The Last Patrician: Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy

By Michael Knox Beran

Overview
In this provocative reassessment of one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century American politics, Michael Knox Beran shows how Bobby Kennedy was shaped by values of the aristocratic class to which he had been brought up to belong. He was one of them - until he realized that the welfare state they had helped to create at home and the empire they had helped to found abroad were undermining some of America's most cherished traditions. In denouncing the welfare system as a "second-rate set of social services" and "hand-outs," and in questioning the imperial commitments that the patricians made in places like Vietnam, Bobby Kennedy was a prophet who accurately foresaw the changing direction of American politics. Challenging the work of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Jack Newfield, and others, Beran demonstrates that Bobby was neither a pious liberal martyr nor a would-be revolutionary. He was a man who drew on the wisdom of Emerson, the ancient Greeks, and his own father's ideas about the transformative power of free markets - and used them to create a compelling vision of a better America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781250088017

Michael Knox Beran

Michael Knox Beran has written for The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and The New Yorker. A graduate of Columbia, Cambridge, and Yale Law School, he is a lawyer and lives in Westchester County, New York, with his wife and daughter.

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To my wife

and my parents

Acknowledgments

I WISH TO thank the following people for their help in connection with the writing and publishing of this book: Mary Elizabeth Ward Beran, Denis Beran, Virginia Beran, Michael V. Carlisle, Henry P. Davis, Sarah Jeffries, Brian H. Johnson, Becky Koh, William W. Morton, Jr., Barbara J. Ward, Sedgwick A. Ward, and Robert Weil. I should also like to thank members of the staff of the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library for permitting me to review documents in the library’s archives. None of these individuals is, of course, responsible for such errors of fact or interpretation as the book may contain.

Note

HE DID NOT like the name Bobby. He preferred that more grown-up, manly-sounding name Bob. But just as his sister-in-law Jacqueline could not escape the intimacy of Jackie, so he could not escape the diminutive boyishness of Bobby. Jack Newfield, in his book Robert Kennedy: A Memoir, records the charming story of a ten- or twelve-year-old boy outside a Manhattan tenement who, when he was asked what all the fuss was about, replied that Senator Javits and Bobby were inside the building. It was as Bobby Kennedy that he was known to the world, and is now known to history, and I have therefore called him by that name in this book.

A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.

—EDMUND BURKE

INTRODUCTION

A Patrician in Pain

The White House, June 5, 1981. The survivors of Camelot have gathered in the Rose Garden to hear Ronald Reagan pay tribute to one of their own. Bobby Kennedy’s widow is at last to receive the gold medal that Congress ordered to be struck in her husband’s memory. Jimmy Carter, spiteful to the last, never found time to do it, and so it now falls to Carter’s more magnanimous successor to present Ethel Kennedy with a token of the nation’s gratitude.¹

It is an exercise in irony, or rather in multiple ironies, this spectacle of a seventy-year-old President with a glistening black pompadour consecrating the memory of a tousled young martyr. Ronald Reagan was fourteen years old when Bobby Kennedy was born; he did not become President until twelve years after Bobby’s death. In contrast to Reagan’s long life, Bobby’s was relatively brief: he was forty-two when he died in a Los Angeles hospital room in June 1968. Bobby’s political career ended two years after Reagan’s began. The younger man reached the summit of American politics half a decade before the older man started to climb. Bobby, in his thirties, was Attorney General of the United States when Reagan, in his fifties, was a faded actor working for the General Electric Corporation. Reagan privately blamed Bobby’s Justice Department for costing him his job. Justice had long suspected that MCA—Jules Stein’s company, the entertainment giant with which Reagan had formed close ties during his Hollywood career—was violating the antitrust laws.² When in 1962 Justice appeared ready to indict a number of MCA officials and others who had done them favors, GE panicked and fired the genial host of its popular television program—or so Ronald Reagan believed.³

Bobby died young, but now, as they gather at the White House to honor his memory, his disciples are old. The brilliant young lawyers who once brought the power of the federal government to bear on MCA are themselves out of power, and the fading actor whose ties to men like Jules Stein and Lew Wasserman once provoked their scrutiny is now the President of the United States. In the Rose Garden on this warm June day it is the aging Kennedy men, not the newly installed Republican President, who seem tired in spirit, worn out by the battles they have fought. Camelot is gone, and the faithful, bereft of their captains, are left to wander aimlessly in the diaspora. Ethel Kennedy, in her fifties, chats amiably with Nancy Reagan, but her good cheer cannot mask, quite, the sorrow written in the lines of her face.

