Getting Right with Bobby.

• Author: Pitney Jr., John J.
• Position: Review

The strange lure of Robert F. Kennedy

Robert Kennedy: His Life, by Evan Thomas. New York: Simon and Schuster, 509 pages, $28

In Love with Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy, by Ronald Steel, New York: Simon and Schuster, 224 pages, $23

In the 1960s, politics seemed bigger, bolder, more consequential. Back then, Florida was a training ground for the Bay of Pigs invasion and a focal point of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now it's just the home of hanging chads. Back then, John Glenn rocketed into space and the nation prayed that his capsule would not burn up during re-entry. Now Glenn gets a second space trip as a retirement gift, and the nation prays that he remembered his spare dentures. Back then, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon made a mark on American history. Now Bill Clinton just leaves a stain.

During that dramatic decade, politicians stirred our passions and gripped our collective memory even when they didn't accomplish much. Such was the case with Robert F. Kennedy. He spent much of his career ruthlessly helping his brother John win headlines and elections, then served as his attorney general in an administration that made little policy progress before ending abruptly with an assassin's bullet. RFK accomplished nothing of significance during his brief tenure in the U.S. Senate. Before his own assassination in 1968, he championed racial minorities and opposed the Vietnam War--but it was his enemy Lyndon Johnson who actually got Congress to pass civil rights legislation and Nixon who pulled America out of Vietnam (albeit gradually).

"Much of Kennedy's allure lies in the future conditional," Ronald Steel admits, "in what he would have been, what he would have done." In Love with Night explores this allure. It is less a biography than an essay on RFK's character and background, as well as the mythology that grew around him after his murder at age 42. Though Steel overlooks some of the darker episodes of Kennedy's life, his book offers a tough-minded analysis of a politician who worshipped toughness.

In Robert Kennedy: His Life, Evan Thomas offers a full-scale biographical treatment, based on impressive original research, including newly available archival material. He differs from Steel on some incidental details. For instance, Steel says that journalist John Seigenthaler ghosted RFK's 1960 book on labor racketeering, The Enemy Within. Thomas claims that Kennedy wrote it himself. Overall, however, they agree on the basic facts. Where they part company is the interpretation of those facts--most significantly, on the answer to the oft-asked question, What kind of president would RFK have made? Thomas says that even if he had failed in the White House, Kennedy "would have failed trying his utmost to lift up the poor and the weak." Steel takes another view: "Instead of being the 'tribune' of the underclass, he would have had to become what every president ultimately is: a power broker."

At one point in his prologue, Thomas unintentionally sides with Steel's more skeptical appraisal. Kennedy, he writes, "was a Zelig of power--at the vortex, it seemed, of every crisis of the 1960s." Zelig, the title character of Woody Allen's 1983 movie, did in fact meet many famous people, but was not at the center of historic events--that was another filmic Everyman, Forrest Gump. Zelig was the human chameleon who could assume the appearance and mannerisms of anybody he met. Though Thomas meant to say something different, he actually got it right: RFK was a shape-shifter as times changed and...