Robert Kennedy: His Life, by Evan Thomas.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
$28 - 509 pages.

Reviewing a novel about a Kennedy is, for me, an unforeseen event. Actually, unforeseen is an understatement. Hell may not have frozen over, but I’m sure the temperature just dropped a few degrees.

Robert Kennedy: His Life is the latest addition to the Kennedy canon, that library of books about this remarkable American family. I picked it up on a chance visit to the library, having read a few remarks from a conservative columnist about how tough and competent RFK looked when compared to the politicians of the last 10 years.

Written by Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life uses a great deal of anecdotal history to make its various points regarding the character, virtues, and vices of this third Kennedy brother. Thomas’ powers of description and his largely evenhanded approach to Robert Kennedy help create a fascinating portrait of a fascinating man.

Thomas begins his biography with a miniature portrait of Kennedy just before his assassination in the summer of 1968. He then follows Kennedy’s life chronologically, showing him as a boy ignored by his father and doted on by his mother; a young man who never gets to follow his two brothers into the war and who struggles through much of college; a new lawyer, married and with a growing family, who helps his brother run for president; an attorney general who battled organized crime and the FBI; a loving father and husband.

Robert Kennedy, however, had a dark side. He could be careless with his own life, cruel toward underlings and people whom he considered weak and contemptuous of those who disagreed with him. He was the Kennedy with the puritanical streak, the brother who took the longest to grow up, the man with the hair-trigger temper who in his younger years often swung on an antagonist without asking too many questions.

Yet it is for his faults, oddly enough, that I found myself admiring Robert Kennedy. His “puritan” side seems more virtuous now, given what we know about his brother’s behavior in the White House as well as the behavior of a score of politicians in the last 10 years. RFK had a noble and romantic side to him that John Kennedy lacked. When others didn’t meet these standards, RFK could become bitterly sarcastic, often losing his temper to such a degree that he would punch those who annoyed him.
Thomas believes he took longer “growing up” than Jack did, yet again RFK’s passion for the underdog and his sense of justice make him seem today more mature than his brother.

What makes Thomas’ book so interesting is his eye for detail, his willingness to elaborate on certain RFK quirks, and his unwillingness to engage in speculation or unfounded conjecture. In discussing Kennedy’s relationship with Jackie after her husband’s death, for example, Thomas tells us that “... beyond gossip and somewhat questionable sightings of the two embracing, no evidence has emerged that would prove a physical relationship.” Even Hoover’s RFK file holds not even a rumor of an affair between them. (It was fascinating to read how greatly affected Kennedy was by Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way, first given to him by the newly widowed Jackie. According to Thomas, who devotes nearly three pages to Kennedy’s relationship with this book, Hamilton’s account of the Greek concept of hubris strongly influenced Kennedy’s thoughts in the last years of his life).

Thomas is sometimes unwittingly funny. Thomas trots out the cliches where he writes that during race riots in Oxford, Miss., “the students in crew cuts and T-shirts began to scatter: the boys from the hills had taken over, hard-eyed men with ducktail haircuts and missing teeth.” While Russia and the United States seemingly came ever closer to war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, George Ball, a Kennedy advisor, wrote that his wife had stockpiled a little supply of food and drink as well as a Bible “for our black cook, who was devoutly religious.” We are left to wonder whether it ever occurred to Ball to look for wisdom inside the pages of that book while he and others had the fate of the world in their hands.
But these are mild failings. The author presents a honed study of one of the most fascinating political characters of the last 50 years.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars bookstore on Main Street in Waynesville.)

 

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