The family’s reigning prince, brother Edward, is also on hand. The handsome youth whom Bobby helped to win a Senate seat in 1962 has settled into an uncomfortable middle age.⁴ It has not been a good year for Teddy. Less than twelve months have passed since he was defeated by Jimmy Carter in his bid for the presidency. Six months ago he announced that his pro forma marriage to Joan Bennett was over.⁵ Gossips whisper about too much drinking; some talk of drugs.⁶ Suzannah Lessard has exposed his philandering; her article Teddy’s Women Problem / Women’s Teddy Problem caused a sensation when it appeared in The Washington Monthly at the end of 1979.⁷ But, beleaguered though he is, the prince can still summon his hundred knights. The geriatric Cavaliers have dutifully presented themselves at the palace: McNamara, Harriman, Alsop, a host of lesser figures. Unlike the heady days when they came here to stare down Khrushchev or sip champagne to the sound of Pablo Casals’s cello, the old warriors are bent and gray, a shadow of their former selves. The strong and confident leaders of the sixties are themselves in their sixties. They were, of course, the best and the brightest of the new generation that Jack Kennedy summoned to power on a cold January afternoon in 1961, but today they are haunted by their former greatness, humiliated by the promise to which they failed to live up. There is a peculiar pathos in seeing this, of all political generations, in its dotage.

And yet there is no bitterness, no resentment, in these men, the decayed remnant of a generation that would have changed the world—had it but world enough and time—as they sip cold drinks served on silver trays in the summer afternoon.⁸ The New York Times will report that both Kennedy and Reagan loyalists are using the word graceful to characterize the occasion.⁹ The reporters want to play up the contrast between New England idealism and California conservatism, between patrician conscience and Hollywood glitter. The Kennedys aren’t playing that game. Ethel Kennedy nods approvingly as President Reagan speaks.¹⁰ Reagan may be the first movie-star President, but, after all, the Kennedys themselves made glamour an indispensable part of American politics long before the host of Death Valley Days and the General Electric Theater reached the White House. Joseph Kennedy was in Hollywood, learning its lessons, studying its methods, financing its movies, ten years before Ronald Reagan showed up at Jack Warner’s studio in Burbank in 1937.¹¹

Still, the occasion is strange. Why is Ronald Reagan paying elaborate—and apparently unfeigned—verbal homage to a man Alice Roosevelt Longworth likened to a revolutionary priest?¹² Is it mere politeness that leads him to celebrate the hero of the liberals and the left, the admirer of Che Guevara, the man whom Arthur Schlesinger called a tribune of the underclass?¹³ Is it hypocrisy? It is as if Augustus, safely ensconced in the imperial palace, had celebrated the memory of good old Cato, or as if Charles II had praised the memory of Cromwell. It doesn’t make sense.

