The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [234]
Bobby may have seen all that, but he also had heard enough to reinforce his most rigid views of Marxist totalitarianism, from the loudspeakers spewing propaganda in the fields and factories (“It just drives you out of your mind”) to the absence of any voices of dissent, spirited or otherwise. He saw Russian colonialism at work in the segregated school system that separated the Asian and Russian populations. As he sat with his hosts eating such exotic fare as lamb’s brain, he saw too that there were few Communists in this Communist land. He saw a Soviet Union attacking the colonial powers of the West in Africa and Asia while running its own empire in Central Asia. He showed a perceptive awareness of one of the great ideological struggles of his time, not communism versus capitalism, but Russian imperialism versus the nationalistic instincts of subject peoples within the Soviet empire.
When Bobby returned home, he parlayed the journey into a bounty of publicity and goodwill. Douglas may have believed that Bobby’s experiences in Russia had begun to open him up to a world more divergent and complicated than any he had imagined. Yet Bobby successfully hid that awareness in the many interviews and speeches that he gave and the articles that he wrote.
Bobby had had an opportunity that no American official had ever had before—to meet with the largely forgotten peoples of Central Asia, whose nationalistic aspirations would explode into life three decades later. Yet Bobby remained as much an ideologue as the Communists he despised, and no more interested in the story of the individual human life than they were. Bobby had gone to the Soviet Union on a political mission, and he was not ready to display reportorial snapshots in lieu of ideas.
It is out of the specificity of human experience, however, that empathy grows. Nowhere did Bobby tell the tale of the woman doctor who saved his life, presumably because it would have given his audience the idea that a Communist could be a human being. Nowhere did he make Douglas’s essential point, that these were people, not ideological stick figures. Nowhere did he draw the obvious conclusion that as offensive as the ethnically segregated schools might be, Americans could hardly condemn them too loudly until they changed their own segregated system.
Any other twenty-nine-year-old political figure in the nation’s capital would have been ecstatic to have a fourteen-page Q&A in U.S. News & World Report and would have assumed that the then-conservative publication would treat him fairly. Bobby not only edited the transcript and suggested an added question and answer, but got the magazine to state that he had been off the government payroll during the six weeks he was in Russia. He invited a reporter from the Boston Globe down to the Cape for another lengthy feature article.
Bobby was a terrible speaker. His high-pitched voice was sometimes almost inaudible, and his sheer discomfort at being up on the podium communicated itself to his audience better than his words. Yet he agreed to give the prestigious Gaston Lecture at Georgetown University in October 1955, to talk about his trip. He was so dreary an orator that even his own secretary, Angie Novello, told him: “The pictures were great, but I think you could have spoken better than that.” He was still mining the trip nine months after his return, writing a lengthy article for the New York Times Magazine on “The Soviet Brand of Colonialism.”
Bobby continued to ingratiate himself with Hoover, going to see the FBI director to tell him about his trip and the following year writing him the kind of fawning letter that was de rigueur for impressing Hoover (“I hope the United States enjoys your leadership for a long time”).