Mahoney - The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby

M y father was a friend of Robert F. Kennedy and an ambassadorial appointee of John F. Kennedy. He, and consequently the rest of our large Irish-American family, admired the Kennedys uncritically, a sentiment that was reinforced by the nature of their deaths. One of the last things Robert Kennedy did on June 5, 1968, in his suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles before going downstairs to accept victory in the California primary was to make a list of friends he wanted to call when he got back to his room later that night. Among them was my father.

In March 1974, when I first went to the Federal Records Center in Waltham, Massachusetts, which then housed the Kennedy papers, I did so more in the manner of a pilgrim than a scholar. I was a member of the faithful, looking for evidence, even relics, of the blessed era. I would sit for hours in the poorly heated research room reading JFKs office files and the oral histories of RFKs brief run for the presidency six years earlier. I became friends with the late Dave Powers, then curator of the Kennedy Library, who had been Jack Kennedys best friend. I would often drop by his office in the late afternoon and listen to him tell stories about the Kennedy brothers, Jack in particular. The figures Powers evoked fit my familys conception of them men full of wit, charm, and purpose who, in those Watergate years, seemed nothing less than heroic.

Yet scholarship was beginning to offer a second, far harsher evaluation of the Kennedys. President Kennedy, some scholars charged, was responsible for bringing America into the nightmare of Vietnam. Other scholars claimed that Attorney General Robert Kennedy had, for reasons of political expedience, done the minimum on civil rights. I decided that I would take a look for myself at an area of the Kennedy record that had not yet been analyzed the Kennedy administrations policy in Africa, where I had spent part of my youth.

Over the years, I became a familiar figure to the staff of the Kennedy Library. Much of my first book, JFK: Ordeal in African, published by Oxford University Press in 1983, was based on what I found in the National Security Files, which the library staff had effectively declassified. Between 1974 and 1980, I also did 223 oral history interviews. These encounters opened doors that led to unexpected places. I remember a winter day in 1976 in Princeton, New Jersey. At the conclusion of an interview with the late George Ball, undersecretary of state during the Kennedy years, he invited me to have a look at his transcribed telephone conversations, about ten thousand in number. For three weeks, I read through those telephone conversations in Balls home, often leaving at daybreak and then returning a few hours later.

I was stunned by what they revealed. The picture they painted of the Kennedys was very different from the treasured anecdotes, those memorable and canonized speeches, or the top-secret memos covering policy options. What emerged first were traits common to powerful men expediency, calculation, and manipulation. But the transcriptions also revealed other qualities that were, I came to believe, unique to the Kennedys an icy wit, an awareness that they were players on a stage, and a capacity for growth nurtured by their constant collaboration. Depending on the conversation, they could be idealistic or Machiavellian, utterly conventional or suddenly imaginative, hot or cold. The Kennedy brothers seemed neither as grand and omniscient as the court histories that sprang up after the presidents assassination portrayed them, nor as cunning and shameless as later books, such as Seymour Hershs The Dark Side of Camelot , argued. They were both self-creative and self-destructive.