Shooting Star

In the current Barbara Kruger retrospective at the Geffen Contemporary, a sculpture with the word “Family” carved into its base immortalizes the trio of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe: The film goddess’ outspread legs are supported on the shoulders of the genuflecting Kennedys, and all three grinning figures hold their arms open, like circus performers inviting applause at the end of their act. This work borrows the grandiose style of figural monuments that blandly grace our public parks: It is emphatically a “statue,” appearing immensely weighty and weirdly hollow at the same time. Unlike the standard outdoor renderings of George Washington or Thaddeusz Kosciuszko, “Family” locates its subjects in the associative nexus they automatically call to mind, in that symbolic realm through which all contemporary reality passes before it arrives on our plates.

The salient feature of the symbolic is the duality of everything in it. What something really is, and what the same thing represents, while often having little to do with each other, become fused in an indissoluble, paradoxical unit. This has always been a defining quality of movie stars and politicians, but in the case of Kruger’s triumvirate, the abyss between public image and private reality is itself a key ingredient of their posthumous charisma. Monroe and the Kennedys not only symbolize great fame, great beauty, great power and all the other greatnesses that accumulate in historical personalities; in a peculiarly modern way, they also incarnate the pathological impulses behind the creation of myth. Folded into the iconic appreciation of JFK, RFK and MM is an overt irony, an awareness that their manipulation of the symbolic had an infinitely elastic relationship to who they really were.

Ronald Steel’s “In Love With Night” plumbs the depths, or perhaps the shallows, of this menage’s murkiest figure, Robert Kennedy, and the part he has come to play in our collective imagination. Steel brings to his investigation a nimble skepticism about the “might have beens” adhering to JFK’s abbreviated presidency, based on what the Kennedy brothers actually did while holding power; he indexes a great deal of confused reactive crisis management in foreign relations and expedient dilatory pandering to both sides of the civil rights struggle. Retroactively, the publicity genius of Jacqueline Kennedy and an army of loyal scribes transformed a mediocre thousand days into a fairy-tale time of infinite promise and Arthurian enchantment that many more than would care to admit it still half-believe in. The “might have beens” become even more evanescent and questionable vis-a-vis Bobby’s later political career, which consisted of 10 undistinguished months in the Senate and an 11th-hour entry into the 1968 contest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Steel doesn’t need to debunk any myths. Many writers before him have deconstructed the Kennedys. His book is therefore casually inclusive of facts that were once dismissed as heresies and scandals (in other words, relaxed about its own irreverence), and more interestingly focused on the “real” Bobby and his symbolic double as a unitary cultural artifact, which, like a work of art, relies on its audience to complete its “meaning.” Steel finds it odd and troubling that someone as purely incipient as Bobby Kennedy, who accomplished almost nothing in the real world, became the repository of so much political yearning among the dispossessed in 1968 and an object of reverence ever after; “In Love With Night” is a gracefully meditative attempt to discover how, exactly, a man who hated to be touched in any familiar manner and cultivated a reputation for unpleasantness connected, in the closing chapters of his life, with masses of poor people and came to embody “the last best hope” of liberalism.

Steel allows that at least part of the answer must be found in Bobby’s “conversion” through the trauma of his brother’s murder into someone who could genuinely empathize with other people’s suffering but locates another part of it in the credulity and emotionalism of the most desperate segments of the electorate. Steel is uncomfortable with any hagiographic reading of Bobby, for the good reason that even at RFK’s best moments “the good Bobby” and “the bad Bobby” (as Jules Feiffer dubbed them) seemed to war inside a person who ultimately was more preoccupied with the public’s perception of himself than with any of the public’s problems.

Steel’s Bobby is a worm can of insecurities, the least favorite son of one of the 20th century’s true grotesques: Joseph P. Kennedy, arriviste bootlegger and one-time studio mogul who had to be relieved of the ambassadorship to England because of his pro-Nazi sympathies. JPK taught his numerous sons that women were properly treated like dirt, that winning was everything and that anyone and anything could be bought, lessons that our late president absorbed more slickly and readily than Bobby, whose moral self-righteousness was, if anything, overdeveloped and who loved his mother. (JFK once described Rose Kennedy, who detested him, as “just a nothing.”)

Young Bobby was scrawny, socially awkward and devout. For the family patriarch, Bobby’s usefulness lay mainly in the fact that he was “a real hater,” and in the imperial Kennedy scheme of things, Bobby’s role became that of his brother’s facilitator and enforcer. The ambassador had wanted his first-born to be president, but JPK Jr. bought the farm in World War II while trying to impress Dad with his daring, so the mantle of craven ambition fell to Jack, who would have preferred to be a journalist or something similarly easy. (None of the Kennedy sons ever dared to cross Joe Sr., who decided exactly what lives they would have. Of the daughters who fell short of his social ambitions, one was given a lobotomy, the other was permanently ostracized from the family.)