The Liberal Icon

OR DOES IT? When Ronald Reagan claimed that Bobby Kennedy was critical of bloated bureaucratic government, The New York Times sneered: Reagan was playing politics with Bobby’s reputation, turning him into an advocate of his own vision of smaller government.¹⁴ The Times was subscribing to the conventional wisdom: that Bobby Kennedy was the antithesis of Ronald Reagan, a martyr to the cause of twentieth-century liberalism, an orthodox liberal figure who, if he was capable of flirting with the radical left, never strayed very far from the principles of Franklin Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, and his own older brother. To the extent that Bobby was moving beyond conventional liberalism, he was moving in a direction consistent with its larger purposes, its higher ends; in moving beyond it, he was not turning against it. This is the prevailing view of Bobby Kennedy, the view memorialized in Arthur Schlesinger’s vast (and brilliant) tome and in Jack Newfield’s slender memoir. Ronald Reagan might have had the audacity to challenge this view of Bobby; few others have. Unlike Jack Kennedy, Bobby has largely been spared the indignity of a critical reevaluation. The historians who are hardest on Jack Kennedy are surprisingly gentle in their treatment of Bobby, unwilling to disturb popular myths, hesitant to cast doubt upon the first principles of the man’s contemporary cult. Garry Wills, who in The Kennedy Imprisonment depicted Jack Kennedy as one of the great frauds of all time, is surprisingly sympathetic to Bobby, a man who (as Wills sees it) was forced by the charismatic requirements of being a Kennedy to move to the left and create a kind of revolution in the hills, his own personal Sierra Maestra.¹⁵ Wills’s Bobby is radicalized by the sixties; he flirts with language that was framed in the hills of Cuba and is in danger of becoming a mini-Fidel.¹⁶ This, of course, is nonsense; is as valuable a contribution to the Bobby literature as Frank Capell’s right-wing polemic Robert F. Kennedy, Emerging American Dictator, with its picture of Bobby as a soul mate of Castro.¹⁷ Neither Wills nor anyone else has succeeded in revising Schlesinger’s picture of Bobby as the last great liberal. Is such a revision even possible? Will the sentimental defenders of the welfare state permit it? In his guise as the last great liberal, Bobby is a valuable commodity, a rare example of a liberal icon whose appeal remains undiminished today.¹⁸ There has been no rush to tell the truth about Bobby Kennedy.

Reagan was nearer that truth than he—or his listeners—knew. Bobby did challenge the liberal orthodoxies of his day. If he was not a raging conservative trapped inside a liberal’s body—a Bill Buckley waiting to be born—neither was he the gentle liberal whom Arthur Schlesinger depicted in his thousand pages.¹⁹ According to the keepers of the liberal conscience, Bobby was, at the time of his death, poised to become the Adlai Stevenson of the 1970s, the torch-bearer of all that Eleanor Roosevelt stood for.²⁰ Eleanor Roosevelt herself was more canny; she resisted Bobby almost to the moment of her own death.²¹ The liberals who canonized Bobby in death were suspicious of him in life—and for good reason. Newfield reluctantly conceded the existence of a conservative Bobby, a Bobby who believed in the work ethic, family, and the rule of law.²² The rigors of a liberal education and his own conscientious attempts at liberal piety never succeeded in eradicating the conservatism at his core. He never lost, Newfield wrote, that Puritan strain of moral conservatism that made him despise Playboy magazine and movies that glorified sex and violence.²³ He "agreed with his wife that it was ‘not right’ when Newsweek published a nude photo of Jane Fonda on its cover," and he thought the decadence of Antonioni’s film Blowup immoral.²⁴ Bobby would have been the first to applaud the contemporary renewal of interest in the Victorian virtues. William Bennett’s anthologies, with their Kiplingesque paeans to work, courage, loyalty, and faith, would have appealed to him.

The story I have to tell is not a simple one. Ronald Reagan grew to manhood in small Middle Western towns whose sunny verities he instinctively adopted as his own. Bobby’s was, from the first, a more complicated existence. He was the son of an entrepreneurial father who believed that his sons could obtain power for themselves only if they forswore the role of entrepreneurial hero and allied themselves to a patrician elite. Bobby and his brothers would be raised not in the entrepreneurial tradition of Joseph P. Kennedy, but in the aristocratic tradition of patricians who, like Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, believed that the age of the entrepreneur was over and that America’s continued progress depended on its creation of a government powerful enough to institute reform at home and guarantee peace abroad. These patrician statesmen were the architects of the twentieth-century welfare and administrative state; after World War II they helped to construct the twentieth-century national security state. The son of an entrepreneurial capitalist, Bobby became the proselyte of the tradition of grand government that Roosevelt and Stevenson championed. This tradition was, of course, at odds with his own deepest impulses, and he never ceased to admire brave, self-reliant, self-made men. But Bobby was a good boy and for the most part did as he was told. His rebellion came later, when he was on his own, when his older brothers were gone and his father lay crippled by a stroke.

