COMMENTARY : SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF ROBERT KENNEDY’S TIMES

There was a rather quiet moment, smack in the middle of Sunday night’s opening segment of “Robert Kennedy and His Times,” when it all came home.

In the CBS-TV miniseries, Kennedy, portrayed by Brad Davis, is seen as attorney general in shirt sleeves in his office--J. Edgar Hoover in attendance--tacking his children’s crayon drawings to the ornate Justice Department walls, his lumbering black dog Brumus on patrol. Hoover, who had been ordered to clear all press releases with Kennedy, snidely retorts that he’s directed the FBI since 1924--probably since before Kennedy was born. “I was born in 1925,” Kennedy says evenly.

Robert Francis Kennedy, who for so many--and for so brief a time--symbolized youth and hope, would have been 60 this year.

It was with some trepidation that I began watching “Robert Kennedy and His Times,” not wanting to re-experience the loss. I had known Kennedy since late August, 1964, when I was sent by my editors at the New York Post to meet him at a reception at the Overseas Press Club. I would be covering his campaign for the Senate. I would follow him intermittently over the next four years, ending up in Los Angeles in the aftermath.

Having boned up on Bobby Kennedy, reading everything I could lay my hands on before I met him, I figured him to be tough Irish, nasty-tough despite the good causes, with a win-at-any-cost mentality--in a word, ruthless. I had the perception of muscle.

Instead I found a taut, vulnerable man with intense blue eyes--”like pale blue razor blades,” the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko would later describe them--who stood surrounded by a semicircle of male reporters. In one breath I remember blurting out by way of introduction, “I’m Judy Michaelson of . . . and this is my first campaign.”

“Mine too,” Kennedy said after a pause, while those eyes bored in. “I guess we’d better stick together.”

Had Sirhan Sirhan not been waiting on June 5, 1968, in the late spring of Kennedy’s career, he undoubtedly would have continued his campaign to bring a contentious America together, and a comfortable America to a recognition of and concern for another, afflicted America.

” . . . and it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there” were indeed, as the docudrama portrays, Kennedy’s last public words after victory in California. Whatever one’s assessment of Robert Kennedy, he surely would have been a major contender at the Democratic Convention in Chicago that summer-- would there then have been rioting and tear gas in the streets?--and, some believe, would have gone on to win his party’s nomination, and the presidency.

What might have been. . . .

“Robert Kennedy and His Times” aptly conveys some of that, whether in the scene where Kennedy as attorney general demands bus drivers for Freedom Riders, or where, as the junior senator from New York, he confronts an upstate farm owner who has migrant workers living in a bus--”I wouldn’t let an animal live like that”--or in the depiction of his change in attitude about the war in Vietnam.

Yet the reel and the real are not always the same. In docudrama we deal with heroes; here, the warts, from the Bay of Pigs to the stupid squabble over publication of William Manchester’s “Death of a President,” are missing.

A problem arises, too, when docudrama steps over the line of fact--as “Robert Kennedy and His Times” does at times--and presents what the producers apparently think should have been. (This despite consultation with various family members and friends, including Ethel Kennedy. Rights to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s 1,066-page book of the same title were acquired for a reported $500,000.) The problem may be the very concept of docudrama itself: this blurry blend of instant high-tech history with lights, cameras, action--and drama of course.

In the very first scene you see Ethel and Bobby meeting during John F. Kennedy’s first political campaign for Congress in 1946. Actually they met months earlier--or as Schlesinger wrote, “Over the Christmas holiday of 1945-46 Jean (Kennedy, her college roommate) had brought Ethel Skakel along on a skiing expedition at Mont Tremblant in Canada. . . . “

A more serious defect is almost unavoidable--with Robert Kennedy as protagonist, he, rather than President John F. Kennedy, at times seems to be at the center of the action.

I have my own images. I remember pink auto flares lining the packed motorcade route from the Buffalo airport to the center of the city on Robert Kennedy’s first night of the campaign, and the diffidence in his waves back to the crowd . . . .

The second night, in Rochester, where there had been rioting, Kennedy telling a Knights of Columbus rally, “You can pass legislation to give a Negro the right to buy an ice cream anywhere, but you can’t pass legislation to give a Negro an education, or provide him with a job,” and that we must do more. . . .

And the third night, in picture-post-card Glens Falls, N.Y., when more than 4,000 people waited five hours for him in the town square, until 1 a.m., many of them having changed into their pajamas.

