The Last Hero

By Margaret B. Carlson

It has been 20 years since he died, and still it is hard to take the measure of the man. Robert Kennedy was mostly a brother in his lifetime: a campaign manager, an Attorney General and then the younger brother to whom the torch was passed. Again, as a brother, he had to battle past his own dark night of the soul to take up a doomed burden, knowing that every time he rose to speak in front of a crowd it was to stare his own death in the eye. But the Kennedy magic, both a blessing and a curse, attached to him, and he quickly became a Senator, then a rebel candidate for President. Almost as quickly, he too was killed. He was 42.

What echoes today is a memory, almost mythic in proportions. Like all leaders who die young, Bobby is frozen in death as larger than life. As a memory, he evokes an era of political passion and social commitment that stands in haunting contrast to 1988. As a myth, he is a vessel into which all dreams can be poured. A recent Rolling Stone survey found that to this day only Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. stand out as heroes to the 18- to 44-year-olds who were interviewed.

Twenty years ago, Kennedy had just won the Nebraska primary. Roy Lichtenstein's celebrated pop portrait on the cover of TIME captured all the vibrancy and passion of Kennedy's surging campaign. Three weeks later Bobby lay on the floor of the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The anniversary of that heady quest and its horrifying finale has become an occasion for a subdued outpouring of nostalgia, bespeaking a sense that something is missing in the year of Bush and Dukakis. A week ago, about 800 people -- led by such old colleagues as Paul Schrade, Arthur Schlesinger, Cesar Chavez and Frank Mankiewicz -- gathered in Los Angeles to reflect on Kennedy's legacy. Said Jack Newfield, author of Robert Kennedy: A Memoir: "If you took the best half of Jackson and the best half of Dukakis, you would have half of Robert Kennedy."

The rising nostalgia about Bobby seems to embody an inchoate yearning for a time in U.S. political life when everything seemed possible: topple a President, end a war, bring peace between the races, fight poverty and injustice. Whatever verdict history renders on the short life of Bobby Kennedy, this is certain: he brought a passion to public life, a sense that government in the hands of the right people could be mobilized for something good. Politics mattered. Like other times when the country gave up its individual dreams for a collective vision -- during the World Wars, the Depression -- there seemed to be a brief moment in the '60s when people believed that one person, by force of character, could seek a newer world. "There is," says Kennedy's old speech writer Adam Walinsky, "a lot of nostalgia for this country as it used to be."

Both friends and foes have enlarged Kennedy beyond what he was in life to the point where it is hard to separate the myth from the man. Tim Giago, editor of the Lakota (S. Dak.) Times, runs a story every other year to commemorate the anniversary of the day Kennedy visited the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. "It was almost as if a saint had come and was reaching his hand to the people," he says. "He went to the grubbiest children and hugged and kissed them." But Bobby was, of course, much more complicated than the myth will allow, more flawed and human.

The myth does not integrate the bad Bobby, the mean Bobby, into its memory. | It glosses over the young Kennedy who, as counsel to Joseph McCarthy, relished hunting down Communists; the zeal with which he pursued Jimmy Hoffa; the campaign manager who cut down political bosses who did not toe the party line; the Attorney General who acquiesced in J. Edgar Hoover's request to tap the phone of Martin Luther King.

But without the bad and the ugly, the picture is distorted and the political odyssey incomplete. If he had not been a hardball player, he would never have entered the presidential primary after Eugene McCarthy had cleared the way. Without his ruthless, hard-nosed side, Bobby might not have been able to put together the coalition he did. Conservative working-class whites may have been willing to help the needy, but fearful of being taken advantage of, they wanted a tough guy in charge. The impetuous young Bobby helped make the grownup Bobby more compassionate.

As a Senator and candidate, Bobby revived for millions the hopes that died with his brother. Even among skeptics, there was a sense that Kennedy grew into his own after his brother died. History -- two assassinations, a war, a racial struggle -- changed him, says Schlesinger, and given time he might have changed history.

The shooting of Martin Luther King, 19 days after Bobby plunged into the 1968 campaign, accelerated his transformation. The war, Kennedy's ostensible reason for getting into the race, gave way to a near desperate plea for an end to racial hatred and intractable poverty. In speeches scribbled on note pads in the days after King's death, Kennedy made some of his most eloquent appeals. "For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly," he declared. "The violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors."

