Bobby

He hated the diminutive "Bobby." And yet the flame that arced across the American political firmament burned so fiercely in those last 82 days that supporters and detractors alike fall into the imagined familiar, speaking in terms of "our Bobby" or the "Bobby myth,"¹ caught and sometimes struggling within the tragic but "poetic aura of the martyred leader."² In 1992, Josh Getlin described "The Cult of Bobby" to readers of the Los Angeles Times.³ Less than a year later and a quarter century removed from the assassination, Jonathan Yardley echoed public sentiment in his "Missing Bobby" for the Washington Post.⁴ In a 1998 anniversary editorial, the New York Times characterized Kennedy's ordeal as a kind of purification through "great suffering" in preparation for "a holy quest."⁵ These and other works, both popular and scholarly, confirm that "Bobby" is symbol and shibboleth, a mythic presence in our political imagination and civic discourse.

The reasons for this status are far from clear and remain the subject of considerable debate. Some point to the fact that Kennedy's death was one of the many momentous events that made 1968 a year, in Mark Kurlansky's terms, "that rocked the world" and consequently established the events and people of that year as pivotal.⁶ Others find answers in the arguably quixotic nature of RFK's presidential bid: improbable, poorly timed, and politically hopeless, and yet, for these very reasons, in every way appealing to the antiauthoritarian strain in America's love of the underdog. Most acknowledge that Robert Kennedy's enigmatic character and career contradictions add to his mythic status, raising questions that defy easy answers. He was a Kennedy, of course, the torchbearer for a brother who was himself gunned down. Yet he too ultimately helped define a decade of death in which the names of the dead slip like a dirge of lost hopes: Medgar and John and Malcolm and Martin and Bobby and too many more. Interestingly, RFK's hold on our imagination seems only to have tightened in the post-9/11 era, as antiwar sentiment, economic hardship, racial tension, and a longing for hope helped open a field of play for a young and audacious candidate's equally improbable bid for the presidency.

At the heart of Robert Kennedy's mythic presence is the light and dark found in all tragic heroes. Supporters prefer to dismiss the darker aspects of this legacy as misunderstandings, mere shadows cast by the light of noble ideals and later achievements.⁷ But it is hard to deny this side of RFK's character or the more dubious choices of his political career. He was an ambitious political operative who could be ruthless, an unyielding foe of those caught in his crosshairs. Moody, perhaps even melancholic, Kennedy tended to lapse into brooding reverie. He was shy, alienated, and often inarticulate. His political ideology fit no category, and for the bulk of his career he was "simplistic, conservative, and authoritarian."⁸ He was an early McCarthyite, a cold warrior obsessed with communism and taken to promoting "black ops," counterinsurgency, and propaganda. He was morally conservative on some social issues, and he came late to the causes and positions for which most supporters laud him today: civil rights, antiwar, antipoverty, voting rights, racial justice, and human dignity for the dispossessed and disenfranchised. And yet, supporters say, that is exactly the point. Somewhere along the way the tough and taunting RFK of the McCarthy era and the Rackets Committee became, through pain and loss and long nights of grueling introspection, RFK the champion of the rights and...