RFK: Kid Who Lived to Tackle, Adult Who Lived for His Brother

On June 5, 1968, Sirhan Sirhan shot Sen. Robert F. Kennedy just after RFK won the California primary and seemed on his way to the Democratic presidential nomination. Kennedy died 20 years ago today, leaving a nation numb with misery and horror. His brother, President John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated less than five years before, and civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed just two months earlier. A reputation for ruthlessness stuck to Robert F. Kennedy because it seemed to explain something about him.

He was the kid who lived to tackle in football games; the diligent young aide to Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy; the hound on Jimmy Hoffa’s trial; the designated s.o.b. in John F. Kennedy’s campaigns; the “carpetbagger” senator from New York; the candidate for President who waited until Eugene J. McCarthy had led the way.

“Reputation for ruthlessness” is even in the index of an admiring biography by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

‘Most Thoughtful’

But Bobby Kennedy was also, according to Luella Hennessey, a nurse who worked for the family, “the most thoughtful and considerate of the Kennedy children.”

In a Roman Catholic family that lived for politics, he was the one boy who might have become a priest.

“He’s got high moral standards,” brother John once said.

Bobby was the passionate one, the brother of the greatest intensity--a brooding quality some found to be deeply Irish.

“My, he is unassimilated, isn’t he?” the poet Robert Lowell remarked after meeting him.

Bobby first channeled that passion into college football, then into service as an indefatigable aide to congressional committees and his brother’s campaigns. Finally, bereft of the brother he idolized, he became a passionate advocate of civil rights and, after years of backing the war, an opponent of the bloodshed in Vietnam.

“Bobby resembles me more than any of the other children,” patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy once said. “He had the same capacity for likes and dislikes, for love and hate.”

Robert Francis was the seventh of nine Kennedy children, 10 years younger than Joe Jr. and eight years younger than Jack. “When you come from that far down,” he once said, “you have to struggle to survive.”

He was the smallest of the four boys, accident-prone and clumsy but determined to keep up.

Unhappy at his slow progress in learning to swim, young Bobby tried to learn all at once by jumping off a yawl into Nantucket Sound, where he thrashed until Joe pulled him out.

‘A Lot of Guts’

“It showed either a lot of guts or no sense at all, depending on how you looked at it,” Jack said.

Herbert Stokinger, his football coach at Milton Academy, recalled: “Bob (at only 160 pounds) loved to crunch. . . . He loved to hit his man. And when he hit, he seemed to come alive.”

“Bobby was an all-out,” said Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who took the young attorney along on a visit to the Soviet Union in 1955. “If he was climbing a peak or hiking a trail, there was nothing else in the world to do but that.”

Schlesinger, author of “Robert Kennedy and His Times,” traces the reputation for ruthlessness to Jack Kennedy’s campaign for the Senate in 1952. Bobby, the campaign manager, once booted a local labor leader out of the office, saying: “If you’re not going to work, don’t hang around here.”

When Jack Kennedy decided that he didn’t want to wage a joint campaign with Massachusetts Gov. Paul Dever, he sent his brother to deliver the bad news. “Don’t give it (the joint campaign) to them,” Jack told him, “but don’t get me involved in it.”

‘First Irish Puritan’

“Jack Kennedy,” Dever reflected after the campaign, which he lost, “is the first Irish Brahmin. Bobby is the last Irish Puritan.”

Bobby played a similar role in the presidential campaign of 1960. “Inside the campaign he was the tireless investigator and goad,” Schlesinger wrote, “responsible for everything but the speeches. Outside he became the man to do the harsh jobs, saying no, telling people off, whipping the reluctant and recalcitrant into line.”

Well before the 1960 campaign, Bobby had earned a national reputation as a relentless investigator.

In 1952, his father arranged for him to work for Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, the crusading anti-communist who headed the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee.

McCarthy had made the acquaintance of the Kennedy family after coming to Washington in 1947, and had won the admiration and support of fellow Irishman Joseph Kennedy.

Assistant to Cohn

McCarthy made Bobby an assistant counsel--one of 15--to his young chief counsel, Roy M. Cohn. Kennedy’s major work was a report detailing that three-fourths of the cargoes reaching China were on Western-flag ships--this at the time China was sponsoring the communist side in the Korean War.

