Larry Tye - Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

H ISTORY REMEMBERS R OBERT F. K ENNEDY as he was in his crusade for president in 1968a racial healer, a tribune for the poor, and the last progressive knight. His romantic vision for America and the planet made Bobby the uncommon optimist in an age of political distrust and later would inspire both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in their spirited runs for the White House. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, RFK reminded us, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. No wonder his audiences swooned.

But there was an earlier Bobby Kennedy whom few recall. Our favorite liberal was nurtured on the rightist orthodoxies of his dynasty-building father and started his public life as counsel to the left-baiting, table-thumping senator Joseph McCarthy. That younger RFK was a bare-knuckled political operative who masterminded his brothers whatever-it-takes bids for senator and president. As attorney general, Kennedy okayed FBI wiretaps of Martin Luther King, Jr., whom he never trusted or liked. Even guerrilla warfare was in his toolkit: Bobby masterminded cloak-and-dagger operations against Communist Cuba that included blowing up railroad bridges, sabotaging crops, and plotting the elimination of President Fidel Castro. His steely conservatism made him an idol to a young Rudolph Giuliani and younger Bill OReilly and Karl Rove. It would ensure him acolytes whose views were so antithetical to his leftist fan base that the two groups could neither talk to nor tolerate each other.

In charting this charismatic mans little-understood transformation from cold warrior to hot-blooded liberal, this book tells the story not just of Bobby Kennedy but of America at midcentury. The nation was riven back then. It had lost both its postwar sense of unbounded possibilities and John F. Kennedy, the youthful president who embodied that enthusiasm and promised new frontiers ahead. In their place were cities in turmoil, whites fleeing to the suburbs as blacks vented their frustrations in the streets, and a political system unable to respond. Now JFKs messianic younger brother was offering fresh dreams. He imagined a country split less between right and left, or black and white, than between good and bad. The Bobby Kennedy of 1968 was a builder of bridgesbetween islands of blacks, browns, and blue-collar whites; between terrified parents and estranged youths; and between the establishment hed grown up in and the New Politics he heralded. At age forty-two he was on the way to becoming the tough liberalor perhaps tender conservativewho might have stitched back together a divided land and whose vision seems at least as resonant in todays polarized America.

That healing magic was on graphic display one chilly day in May 1968 when his campaign motorcade rode through the then racially and ethnically diverse Gary, Indiana. Richard Hatcher, the black mayor, stood on one side of Bobby in the backseat of the convertible, waving to the biggest crowds his city had ever seen. Clinging to Bobby from the other side was Tony Zale, a Polish American steelworker who had boxed his way out of Garys ghettos to the middleweight championship of the world. The open cars rode through the white part of Gary, and then the black part, and Kennedy said precisely the same thing to both races: jobs were better than welfareriots were no solution, remembered a journalist who was there. The reaction was equally enthusiastic in each half of the city. It wasnt just that he was the only politician in that season of strife who was embraced on both sides of the railroad tracks. Only Bobby was willing to tell each side not merely what it wanted to hear but what it needed to know.

If the Gary appearance captured his public persona, a less documented car trip that year revealed the man-child who charmed audiences across the country. Hed been visiting a suburban New York hospital for mentally retarded children and, on his way out, he impulsively promised the nine kids he was talking to that hed take them out later for his favorite food, ice cream. Knowing his jam-packed schedule, neither his aides nor the doctors believed him. But ten minutes later he was back, helping the shouting youngsters dress, piling them into his chauffeured car, and letting each of them pick out one thing at a nearby store that sold ice cream and candy. Driving away from the hospital afterward he joked, When those kids tell their parents that Bobby Kennedy took them for a ride and bought them ice cream, theyll never get out of that place.

How hard Americans fell for Bobby is apparent not just in his presidential bid that was catching fire or his accomplishments as attorney general and senator. Equally winning was his boyishness, with the countrys collective memory of him framed by that Kennedy smile and an unruly cowlick that flopped onto his forehead. In the history of America, there have been but two non-presidents with whom our relationship was so intimate that we recognize them by their initialsRFK and MLKand we must reach back to Teddy Roosevelt to find even a president known by an appellation as dear as Bobby. He was, in a way, our little brother, too, which made the loss that much more harrowing when, hours after his most momentous political triumph, an assassin halted his campaign of conciliation.