Bobby: Good, Bad, And In Between.

• Author: THOMAS, EVAN
• Position: Robert F. Kennedy

The many incarnations of Robert Kennedy

The Phineas Understudy

In 1942, RFK left the Catholic Portsmouth Priory prep school amid a cheating scandal that has never been fully resolved and became a student at the resolutely Brahmin Milton Academy. There he became friends with the model for the tragic hero Phineas in John Knowles' A Separate Peace:

Shy, prickly, and demoralized, Robert Kennedy arrived at Milton, his sixth school in ten years, in the fall of 1942. Milton was a traditional feeder school for Harvard, which recommended it to Ambassador Kennedy, but the tone and culture were High WASP, unwelcoming to Catholic new money. Milton could have been a disaster for Bobby Kennedy. He arrived knowing no one and made little attempt to learn anyone's name. He simply called the &her boys "fella," as in, "hey, fella" Kennedy was instantly, and not affectionately, nicknamed Fella. In the recollections of his classmates, he was deemed to have "a chip on his shoulder," "a short fuse," and, just as unacceptable, "the wrong clothes? There were a few Catholics on campus, but most of them worked in the kitchen, or made beds. Almost all the students came to the school in eighth or ninth grade. Bobby entered in eleventh grade, after the cliques had already formed. His schoolmates insisted, somewhat defensively, that Milton was free of prejudice. "There were no ugly incidents," said Joy Luke, who went to the coordinate girls' school across the street. "But we were all aware his father was a bootlegger." RFK could have remained an outcast, but for a friendship he formed while playing football.

At Portsmouth, Kennedy had been a slow, small, but inordinately determined second-string halfback. As he neared his seventeenth birthday, Kennedy had filled out and hardened. He still looked scrawny in street clothes and walked head down, "like a bird in a storm;" as one of the Milton girls described him. But he was taut and wiry. While his legs were short and stubby, his torso was long and muscled, and his arms, particularly his forearms, were well developed. "Bobby is going to be the most robust and Jack practically admits to us--though not to Bobby--that Bobby could throw him now," Rose wrote Kathleen and Joe Jr. At football practice at Milton, he tore into tackling dummies "as if his life depended on it," recalled Sam Adams, another would-be halfback trying out for the team. Adams and Kennedy both made the second backfield, along with a younger boy; a tenth grader named David Hackett.

Hackett would become a schoolboy god, Milton's best football and hockey player ever, his schoolmates swore decades later. Little boys would follow him around, "like the Pied Piper," recalled Mary Bailey Gimbel, who was at the Milton Academy girls' school at the time. Hackett's appeal to Kennedy, however, was less as a boy hero than as an anti-hero, a romantic renegade. In his famous coming-of-age novel, A Separate Peace, John Knowles would use Hackett (whom he had met at summer school at Exeter) as the model for his doomed golden boy, Phineas. Phineas possessed a "scatterbrained eloquence," a "calm ignorance of the rules with a winning urge to be good." He was a "model boy who was most comfortable in the truant's corner." So, in real life, was Hackett. "Hackett seas offbeat," said Joy Luke. "If he couldn't find the right words, he'd try a different way." Hackett was an astonishingly graceful athlete and "a wild man. He'd do anything and get away with it, in a charming way," said Tom Cleveland, the more traditional campus "big man" of the era.

Hackett took an immediate shine to Kennedy. "We were both misfits," he later recalled. Hackett liked Kennedy's "impulsiveness and fearlessness," he said. He enjoyed his irreverent humor and admired the fact that, in a world of conformity, Kennedy was "willing to embarrass his friends." Bobby made no attempt to downplay his Catholicism; indeed, he tried to expose others, urging Hackett to join him at Sunday mass. Hackett was enormously impressed one Sunday when Kennedy, seeing that an altar boy was missing, suddenly hopped over the prayer rail. Quite unself-consciously, it seemed to Hackett, Kennedy began attending to the priest. Hackett was impressed with Kennedy's unwillingness to compromise to gain acceptance. Kennedy would not join in dirty jokes. He disliked bullying and would step in when an upperclassman tried to push around a younger boy.

Hackett gave Kennedy his fist real taste of friendship. They roughhoused together and played practical jokes. Hackett would be Kennedy's friend for life, long after the adolescent hero worship wore off. For once, Kennedy had a sense of belonging, even a measure of stature in Hackett's reflected glory. Kennedy's confidence grew; his grades improved from D to C with an occasional B....

Hackett, curiously for someone so exalted by his peers, shared Bobby's outsiderness. A day student who lived not in the dorm but with his genteel, threadbare family in nearby Dedham, Hackett identified with the dispossessed. He and Bobby earnestly questioned why they should be the privileged ones; when Milton played the local public school, Hackett said he felt as if he was on the wrong side of the ball. Something stirred inside Kennedy as well. He had always sided with the downtrodden at school. Now he began to notice inequity in the wider world. On a trip home to Hyannis Port, Bobby began questioning his father about the poverty he glimpsed from the train window. Couldn't something be done about the poor people living in those bleak tenements? Kennedy Sr. dismissed his son's show of social conscience.

Increasingly, as time wore on, the talk between Bobby and Hackett was about joining the marines. The world war was never far away, even from a cloistered prep school. The chapel tower was manned as an observation post, to spot any enemy planes that might be flying nearby. Maps of the Southwest Pacific and North Africa--American battle zones--were hung in classrooms. Almost as soon as he arrived at Milton in the fall of '42, Bobby began agitating with his father to allow him to enlist. He wanted to catch up to his brothers.

The Red-Baiter's Right Hand Man

In January 1953, Bobby went to work as a lawyer on the staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations under its chairman, Senator Joseph McCarthy. His father got him the job by picking up the phone and calling McCarthy. (The senator from Wisconsin was soon...