The compassion he preached was not part of a cold political calculus designed to forge a winning electoral coalition. Though much of what Bobby did was carefully planned, his pleas for racial harmony and social justice -- delivered to conservative whites in Terre Haute, Ind., as well as to blacks in Gary -- seemed to reflect deep and true personal feelings. He was a latecomer to civil rights when he saw it as a threat to his brother's political standing, but he was passionate in the cause of social justice after being exposed to the sight of young blacks falling outside a system that seemed to hold no promise for them.

Kennedy was credible to blacks and whites because he delivered messages to % each they did not want to hear. He told blacks there would be no guaranteed income. He told poor whites in Kentucky to get up off their porches and clean up the abandoned cars pocking the landscape. He told everyone to "work their butts off." He didn't pander to labor by promising to work for the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, which curbs strikes. He told students he would end the shame of college deferments. He preached, as only Jesse Jackson has been able to since, that fathers must take care of the babies they made. He spoke of the crippling effect of welfare. And when an audience of medical students asked who was going to pay for the help that he said must be provided to the poor, Kennedy had a simple answer: "You are."

Robert Kennedy may have been the last major white politician black people seriously heeded. He seemed to be a friend of life's victims, as rich men can afford to be but seldom are. He came naturally to the outsider's mentality. As the scrawniest of the four Kennedy boys, he was lost amid the the physical grace and athletic prowess of his brothers. Where Joe and John were debonair and cool, Bobby was intense and awkward, the little guy trying to catch up. Shy, with few friends, he did poorly in school and sports. His father hardly noticed him. He could easily have rebelled, become the embarrassing younger brother that besets many prominent families. Instead, he simply tried harder to win his father's approval. He became the scrappy family errand boy, which earned him his ruthless reputation but gave authenticity to his empathy with those left out.

There was not much time to put what he said into action. But his success in launching a community rehabilitation program in the Bedford-Stuyvesant part of Brooklyn showed that the poor, with the self-interested help of corporations and unions and banks, could bring a devastated slum back to life.

Kennedy had more potential than most politicians. Unlike others, he had his dual citizenship going for him: a tough pragmatist among working-class whites and a man of compassion among blacks, Hispanics and the poor. David Farber, author of Chicago '68, says Kennedy could have allowed the blue-collar people "to come through the '60s without falling prey to the fears that took over so many people." He was a politician who could talk about law-and-order without sounding racist and about gun control without sounding soft on crime; who could advocate government help without sounding radical and self-help without sounding reactionary.

Even with his California victory, acknowledged minutes before he was shot, Kennedy would have had trouble wresting the nomination from Hubert Humphrey, who was by then only a few dozen delegates away from a majority. But Schlesinger speculates that Kennedy would have triumphed in Chicago, then gone on to defeat Richard Nixon. That would probably have meant an earlier end to the Viet Nam War, an extension of civil rights reforms, no Watergate scandal, and a whole different perception of government and politics than the one that pervaded the 1970s. No one, of course, can say with certainty what would have happened had Bobby lived. But there are intriguing indications. Tom Hayden, who remained publicly neutral on R.F.K.'s 1968 candidacy, wept by his casket, Cuban hat at hand. In his new book, Reunion, Hayden argues that Kennedy would have won the nomination and election. "He would have retained Humphrey's basic vote, cut into Wallace, and turned out large numbers of disaffected voters that Humphrey never could rouse."

The Kennedy mystique seems particularly appealing in 1988. The yearning that some feel to cast a protest vote or express a passion for social change has been partly reflected in the success of Jesse Jackson's candidacy. But the triumph of George Bush and Michael Dukakis has submerged political passion in favor of pragmatism and efficiency. Each has his programs and respectable records. Dukakis even tries to evoke the Kennedy legacy. But they pale in comparison to the faded photographs of Bobby reaching out to endless seas of eager hands and exciting admiring crowds. Bush has apologized to his supporters for not being adroit at articulating his emotions, and Dukakis has campaigned on the premise that the voters are tired of charisma. But Bobby was able to spark excitement by articulating dreams. Given today's dearth of passion, it is no wonder that the young people who embraced politics in the '60s -- and whose faith in government was undermined by Viet Nam, assassinations and Watergate -- should remember Kennedy as a hero.

In 1985, when a Roper poll asked the baby-boom generation for its heroes, the rich and famous and superficial headed the list: Clint Eastwood and Eddie Murphy, celebrities standing in for real heroes. But the current wave of nostalgia for Bobby Kennedy may be a signal that the generation that retreated to self-absorption in the '70s and '80s may be ready to feel passion again. That Kennedy is a hero to them could be more than nostalgia; it may suggest a yearning, once again, to re-engage.