A work in progress

Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon. By Larry Tye. Random House; 580 pages; $32.

ROBERT KENNEDY remains an enigma nearly 50 years after he was gunned down in a Los Angeles hotel, in the midst of a promising presidential campaign. He was fearsome yet gentle, an anti-communist stalwart who became the standard-bearer for American liberals, and a moralistic, devout Catholic who covered up his brother’s affairs (and, some suspect, his own) and embraced dirty political fights.

Larry Tye, a former Boston Globe journalist, is the latest to try to untangle these delicate threads. His thesis is that Bobby Kennedy learned as he went along, far more than most politicians. Driven by passion, Kennedy became a “pragmatic idealist” who, midway through his only term as senator from New York, had become “twice the senator and reformer” that his brother John had been.

Mr Tye opens with Robert’s most startling alliance—with Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose anti-communist witch-hunts rocked America during the 1950s. Joe Kennedy, the family patriarch, had befriended and given amply to McCarthy, clearing the way for Bobby to take a job that jump-started his career. An aide on McCarthy’s investigations subcommittee, Kennedy focused on American allies shipping goods to communist China during the Korean war. He left after seven months but remained fond of McCarthy, even showing up secretly at his memorial service.

The experience was, Mr Tye writes, a “baseline”, highlighting how much Kennedy would change over his short life. His cold-warrior posturing, in support of a man who routinely violated civil liberties, would soften as he saw more of the world and its hardships. Gradually, this privileged son who lived in an enormous mansion learned to empathise with those on the fringes of society.

Indeed, it is Kennedy’s work on civil rights and poverty that reverberates most powerfully through history. As attorney-general during his brother’s presidency, he ordered troops to prepare for a stand-off in Alabama with the arch-segregationist governor over admitting African-Americans to the state university. As a senator, he travelled to Mississippi to search out the poverty that the state’s leaders ignored. He also became an early ally to Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers Chavez fought for. “All [Kennedy] said was, ‘What do you want? And how can I help?’ That’s why we loved him,” a Chavez deputy recalled.

Mr Tye’s account is nuanced and thorough, and he manages the rare feat of interviewing Kennedy’s widow Ethel, now 88. Yet it is still hard for the reader to get truly inside the mind of this complex Kennedy, somehow both a “Machiavellian contriver and man of conscience”.

A few stylistic quirks also distract. Mr Tye repeats that Bobby was “growing up fast”—a tired way to describe a grown man. He has an odd habit of relegating key points to footnotes. These include the Kennedy brothers’ likely plans to get rid of J. Edgar Hoover as director of the FBI had John been re-elected in 1964, and the “antipathy” between Ethel and Jackie Kennedy, whom Bobby grew close to after John’s death. (Mr Tye poses the question of how close, but does not answer it.)

And so Robert Kennedy remains a mystery, cut down at 42, shortly after he won the California presidential primary. Yet his vision echoes through the decades. “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly,” he said in 1966. If only modern-day leaders were so bold.