The committee’s more famous work, the hunt for subversives within the government, was energetically led by Cohn and G. David Schine.

“Cohn and Schine claimed they knew from the outset what was wrong, and they were not going to allow the facts to interfere,” said Kennedy, who resigned from the committee after six months.

At this time in his life, Bobby made a disagreeable impression even on some friends of the family. Theodore C. Sorensen, Jack’s speech writer, found the younger brother to be “militant, aggressive, intolerant, opinionated, somewhat hollow in his convictions.”

Bobby returned to the Government Operations Committee in 1954 as counsel for the minority Democrats, resuming his fencing matches with Cohn. On June 11, in the acidic Army-McCarthy hearings, Kennedy and Cohn nearly came to blows in the hearing room in what one newspaper headline called a “Hate Clash.”

Even after McCarthy was censured in 1954, Bobby felt a personal loyalty to the Republican from Wisconsin; in 1955 he walked out on a speech by Edward R. Murrow, who had denounced McCarthy in a famous CBS broadcast.

Kennedy became majority counsel of the investigations committee, under Sen. John L. McClellan, after Democrats regained control of the Senate in 1954. First he went after Teamsters president Dave Beck, and then Jimmy Hoffa, who led the union after Beck was convicted of tax evasion.

Kennedy’s pursuit of Hoffa was bitter and personal, on both sides, and continued when Kennedy became attorney general in his brother’s Administration. Hoffa called Kennedy “a young, dimwitted, curly-headed smart aleck.”

In the Kennedy Administration, Bobby was not only the attorney general, but was also acknowledged as the President’s closest adviser. That closeness was, in some ways, a union of opposites.

“John Kennedy was the more secure, the freer, of the two--freer of his father, of his family, of his faith, of the entire Irish-American predicament,” Schlesinger wrote. “. . . The two brothers had moved in different directions in adolescence and young manhood. John establishing his intellectuality, Robert his toughness. John his independence, Robert his commitment to the family.”

Appeared Withdrawn

Devastated by his brother’s death, Bobby struck his associates as withdrawn, almost shrunken. He adopted his brother’s habit of smoking cigars and began carrying around one of JFK’s old coats. He read Greek tragedies and the work of Albert Camus, and turned to an old passion--football.

“Everybody was trying to get the hate and the anger out of their systems,” Pierre Salinger, JFK’s old press secretary, told Lester and Irene David, authors of “Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Folk Hero.”

“Bobby was absolutely relentless,” Salinger said. “He attacked the man with the ball like a tiger, slamming, bruising and crushing, and so did everyone else. One guy broke a leg, and you couldn’t count the bloodied noses and contusions.”

Bobby’s own political campaigns were preceded by long bouts of indecision. He didn’t announce his candidacy for the Senate in New York until the latter half of August, 1964, although he wound up winning easily.

Because he was a Kennedy, there was always talk--some hopeful, some despairing--that he would some day run for President.

Ridiculed by Cartoonist

He remained an enigma--something the cartoonist Jules Feiffer ridiculed in 1967 as “the Bobby twins.”

“The Good Bobby is a fervent civil libertarian. The Bad Bobby is a fervent wiretapper,” the cartoon said, adding: “If you want one Bobby to be your President, you will have to take both . . . for Bobbies are widely noted for their family unity.”

Bobby wavered again in 1968 before jumping into the presidential race, days after Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy had run a close second to President Lyndon B. Johnson in the New Hampshire primary.

“It is hard to forgive Kennedy his shy, calculating delay in declaring himself, or forgive the shaggy rudeness of his final entrance,” Robert Lowell said in Oregon, even though he affirmed his admiration for the man.

Jacqueline Kennedy worried in the spring of 1968: “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby? The same thing that happened to Jack. . . . There is so much hatred in this country, and more people hate Bobby than hated Jack.”

On the night he won the California primary, Bobby spoke for a moment with Kenneth O’Donnell, a longtime Kennedy friend.

“You know, Kenny,” he said, “I feel now for the first time that I’ve shaken off the shadow of my brother.”

Within hours, he was dead.