This book tells the story of that rebellion. It was a rebellion that brought Bobby to question, as cogently and thoughtfully as any statesman of the postwar period, the orthodoxies upon which the welfare state and the national security state rested. The argument advanced in these pages is not that Bobby was a repressed conservative, patiently waiting for an opportunity to come out of the liberal closet. There was much in Ronald Reagan’s policies that he would have abhorred. And yet he would, I think, have been no less troubled by his younger brother’s defense of a welfare system that had manifestly failed. He would have thought it sad and perhaps tragic that Ted should have spent his career championing a welfare establishment that he himself despised. The New Deal, Bobby asserted, was over; it was time for Americans to disenthrall themselves, to find new solutions to old problems.²⁵ In looking for new solutions, Bobby became convinced of the value of old ones.

Toward a Post-Enlightenment Politics

THE THEME THAT gives his life its unity, its dramatic coherence, is his preoccupation with pain. Pain was for him a vocation of sorts; he would become, at the end of his life, a close student of Greek tragedy and an expert on the ways in which contemporary Americans suffer. When he came to write a foreword to the memorial edition of his brother’s Profiles in Courage, pain was the first thing that came to his mind. At least one half of the days he spent on this earth were days of intense physical pain, Bobby wrote of Jack Kennedy. He was in Chelsea Naval Hospital for an extended period of time after the war, had a major and painful operation on his back in 1955, campaigned on crutches in 1958. In 1951 on a trip we took around the world he became ill. We flew to the military hospital in Okinawa and he had a temperature of over 106 degrees. They didn’t think he would live.²⁶ But although Bobby grew up with pain, he did not immediately discover in it his life’s work. One of the most vivid memories of his youth was the smell—putrid and horrible—of Lem Billings’s burnt flesh when the two of them shared a room one summer after Billings had been scalded in the shower.²⁷ Much of Bobby’s life was passed in the shadow of death; before he himself died, he would watch two brothers, a sister, and a brother-in-law die violent deaths. But it was not until middle age, long after he had first known the horror of charred and rotting flesh, that he discovered in human suffering his true métier.

If Bobby interests us today—and he should interest us today—it is because at some level his preoccupation with suffering was genuine, and not just a ploy to win over liberals and intellectuals.²⁸ At some level the anguish was real. Not simply his anguish over the sins of the nation, its manifold injustices to the poor, the blacks, the Indians. Not simply his anguish over his brother’s death, his despair in the face of a world that could destroy a man like Jack Kennedy so casually, so carelessly, so capriciously. The tabloid histories that have appeared in recent years, so otherwise worthless, have this merit, a merit that goes beyond giving publishers an excuse to reprint old pictures of Marilyn Monroe: they have revealed to us the sordid places in Bobby’s own soul, the shadowy depths to which Schlesinger and Newfield and the other hagiographers never dared to descend. A man with as finely developed a conscience as Bobby Kennedy’s could not have been unaffected by the memory of his own less forgivable conduct. In this respect at least the anguish was real.

Hardly a day passes without our being introduced to some new and hitherto undiscovered aspect of the American agony. There is, of course, the physical pain of the inner-city slum, the deprivation described by Jonathan Kozol in his book about the Mott Haven section of the Bronx.²⁹ But this physical pain, Bobby knew, was a manifestation of a deeper pain, a pain that was not limited to the ghetto. This pain, a spiritual, or what we more often today call a psychological pain, is big business in America, one of our foremost growth industries. Evidences of this pain are ubiquitous in our culture: depression, anxiety, alcoholism, drug abuse, eating disorders, the pervasiveness of Prozac are among its more readily apparent symptoms. To escape the hurt, we spend billions of dollars in the pursuit of more or less counterfeit approximations of felicity. In the Old World, human suffering was a question for philosophers and theologians. Ordinary men and women were too busy doing the suffering to care much about why they suffered, or whether they should suffer. How different the case in America. In the second half of the twentieth century, the vast majority of Americans, free of the harsher forms of physical suffering, have become, if anything, even more conscious of the other agonies of human existence. They have become even more obsessed with the question of why they so often feel so bad. Depression, despair, frustration, alienation—whatever name we give the pain, it is there, defying the most ingenious attempts of the pharmaceutical industry to mitigate its deleterious effects.

