The Great What-If

By LANCE MORROW

Here is an early core sample of the famous ruthlessness: when Bobby Kennedy was young, he took a friend out sailing off Hyannis on one of the family boats. The friend did not know how to sail. The wind died. Lunchtime approached. Old Joe Kennedy was a tyrant about punctuality. Bobby, who was worrying that they could not make it ashore in time, simply dove overboard and swam for home. His friend drifted and flapped about helplessly until rescued by a passing boat. Good thing it was a nice day. Bobby never apologized. He was not a boy at the time, but 22 years old, headed for law school.

Bobby Kennedy--out of self-absorption, recklessness, fear of cowardice, idealism or sheer nervous energy--was a headlong plunger all his life. Toward the end of it, in June 1967, on a rafting trip down cold rapids in the Grand Canyon, Kennedy defied the river guides, who thought it was too dangerous, and threw himself into the white water to tumble wildly down through a slalom of rocks. He did this kind of thing all the time. What was he trying to prove?

In a superb new biography, Robert Kennedy: His Life (Simon & Schuster; 509 pages; $27.50), Newsweek assistant managing editor Evan Thomas addresses the question with moral clarity, psychological subtlety and bracing dramatic pace. Thomas conjures up not only the well-known good Bobby and bad Bobby--the saint and the bully--but all the Bobbys, like cats in a bag: the punk with the resourceful instincts of a statesman (see the Cuban missile crisis or the civil rights struggle in the South), the hawk and the dove, the liberal and the conservative, the plunger and the temporizer, the youthful McCarthyite, the knight of the New Age, the scowlingly obsessive hater (Castro, Hoffa) who was also a friend of animals, children and poets.

And there was the Bobby who all his life was a boyishly relentless self-improver, a quester. A friend remembered him lugging around a heavy anthology of Western literature "like a football." Kennedy said the only writing he liked in it was the story about the French poet Gerard de Nerval, who walked with a lobster on a leash. Someone asked Nerval why he did that. Nerval replied, "He doesn't bark, and he knows the secrets of the deep."

Bobby Kennedy could bark like a nasty terrier. Sometimes he bit as well; he went after his enemies like a dog after the mailman. If he came to know some of the secrets of the deep, he learned them the hard way. Certainly at the end, he knew about the ironies of glamour and fame and money, and of sudden, violent loss.

This biography subscribes to the familiar narrative line that Bobby--the runt of the litter, Mother Rose's pet and much ignored by his powerful father, the unpromising younger brother of Hero-Martyr Joe Kennedy Jr. (blown up over the English Channel on a virtual suicide mission) and of Hero Jack Kennedy (PT 109)--had to claw his way to a sense of worth. "He was brave," Thomas writes, "because he was afraid. His monsters were too large and close at hand to simply flee. He had to turn and fight them...He became a one-man underground, honeycombed with hidden passages, speaking in code, trusting no one completely...Although he affected simplicity and directness, he became an extraordinarily complicated and subtle man."

Thomas believes Bobby's is "the story of an unpromising boy who died as he was becoming a great man." Perhaps. Thomas every now and then falls into Camelot prose, the elegiac, mock-heroic blather about bright promise and fate and doom and how the gods have it in for the Kennedys--a literary form of which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is a founding master. And at times, Thomas slips into dreamy, unthinking partisanship: "Americans were afraid in 1968, and they eventually voted their fears and elected Richard Nixon." But perhaps Americans simply decided that the Democrats, with their ruinous, unwinnable war in Vietnam and their grandiose, badly managed Great Society, deserved a rest.

But mostly, Thomas' telling of the story is clear eyed, richly detailed and riveting, mainly because of his shrewd feelings for the nuances of Kennedy's character and internal conflicts. In late May 1968, during the California primary campaign, Kennedy attended a party at the Malibu beach house of director John Frankenheimer. The novelist Romain Gary, husband of actress Jean Seberg, fastened onto Kennedy and said, brutally, "You know, don't you, that somebody is going to kill you?" A few days later, when he was 42, somebody did. Bobby Kennedy vanished to become an item of America's counterfactual history. What if? Who knows?