Clarity Through Complexity.

• Author: Wofford, Harris
• Position: Review

R.F.K.

Even before his assassination, writers, pundits, and political cartoonists were making hay with the evident tensions within Bobby Kennedy's personality. As Evan Thomas puts it in his new biography Robert Kennedy: His Life: " The Good Bobby/Bad Bobby dichotomy, limned by cartoonist Jules Feiffer, became a cliche even before he died. Was he the hard-bullying, McCarthyite, wiretapping, Hoffa-Castro-obsessed hater forever scowling and vowing to "get" his enemies? Or was he the gentle, child-loving, poetry-reading, soulful of a new age?"

In order to explore this question, we offer the following review of Thomas' book by Harris Wofford, together with passages from the book itself that demonstrate the most compelling good and bad sides of RFK.

THE FIRST WAVE OF WRITING ABOUT Robert and John Kennedy and the New Frontier was overwhelmingly romantic and sentimental. Its high-water mark--also perhaps a mining point--came in Arthur Schlesinger's moving 1978 biography of Robert Kennedy, which Evan Thomas in his illuminating new biography, Robert Kennedy: His Life, still considers "magisterial."

Schlesinger wrote as a committed colleague of the Kennedys and as a critical historian. His book, written in heroic terms, reinforced the American public's continuing love affair with their lost leaders of the Sixties, and with the extraordinary Kennedy clan.

In the years since, the wave of writing on that decade of high hopes and bitter tragedy has been dominated by the spirit of revision and deconstruction, often crossing the line from critical skepticism into pervasive cynicism, or into the murky waters of conspiracy theory.

In the new evidence uncovered by congressional committees, or discovered in long-secret records belatedly released by the government or presidential libraries, there is plenty of shocking and confusing material to draw on and questions to ask: CIA assassination plots, dalliance with organized crime, obsession with Castro, fear of J. Edgar Hoover, and the demon sex rising up in comical but fateful ways. Who was responsible? Who knew what and when?

Despite it all, our sense of the magic and the mystery of John and Robert Kennedy has lingered on. Now comes Evan Thomas, Newsweek editor, author of previous instructive books--The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared, on the early days of the CIA and, with Walter Isaacson, The Wise Men. Thomas' truly magisterial biography of Robert Kennedy may signal a new wave of writing on the Kennedy brothers...