibited in 1953, when he joined the staff of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and began to hunt down communists with as much zeal as McCarthy himself. It continued in his relentless campaign against Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters Union, first as chief counsel for the McClellan Committee and later as attorney general. He saw the world in black and white, and he took no prisoners in the struggle between them. He was the chief hit man for the Kennedy Mafia.
Even though he had never practiced law, his older brother appointed him attorney general after ascending to the presidency in 1961. His major role, as always, was to serve as chief trouble-shooter for the Kennedy team. During the Cuban missile crisis he performed valuable service in brokering a diplomatic resolution that helped avert what nearly became a nuclear catastrophe. Otherwise, he devoted his energies to covering up his brother’s sexual liaison with a Mafia call girl and cleaning up a sordid affair with Marilyn Monroe, who committed suicide shortly after Bobby met with her. He also focused his flair for hatred on Fidel Castro, orchestrating several bizarre and ultimately failed CIA plots to have him assassinated.
Steel’s major interest is Bobby after JFK’s death in Dallas. The recently published White House tapes of 1963-1964 reveal a disconsolate Bobby Kennedy who found it impossible to accept Lyndon Johnson as a worthy or even legitimate successor to his martyred brother. Steel does not cite the White House tapes. (Indeed, the documentation throughout “In Love With Night” is thin and almost cursory.) He therefore misses the chance to provide colorful detail for a portrait of Bobby Kennedy that confirms the larger picture presented throughout this book. Johnson succeeded Hoffa and Castro as Bobby’s new devil figure. From 1963 until he died in 1968, Kennedy waged a crusade against Johnson’s presidency, which was regarded as an illicit interlude within the larger Kennedy dynasty. Bobby’s ascendance to the White House was to complete the Kennedy restoration.
Of course, that is not the way history happened. Steel’s best chapters follow Bobby Kennedy through his successful run for the Senate from New York, his tortured and much-delayed decision to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 1968, then his own fatal encounter with an assassin’s bullet in Los Angeles. One interpretation of these intensely eventful years envisions Kennedy undergoing a transformation from street fighter to sage, at last moving beyond demonic caricatures of evil empires and domestic devils. According to this view, Kennedy would have ended the Vietnam War honorably in 1969 and assembled a political coalition that united blacks and blue-collar whites, the inner cities and the suburbs, the Old and New Left. If he had lived, the radical and reformist energies of the ’60s would have enjoyed a responsible leader who prevented the violent tendencies of rebellious youth from being dissipated in flagrant acts of self-destruction.
Steel’s chief contention is that this beguiling vision is largely a romantic pipe dream. Kennedy’s criticism of American policies in Vietnam never approached Eugene McCarthy’s outright condemnation of our military involvement because to have done so would have tarnished the reputation of his fallen brother, who initiated the military involvement. Likewise, Kennedy’s response to racial injustice was largely rhetorical and symbolic. He offered only lukewarm support for Johnson’s landmark civil rights legislation and actually denounced Johnson’s welfare program. His major initiative, which had to be different from Johnson’s, was the Bedford-Stuyvesant project, an idea subsequently adopted by Republicans that accepted the permanent existence of the black ghetto in America’s inner cities. Finally, the postelection surveys in all the presidential primaries of 1968 reveal that neither working-class whites nor college-educated professionals in the suburbs ever supported him. His prospects for wresting the Democratic nomination from Hubert Humphrey were remote at best.
Still, the legend persists. The Bobby Kennedy flame still burns alongside his brother’s on that bucolic hilltop in Arlington National Cemetery overlooking the Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington memorials. The main burden of Steel’s book is to show that Bobby Kennedy does not belong in such illustrious company. He was a man of charisma, but not of character. He was capable of dramatic gestures, but lacked a coherent vision that addressed the foreign and domestic challenges confronting the U.S. in his time. If I read Steel correctly, he is saying that the 1960s presented the nation with a cascade of overlapping dilemmas at home and abroad that we were incapable of facing realistically. Bobby Kennedy, like his brother before him, was one of those heroes we invented to pretend that we had responsible answers. All we really had was the will to believe.
