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Mr. and Mrs.President

See How They Ran

With each election cycle, the Bobby Kennedy legend grows. Warren Beatty's movie Bullworth was an ode to the fallen leader thirty years after the forty-three-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 redbaiting 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 avoided 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 eleven children, 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. On the other hand, "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 disinterest 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 -- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s majestic two volume biography continues to set a very high standard; Harris Wofford's, Of Kennedys and Kings, has already explored Bobby's guilt over the assassination, just as Garry Wills' darker work, The Kennedy Imprisonment, has already analyzed this question of charisma and myth-making in a democracy. Moreover, while Steel illustrates the need for more careful thought about liberalism as an ideology, and the Kennedys' relationship to it, this book treats liberalism in a rather superficial way.

Nevertheless, Steel's argument is refreshing: neither mushy nor nasty. Steel 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. Steel agrees with many scholars that John Kennedy's "Thousand Days" was more distinguished by its promises than its accomplishments. Steel notes that Robert Kennedy disdained liberals, those "sons of bitches ... in love with death." And Steel claims that in the 1968 campaign, Robert Kennedy not only had 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, 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, with Roosevelts and Kennedys, to fill the bill.