The Enlightenment promised to end our pain. The philosophes promised to liberate us from our misery, to deliver us from the evil of suffering. It is in part because our pain was supposed to have gone away—or greatly decreased in severity—that we are so morbidly conscious of its presence today. The free market, the welfare state, the modern discipline of psychology, the modern pharmaceutical industry are among the more readily identifiable methods by which the Enlightenment tried to put an end to human suffering. Man’s desire to escape from pain fueled the engines of Enlightenment, but in the end pain itself, our stubborn nemesis, revealed the limits of Enlightenment. Pain is part of our destiny. Bobby, the first post-Enlightenment American statesman, sought to make peace with it. How, he wondered, can we learn to live with pain? How can we profit from it? Bobby did not, in his attempt to fashion a post-Enlightenment politics, come up with all the answers. But he understood the problem; he grasped our predicament better than most.

PART I

The Making of an Aristocrat

1

He became a questioner, a doubter, but that is not how he began. It is an old story: before he rebels, the heretic is among the most pious of priests. Only those who have thoroughly understood a system can act decisively to change it. Augustine was a perfect pagan, Paul a perfect Jew, before each became a revolutionary Christian. Luther was a priest before he became a Protestant. It was only because he had embraced the orthodoxies of his age—embraced them with the passion of a believer—that Bobby Kennedy was able to become, at the end of his life, so constructive a critic of those orthodoxies.¹

He grew up amid contradictions, a confusion of identities, a profusion of faiths. His life was grounded in Yankee realities: prep schools and Ivy League colleges, summers on the Cape. But he did not adjust to them in the ready and easy way his brothers did. He was shyer, quieter, more withdrawn. Vestiges of the old life, the life of his ancestors, so different from the secular Yankee world in which the father sought to envelop the children, perplexed him. Beside his father’s worldliness there was his mother’s piety, her daily attendance at Mass, her constant resort to prayer and contemplation. Her faith made a deep impression upon the young Bobby, deeper than the impression it made upon his brothers. For a time, it is said, he considered becoming a priest.² Who knows? He might have been a good one. But his father had different ideas.

The Meaning of the Malcolm Cottage

THE HOUSE ITSELF tells the story. In 1926 Joseph Kennedy turned thirty-eight. He was a stock speculator and millionaire who four years before had left the investment banking firm of Hayden, Stone & Company to play the bull market of the twenties on his own. More recently he had acquired a controlling interest in a motion picture company with operations in New York and California, and it is probable that he continued to derive profits from the illegal distribution of bootlegged liquor.³ At all events, Joseph Kennedy had by 1926 become a rich man; in the spring of that year, when he moved from Boston to New York, he hired a private railroad car to take his family south. But Kennedy did not want his children to become New Yorkers, and in the summer of 1926 he returned to Massachusetts, took his family to the Cape, and there rented a house known as the Malcolm cottage at Hyannis Port.⁴ Bobby Kennedy, who had been born the previous November, was not yet a year old.

Two years later Joseph Kennedy bought the Malcolm cottage outright for some $25,000.⁵ It was not such a lot of money to a young millionaire who, like Kennedy, was fond of occasional extravagance. He claimed that he lost $1 million on the movie Queen Kelly, his failed attempt to showcase his sweetheart, Gloria Swanson.⁶ And he agreed to put up a horse called Silver King, one of his studio’s principal box-office attractions, in a stable that, at $25,000, cost as much as the Malcolm cottage itself.⁷ The big spender in Hollywood was, however, curiously reticent when it came to throwing his money around on Cape Cod. Even after he enlarged it, the Malcolm cottage remained a conspicuously modest place, a New England summer house, spacious and comfortable, but not at all grand, a rambling, white-shingled, somewhat ordinary house, the chief distinction of which lay in the great swath of lawn that separated it from Nantucket Sound. It was the house of a successful lawyer, a well-off banker, not an American tycoon.

