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Mr. and Mrs.President

See How They Ran

That Robert F. Kennedy could earn this, his father's highest compliment, contradicts conventional wisdom.

Bobby Kennedy today is often remembered as virtually Christ- like, an apostle of love martyred to the forces of hate that deformed 1960s America.

JFK, the murdered Kennedy who became president, may have been carnal, a charismatic sophisticate who mastered the universe while seducing women: James Bond as president.

RFK, the murdered Kennedy who did not become president, is more ethereal, a poet, philosopher and social crusader venerated as the last politician who could have healed America, uniting blacks and whites, paupers and tycoons, insiders and outsiders.

With each election cycle, the Bobby Kennedy legend grows. Warren Beatty's movie Bullworth was an ode to the fallen leader 30 years after the 43-year-old senator's assassination. The movie portrayed a United States senator who finds redemption - and, alas, death - by repudiating convention, speaking frankly, and becoming the rare white politician who actually listens to blacks. Beatty even considered trying to parlay his association with Kennedy during the 1968 crusade into a presidential candidacy. And while Bill Clinton often flaunts his 1963 handshake with John Kennedy as a living link to Camelot, Hillary Clinton is now comparing herself to Robert Kennedy, fellow crusaders lured to New York by its Senate seat.

Immortalizing "Good Bobby" obscures memories of that other Bobby. "Bad Bobby" - in the classic formulation of the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, was indeed the family "hater," his brother John's enforcer, a fiery, competitive, hatchet man.

Yes, "Good Bobby" marched with the union radical Cesar Chavez, but "Bad Bobby" worked for the red-baiting Joe McCarthy.

Yes, "Good Bobby" criticized Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy in 1968, but "Bad Bobby" first helped sink America into that swamp as one of his brother's Cold Warriors.

Yes, "Good Bobby's" empathetic ode to Martin Luther King, Jr., singlehandedly headed off a riot in the Indianapolis ghetto after King's assassination, but "Bad Bobby" had okayed FBI wiretaps on the civil-rights leader.

Yes, "Good Bobby" was the most pious and prolific Kennedy - he fathered 11 children while Joe the patriarch merely produced nine - but "Bad Bobby," though less wanton than his brother, had his share of women, including Marilyn Monroe.

Even the physical descriptions of the two "Bobbys" differ. "Good Bobby" is a Kennedy, a rugged, touch-football-playing aristocrat, with a shock of tousled hair framing his handsome face, his just-a- bit-too prominent front teeth acknowledging his subordinate status as the president's slightly goofy younger brother. "Bad Bobby" is a rude, tough, clipped, cold-eyed, hard-nosed runt.

The Kennedy mystique claims the JFK assassination transformed the half-bad Bobby into the fully good one. Just as polio turned Franklin Roosevelt from a superficial, selfish playboy into a leader, so, too it seems, did the JFK assassination elevate Bobby from the enforcer to the heir, from the junior to the redeemer.

As in a good Greek tragedy, guilt compounded the pain. Bobby's apparent lack of interest in the circumstances surrounding his brother's death stemmed partially from his fears that a full investigation might uncover the Kennedys' involvement in CIA schemes to assassinate Fidel Castro, and partially from his fears that his zeal to eliminate enemies, from Castro to Jimmy Hoffa, somehow rebounded in his brother's murder.

In 200 readable, thought-provoking pages, Ronald Steel tackles "the American romance with Robert Kennedy." Kennedy mavens may find nothing new, but Steel's argument is refreshing: neither mushy nor nasty.

He identifies "three braided strands" to the RFK legend. First, "the myth of Camelot," that Sir Robert Kennedy Lancelot could resurrect the Golden Age the American empire enjoyed under King Arthur himself, John Kennedy. Second, "the liberal myth," that this restored Camelot would have realized the liberal ideals the nation now seems to have lost. Finally, the "rainbow myth," that RFK "alone among all American politicians would have been able to unite" America's many contentious constituencies into "one harmonious, progressive coalition."

The "Bobby myth" unites all three strands. This belief assumes, as one radical-turned-scholar mourned, that with Robert Kennedy's passing, "a promise of redemption not only passed out of American politics, it passed out of ourselves."

While his book explains where all these myths originated, Steel disproves and rejects them. He agrees with many scholars that John Kennedy's "Thousand Days" was more distinguished by its promises than its accomplishments. He notes that Robert Kennedy disdained liberals, those "sons of bitches ... in love with death." And he claims that in the 1968 campaign, Robert Kennedy not only failed to forge any kind of rainbow coalition, he was probably headed for defeat when Sirhan Sirhan gunned him down in California.

Steel, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, made his reputation with a brilliant biography of the great American progressive rationalist, the journalist Walter Lippmann. Like his hero, Steel scorns this whole myth-making enterprise, this quest for redemption. "Politics in a democratic society is about interest groups and deals, not about salvation," he sniffs.

Steel is only half-right. Sure, the act of governing, as the cliche goes, is as bloody and messy as the act of making sausage. But myths have been one of the secrets to America's success, one of the ways a teeming, chaotic, dizzying, disparate, polyglot country, united simply by a bunch of ideas and a constitutional framework, has been able to thrive as a focused, functional, patriotic nation. Americans need heroes - and have been blessed over the years with Washingtons and Lincolns, Roosevelts and Kennedys, to fill the bill.

Canadians take note: Nations need common ideals, common heroes, common myths to unite them. The Kennedy legend, for all its historical inaccuracy, for all the disappointments it may generate in the current crop of leaders, is also a wellspring of hope. If once upon a time, the nation could produce the martyred '60s trinity of Kennedy, Kennedy and King, all is not lost. Three, two, or even one worthy replacement may yet rise again.

- Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University. His book Mr. and Mrs. President: From the Trumans to the Clintons was just released in paperback.