The Kennedys in the World by Lawrence J. Haas

Author:Lawrence J. Haas [Haas, Lawrence J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO010000 Biography & Autobiography / Political, BIO011000 Biography & Autobiography / Presidents & Heads Of State, POL010000 Political Science / History & Theory
Publisher: Potomac Books

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“Bob Kennedy Urges Share for Reds in Saigon Regime,” the Los Angeles Times headlined its front-page story of February 20, 1966. Bobby’s controversial suggestion of a day earlier that Washington offer the Vietcong a power-sharing role in South Vietnam in hopes of a peace deal garnered front-page coverage by the New York Times and Washington Post as well.8

Weeks earlier, Senator George McGovern, a dovish Democrat of rising prominence, suggested to Bobby that he “continue to raise questions about Vietnam” because his “voice” was “one of the very few that is powerful enough to help steer us away from catastrophe.”9 That Bobby’s idea attracted such notice and received such scorn—including from some of LBJ’s foreign policy advisors with whom he had worked closely under Jack—was particularly striking, since J. William Fulbright, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s chairman, had suggested the same thing more than once. At the time, Bobby and Ted were exerting more influence over America’s foreign policy debate. Their political stock was rising in Washington and around the country just as LBJ’s Vietnam strategy was growing more controversial.

“By hoary tradition,” Newsweek wrote about the brothers in January of 1966, with the face of each adorning its cover, “the freshman senator from New York and the junior senator from Massachusetts ought to be invisible men in a chamber that cleaves to the seniority rule as religiously as the bricklayers’ union. Yet, if a senator must finally be judged for what he does, a Kennedy must be measured here and now for what he is: the inheritor of a magic name, an uncompleted mission, a deep-rooted family mystique of ambition and competition and power.”10 The brothers attracted more media attention than other senators, were allotted more space when they wrote articles for leading magazines, received more daily mail, drew more attention from their colleagues when they spoke in the Senate, garnered more speaking invitations around the country, attracted bigger crowds, and joined LBJ and Vice President Hubert Humphrey as the only Democrats who were guaranteed to sell out a party fundraiser. As congressional elections approached in the fall of 1966, Bobby’s stock soared even higher as he campaigned for Democrats from coast to coast.

As senators, the brothers operated very differently. Bobby viewed the Senate as a necessary stop on the road to an inevitable presidential run (though, at the time, he presumed that wouldn’t come until 1972). To his colleagues, he was often cold, brusque, abrasive, and moody. “One day it would be a warm, fun conversation,” recalled Walter Mondale, who served with him in the Senate. “The next day the shop was closed.”11 Not surprisingly, Bobby was a bit of a Senate loner, as Jack had been in the 1950s. While he developed relationships with such fellow backbenchers as Mondale and Fred Harris and retained others from his days as attorney general, he couldn’t hide his impatience with the peculiar norms of a stuffy institution, such as the tradition by which senators called one another “the honorable” and “my friend”—no matter how they viewed one another.

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