What Died (or Didn’t) in Dallas...

Dallas, Tex., Nov. 22, 1963: We all know exactly where we were when it happened, when the pageant ended. For the next four days, we all watched--dazed, disbelieving, profoundly shaken--as the greatest funeral since F.D.R.’s riveted the nation to its collective TV set. I still hear the drum roll, see that riderless horse, the veiled widow reaching out to touch the casket. What had we lost?

Revisionist historians have chipped away at John Kennedy’s monument, charging he was sadly timid on domestic policy and too bellicose in foreign affairs. J.F.K. promised; L.B.J. delivered, etc. And we all now know that Jack was a philanderer (with a Mafia moll no less). Neither of the anniversary books under review offers to restore the Kennedy myth to its outsize, pristine vigor, but each, in its way, revives the image of great political leadership.

“Robert Kennedy in His Own Words” is no stylistic delight to read but packed with information about the inner workings of the 1960 campaign and the Kennedy White House, it allows readers to form their own judgment. The book consists of interviews with a stoic, somewhat embittered Robert Kennedy, conducted soon after the President’s assassination by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Anthony Lewis, John Bartlow Martin, and John F. Stewart for the oral history project of the Kennedy Library. Everything is there: the inside story of the Vienna summit, the Berlin Wall, the Bay of Pigs, Cuban missile crisis, a defiant Gov. Ross Barnet in Mississippi, the Alliance for Progress in Latin America, civil rights legislation, the US Steel rollback, the Test Ban Treaty, the plot to overthrow Diem in Vietnam. And besides, matter for the gossip column: What the President thought of Adlai Stevenson, Dean Rusk (not much), Lyndon Johnson and De Gaulle (respected), and how Luther Hodges was appointed secretary of commerce (hilarious).

For all the “nothing but the facts” style and awkward grammar, the detail makes this book a fascinating study in the craft of governing. One is reminded, especially in connection with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, of Henry Kissinger’s dictum that knowledge of the facts on which to base decisions is often inversely proportional to the scope of action immediately called for--and when that knowledge becomes available, it is often too late.

Yet one comes away from this book with the sharp sense of what doers the Kennedy team were, and of how things get done in the political arena--despite adversaries, limited information, and to an amazing degree because of indefinable human qualities like sound judgment, poker tactics, and the subtle man-to-man creation of mutual trust. When it came to negotiating passage of the Civil Rights Bill, for instance, you find J.F.K. and R.F.K. impatient, not with conservative Republicans like Sen. Dirksen, but with Democratic liberals who seemed bent on losing for the sake of some Platonic ideal. The interviews correct the record: These scions of Grandpa Fitzgerald didn’t act out Arthurian romance (the image of Camelot was Jackie’s, in a remark to Theodore H. White a week after Dallas).

The President and his alter-ego brother emerge as remarkably free of self-serving ego, keen in their judgment of men (women hardly figure here), and above all awake on the job, prudent, and supremely happy at being able to accomplish something. The charges of domestic timidity and overseas belligerence don’t hold up. To the question of what J.F.K. liked most about the job, his brother answers: “He could have influence. It’s the Greek definition of happiness: ‘exercise of vital powers along the lines of excellence, and life affording them scope.’ And that’s what it was. It was happiness.”

Jacques Lowe’s candid photographs in “The Kennedy Legacy” capture that happiness, the glow of men doing well what they loved--in the 1960 campaign, Hyannisport holidays, emergency Cabinet meetings, J.F.K. and R.F.K. intently conferring, the President alone in his office late at night. The images catch the passion, exuberance, and intensity of those days.

Wilfrid Sheed’s wonderfully conversational, accompanying text tells “what life felt like during those years.” Initially, Sheed was a skeptic; like many of us at the time, he couldn’t separate John Kennedy from the “willful” Founding Father or the fabulous siblings. But then one day he found himself in New York’s Union Square basking in the Kennedy radiance. It wasn’t the words, it was the energy--that radiant vitality, confidence, and uncanned humor. “His whole face would light up with a kind of incredulous merriment as a pleasantry struck him, and there was never any doubt where the jokes came from. He never had to steal from anybody.” Sheed was cheered. “This, as reflected off the faces around me, was suddenly the sunniest day in the history of the world, and it was going to be that way from now on. That was the Kennedy effect . . . I’ve stepped into many auras before and since, but never into anything quite like this.”

Sheed compares the Kennedy Administration to the Restoration of England’s Charles II, the “merry monarch,” after Cromwell’s dour Protectorate. Where Ronald Reagan made Americans feel good about themselves, writes Sheed, “Kennedy pulled off the infinitely more difficult (thing) of making other people feel good about us, too.” The Europeans were impressed. “What made Kennedy a dreamer to bet on were two qualities his very presence seemed to radiate . . . decency and intelligence.” The latter cannot be faked. And that intelligent good will, claims Sheed, generated a ripple effect, felt by leaders like De Gaulle and Harold Macmillan, and even in Franco’s Spain. “In many odd corners of the globe, from Africa to South America, even to motionless India itself, things began to stir in their sleep, not always directly because of Kennedy but as part of a long chain reaction to his legendary vitality. And if this isn’t greatness, it might as well be.”

Eventually, after the Cuban missile crisis, even Nikita Khrushchev was impressed. Kennedy liked to quote the British military strategist Lidell Hart: “Never corner your opponent, and always assist him to save his face. . . . Avoid self-righteousness like the devil--nothing is so self-blinding.” Khrushchev got the message; in his memoirs, he wrote that J.F.K. was “someone we could trust. . . . He showed great flexibility and, together we avoided disaster. . . . He showed real wisdom and statesmanship.”

Then there was Bobby in 1968 (when Sheed was working for the McCarthy campaign)--the compassionate Bobby who, amazingly, even more than his brother, crossed class lines. To Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers, “he was one of ours.” This prompts Sheed to wonder if it’s really true, as he supposed, that there can only be one great man to a family. No, he concludes, the two were in a sense one. “Together, they made . . . an extraordinary President.” For a prized moment, J.F.K.-R.F.K. made politics, in the words of John Buchan that Jack loved to quote, “the greatest and most honorable adventure.” In this election year, that is something to honor.