In 1951, Bobby earned a law degree at the University of Virginia. He had already married the deeply Catholic Ethel Skakel and sired the first of an eventual 13 children (two more than Rose and Dad). Joe Sr. got him a job in the Justice Department “investigating tax evaders and suspected communist agents.” When Jack ran for the Senate in 1952, Bobby was obliged to quit his new job and take over the campaign. “It was a family division of labor,” Steel writes. “Bobby sweated and screamed his way through the campaign, doing the dirty work, while Jack gave statesmanlike speeches and charmed the ladies with his boyish appeal.” It was the beginning of a long good cop-bad cop symbiosis.

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If JFK was the ultimate political pragmatist, Bobby was the ultimate true believer. JFK, as senator, knew to publicly distance himself from Hyannis Port drinking pal and demagogic blarney-meister Joe McCarthy; Bobby became, with Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief aide. The anti-communist fevers of the ‘50s seemed to Bobby a good idea. More telling, he found it difficult to admit years later that he had been wrong. Like Rudolph Giuliani, RFK had the dour soul of a prosecutor. His idea of public life, like Giuliani’s, was to find bad people and punish them. As JFK’s attorney general, Bobby carried on an Ahab-like crusade against Jimmy Hoffa and various mob figures such as Joey Gallo and Sam Giancana, eventually achieving the Pyrrhic victory of Hoffa’s incarceration; the campaign’s larger unintended consequences included the weakening of legitimate unions and the labor movement overall. (Bobby’s later, arguably sincere, embrace of Cesar Chavez was meant to rectify some of the damage he’d caused as attorney general.)

This is where hubris makes its appearance in Steel’s story in a big way, for another unintended consequence of Bobby’s actions as head of the Justice Department may well have been his brother’s assassination. Certainly the mob had every reason to feel double-crossed by the Kennedy administration because of Bobby’s prosecutorial zeal. Many of its capos had been in business with Joe Sr. at one time. According to Steel, the mob had boasted about fixing votes for Kennedy in Chicago in 1960, Sam Giancana shared a mistress with JFK, and the CIA had contracted with Giancana and others to assassinate Fidel Castro (“. . . [M]ost terrible of all was the fear that RFK’s own vendetta against the Mafia may have triggered a retaliation that killed his brother--that in Mafioso Carlos Marcello’s grim words, ‘The dog will keep biting you if you only cut off its tail. But if you cut off the dog’s head it will die’,” Steel writes). Bobby’s fear of these ugly potential revelations and their likely effect on JFK’s legacy probably convinced him to sign off on the Warren Commission’s Oswald-as-lone-gunman conclusions. Privately, he suspected the involvement of both the mob and the CIA, yet he carefully protected his ignorance.

Some of Steel’s best pages deal with the Kennedys’ shabby treatment of Lyndon Johnson after the JFK assassination and the posthumous invention of Camelot. They bring to mind Mary McCarthy’s characterization of the “intellectuals” the Kennedys brought to Washington as courtiers as “pale fish out of think tanks.” Treating Johnson as a vulgar usurper, these loyalists boxed the willing Bobby into the role of his brother’s ghost and legitimate successor, a role that grief and loss led him to play first as an agonized, vacillating Hamlet and finally as a passionate crypto-revolutionary whose appeal, so strongly dependent on charisma, summoned the kind of fanaticism more usually seen in Indian rather than American politics.

Robert Kennedy entered political life as a staunch Cold Warrior, like JFK, with a grudging, largely rhetorical liberalism informing his vision of domestic social change. In the chaotic climate produced by the civil rights and antiwar upheavals of the mid-’60s, he embraced the idea of social justice and even became its passionate advocate, yet his notions about how to achieve a better deal for minorities and the underclass were neither conventionally liberal nor legibly conservative but a weird assortment of gimmicks suggested by the heterogeneous marginal nature of his constituency and by his hatred of Johnson, who, empowered by a landslide mandate in 1964 and a Democratic Congress, had pushed through real reforms that the Kennedys hadn’t dared to put forward. Johnson was tragically burdened with an unwinnable war the Kennedys had started, so Bobby churlishly invented the myth that his brother had been planning a Vietnam withdrawal at the time of his assassination. Good Bobby and Bad Bobby were as joined at the hip as the Hilton sisters.

Much of what Bobby proposed as a presidential candidate, aside from a quick negotiated settlement in Vietnam, was considerably to the right of Richard Nixon’s ideas. But that was inaudible to the hungry and poor whose crowds Bobby fearlessly plunged into and had himself photographed with. Steel believes that Bobby really did feel their pain, and this is not a hard thing to believe. What is incredible, however, is the still-popular idea that Bobby, as president, would have done much to assuage it. The dismal fate of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the private sector-financed ghetto upgrade Bobby organized among his Wall Street friends as an alternative to Johnson’s poverty programs, gives a plausible picture of what actually “might have been.” Yet legends live long in hungry hearts, and as Steel almost too generously concludes, even Bobby Kennedy’s legend has some salutary symbolic use, especially when mere reality has little power to move us.