I remember the way he tried to duck questions--once doing a fast underwater swim after lunch at Hickory Hill (the family home in McLean, Va..) to end discussion of the 1965 mayoral campaign--and the last week of October, 1966, when he came in briefly to New York’s lackluster Democratic gubernatorial campaign after stumping for friends across the country. In the darkened campaign bus on the last lap down to Newburgh, he took the seat next to me, talked about the war and--tentatively, with ever so many ellipses--began to outline the pros and cons of a race against Lyndon Johnson.

I remember a St. Patrick’s Day bash at a pub in Rockefeller Center when, in the midst of the gaiety and the bagpipes, he whispered almost inaudibly, “They played at the White House the last time.”

On a ride to a South Bronx community center in the summer of 1967, I asked about his newest son Douglas Harriman, his 10th child, then just a few months old.

“Oh, he’s fine,” Kennedy said of the last of his children who would be born during his lifetime. He stared out the window for a while, closing the shutters on conversation, then continued in a softer tone: “After being the father of nine, a newborn is no longer the biggest event. But I have a special feeling about this one. We had a difficult time with him in the beginning, we weren’t sure he would live . . . he had this condition like the President’s baby (Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who died in infancy) . . . but now he’s fine.” (His daughter Rory would be born six months after the assassination.)

And I remember standing across the street from Good Samaritan Hospital in the middle of the night after we received word that Kennedy was dead, when the police began playing games with their iron stanchions. At the time there were about half a dozen reporters watching for the departure of relatives and friends and a dozen or so bystanders, mostly women, crying. The police were trying to catch our toes with their barricade.

At first, Brad Davis as Kennedy annoyed me (just as portrayals of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Joe McCarthy did too). The actor, as Kennedy, was too short. The voice was a pale imitation, and the hair had obviously been dyed to a single shade of ginger instead of being a natural sand brown burnished several shades by the sun. But gradually he drew me into his Kennedy portrayal--particularly with his Cheshire-cat, J.R.-like grin when saying “Yay-ess” to Hoover’s question about their being in daily contact, and the way his cheek muscles twitched during his portrayal of Bobby at his brother’s funeral at Arlington.

I also liked Veronica Cartwright’s Ethel--that nice combination of total devotion tempered by spunk and wit, “a no-flap dame” as a relative once described her to me, before her world crashed in on her.

Still no matter how good an actor is, he must compete against viewers’ memories. All of us over 21 remember Kennedy and Johnson and Hoover--and most of us, whether at the time or through subsequent reruns, remember Robert Kennedy walking down Pennsylvania Avenue at Jacqueline Kennedy’s side. We saw them, after all, on television.

Appearances aside, there are more substantive issues. Docudrama creates composites. Who was this all-knowing aide depicted as Andy McLaughlin, anyway?

And docudrama compresses. The miniseries does depict the two key events in that 1964 campaign: a McCarthy-esque charge by Kennedy’s otherwise moderate opponent, Sen. Kenneth B. Keating (R-N.Y.), that Kennedy had “made a secret deal” with a former Nazi cartel during his tenure as attorney general (a charge that Kennedy refuted so stunningly that it helped turn his sagging campaign around), and the caper involving the debate with an empty chair. Actually, the events did not happen in one action-packed day, but were separated by about four weeks.

More serious concerns: In the first segment, the fact that Kennedy worked for six months as assistant counsel on Joe McCarthy’s government operations subcommittee is virtually passed over while we see him stalking over to the minority side. Moreover, we see Kennedy, who had been recommended for the post by his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, sagely telling his father: “I’m not sure there are 200 Communists in the State Department.” That quote isn’t in the Schlesinger book.

In the final segment we see Kennedy in the dumps after Johnson’s withdrawal as a candidate on March 31, 1968. Schlesinger writes: “There was, for a moment, a loss of steam and of theme”; in the docudrama we see Rose Kennedy stepping into the breach. She’s telling her son that he knows what he has to say, he knows what he’s about. (That’s not in Schlesinger either.) Kennedy certainly recaptured his theme, as “the tribune of the underclass” as Schlesinger termed it, four nights later in a black district of Indianapolis, when he went to his regular campaign stop without police escort and talked movingly, quoting Aeschylus, about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Who knows? It all may have been just as the docudrama had it, but I missed the footnotes.

I missed something else: In the course of seven hours of TV reel, I got the real King; saw the real Eugene McCarthy; heard the real Frank Sinatra sing “High Hopes,” J.F.K.’s 1960 campaign song; saw the real faces of despair in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant--and saw the real Sen. Henry Jackson at the 1964 Convention introduce . . . Brad Davis.

Was that the real Bob Kennedy in the long shot in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and on the Wabash Cannonball rolling across the Indiana prairie in the spring of 1968?