Later the family would acquire the neighboring houses: Bobby bought the adjacent property, and Jack bought the house next to that, a nondescript residence on Irving Avenue, some distance from the water.⁸ Legend has exaggerated the glamour of the place; the very name the press gave the property—the Kennedy compound, with its air of institutional, of vaguely military, dullness—proclaimed its plainness. Not even the most fanciful commentator could call it an estate. For Joseph Kennedy to have bought—and retained—so modest a property was out of character. It is almost a rule: the successful American—Vanderbilt, Frick, Rockefeller, Hearst, Gates—builds himself a house commensurate with his fortune. And yet Kennedy, though he was no less vain than the constructors of our various American Xanadus, refused to build himself a monument to his plutocratic pluck. Some would doubtless argue that the reason for such unwonted modesty lay in the fact that the Kennedy fortune was never as great as has been supposed, that misapprehensions of the extent of the family’s wealth began in 1957 when Fortune magazine estimated the family’s net worth at $250 million, roughly double the actual figure.⁹ But even allowing for exaggeration, Kennedy’s wealth would surely have permitted him to buy a bigger house than the one he did. Not Kykuit, perhaps, the Rockefeller mansion in Pocantico Hills, or Matinecock Point, the Morgan estate on the north shore of Long Island, but something more impressive than the Malcolm cottage. Why, then, did he buy it? Why did he choose Hyannis Port? His business ventures were taking him farther and farther afield, to Hollywood, to Chicago, to London; wouldn’t a summer place closer to New York, his base of operations, make more sense? Wasn’t Southampton, or Oyster Bay, or Glen Cove a more natural choice? Hyannis wasn’t even friendly to the Kennedys when they arrived—or later. Watching the neighbors wave after her brother’s election to the presidency, Eunice Shriver commented sourly, They never showed such interest. The Kennedy compound, however unglamorous that formulation sounds, was actually an improvement on the original name. For years the Kennedy property was known simply as the Irish house.

He must initially have hoped for acceptance. He would not repeat the mistakes he had made in the Brahmin resort at Cohasset, where he and Rose had been blackballed at the country club.¹⁰ By taking a modest house at Hyannis, Joseph Kennedy would impress his Protestant neighbors with his restraint, would convince them that he, too, despised vulgarity. Far from resembling the gaudy perfection of a Rockefeller residence, with Picassos and Mirós on the walls, Joseph Kennedy’s houses tended toward a distinct shabbiness. Guests were surprised to discover that, despite the expense of their upkeep, the houses were never quite clean.¹¹ But the ingenious strategies failed; the modest houses, the modest sailboats, the modest cocktail hour (one drink before dinner) failed to convince the Yankees (and the Middle Western WASPs who were becoming increasingly prominent at Hyannis) that Joseph Kennedy was one of them.¹² It was petty and cruel, one WASP recalled.¹³ The women looked down on the daughter of ‘Honey Fitz’; and who was Joe Kennedy but the son of Pat, the barkeeper?¹⁴

His money did not impress them, and neither did his genuine successes. Rose Kennedy spoke hopefully of a day when the nice people of Boston would accept her husband, but the day never came.¹⁵ When Kennedy did an admirable job as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the nice people spoke darkly of his knowledge of the crooked and indirect ways of Wall Street; only a very corrupt man, they said, could have made the stock market honest. When he proved (at first) to be a popular ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, the descendants of the Four Hundred (FDR among them) laughed at the spectacle of a red-haired Irishman being taken into the camp of the English.¹⁶ Do you know a better way to meet people like the Saltonstalls? the young Joseph Kennedy asked, naively, after he had been appointed to the board of directors of the Massachusetts Electric Company.¹⁷