Robert Kennedy: His Life

Of the making of books about Robert Francis Kennedy (1925–68) there seems no end. After _Robert Kennedy: Brother Protector_ (1997), _The Last Patrician_ (1998), _Mutual Contempt_ (1999), and _In Love with Night_ (2000), to name just a recent few, comes this biography by a _Newsweek_ journalist. Thomas believes he is the first writer since historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Kennedy’s friend and admiring biographer, to gain access to important closed papers at the Kennedy Library. Thomas also has mined other resources, conducted interviews, and read the literature. The result will not supplant Schlesinger’s masterly _Robert Kennedy and His Times_ (1978), but it does shed additional light here and there, offering appraisals from a more detached yet still fair-minded perspective. Of the futile, "more silly than sinister" plots by the CIA-cum-Mafia to kill Fidel Castro, for instance, Thomas writes that Kennedy’s involvement, if any, was probably "peripheral," and that RFK himself later became the real victim, growing "very fearful" that the plots might have sparked his brother’s assassination. The author finds Attorney General Kennedy more culpable for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s extensive use of electronic listening devices. Kennedy later insisted that he had not known about the practice, but "the evidence strongly suggests that RFK was not speaking truthfully," writes Thomas. "At the very least, [he] displayed a notable lack of curiosity about the source of the FBI’s intelligence on the mob." Under pressure from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Kennedy did authorize the wiretapping of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose adviser Stanley Levison was alleged to be a secret Communist and Soviet agent. The wiretapping seems to trouble Thomas much more than it did Levison, who, while denying the allegations against him, told Schlesinger that he understood the political necessity for the Kennedys to avoid any scandal, given their support for the civil rights movement. Though later remorseful about Hoover’s "grotesque smear campaign" against King, Thomas notes, Kennedy was "not personally sympathetic" to the civil rights leader. After movingly addressing an Indianapolis crowd the night King was slain in 1968, Kennedy remained dry-eyed while some of his staffers wept. "After all, it’s not the greatest tragedy in the history of the Republic," he told one aide, perhaps thinking of another assassination five years earlier.

Haunted by his brother’s death, Kennedy turned to displays of physical courage— climbing mountains, shooting white-water rapids, plunging into piranha-infested waters. There may have been an element of political calculation in some of those displays, a point that Thomas oddly relegates to a footnote: In a 1966 memo, adviser Fred Dutton recommended "at least one major, exciting personal adventure or activity every six months or so," which would help move Kennedy "into the ‘existential’ politics that I believe will be more and more important in the years ahead."

Alas, there were few years ahead for Kennedy. Had he lived, it is by no means certain that he would have won his party’s presidential nomination and then the election. Nor can we know what sort of president he would have been. But, writes Thomas, "he would have surely tried to tackle the problems of poverty and discrimination, and...to end the killing in Vietnam long before President Nixon did." For many who were young then, and who look back yearningly on the imagined path not taken, that is enough.