IN LOVE WITH NIGHT: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy.

• Author: Branch, Taylor
• Position: Review

IN LOVE WITH NIGHT: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy

By Ronald Steel Simon & Schuster Inc., $23.00

FIRST THE GOOD NEWS. RONALD STEEL wrote this book with a worthy purpose. He set out to reconcile, temper, refute, or otherwise explain the enduring polar and powerful myths about Robert Kennedy as the celebrated "good Bobby" and infamous "bad Bobby" The twin myths have been staples of popular culture since Kennedy's lifetime. The shallow, clannish, persecutorial "bad Bobby" was a pit bull for the disgraceful Joe McCarthy and for his brother JFK, sending mafia killers after Fidel Castro, FBI wiretappers after Martin Luther King, and commandos after Vietnamese rebels as a "piano wire hawk" of the Cold War--in the signature word, ruthless. The healing "good Bobby" of later years was a reconciling figure of conscience, driven to tear-fill embrace of malnourished children in sharecroppers' shacks and to a martyr's crusade against the moral destruction of the Vietnam War. Steel's introduction suggests a premonition that "good Bobby" has been exaggerated to preserve him as the patron of lost hope in American politics, which is not an unreasonable start.

The book does catch Kennedy between the twin poles more than once, suspended against type in human moments that are clues to myths in error or transition. There is a brief description of RFK as a scrawny young student at Harvard, not advertising himself as the rich ambassador's son in order to make friends on the football team. The older players "came to admire his grit and lack of pretension ..." writes Steel. "Bobby chose to be with them, to make his social life among townies and vets. Like most outsiders, he felt comfortable only among those who were not his social or intellectual peers. That is why he gravitated so naturally toward children ..." Steel catches Kennedy twenty years later in the high councils of Armageddon as his brother's Attorney General during the Cuban Missile Crisis, already deeply invested in clandestine plots to take vengeance on Castro and now pushing for a decisive air attack to wipe out the Soviet missiles. "Although RFK at first sided with the hardliners, he calmed down," writes Steel, and with those three words his account veers into RFK's diplomacy that helped the country draw back from nuclear showdown. Steel again zooms in on Kennedy two years later, wrestling with whether to become a Senate candidate after JFK's assassination. "He was not, to say the least a natural politician," Steel observes. "Indeed...