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Love was not cheap. For his occasional dalliance, the president was trafficking with a woman who journeyed between his arms and the darkest elements in American society. She was a woman with endless illusions about herself. She came and went like all the others, but she would share the pages of history with him more than she shared the moments of his life, sullying much of what he did, and much of what he hoped he would mean to future generations.

24

Bobby’s Game

Bobby vowed that he would not end up like Attorney General William Rogers, so cowed by the hatred he engendered in the South that he hid on the plane when traveling with candidate Nixon below the Mason-Dixon Line. Bobby was not a man to hide from his enemies, but on the day he first walked into his stately office in the Justice Department, he was already far more a target of hatred than Rogers ever had been.

Bobby knew that there was potential danger to himself and his family, but it was impossible to sort the real threats from the malicious gossip, the honest concerns from the pernicious rumors. During his first year as attorney general the governess was returning to Hickory Hill one evening with several of the children when, on a nearby road, she surprised a man in the bushes. The intruder jumped into his car and sped off without bothering to turn on his lights. After interviewing the governess, a Fairfax County police officer concluded that “on the basis of the man’s action at the time he apparently had gotten out of his car to urinate and on being surprised rapidly left the area.”

That was a matter for hearty laughter, but Bobby was hardly extreme in his fears. He had no entourage of Secret Service agents, no state-of-the-art security around Hickory Hill, and with every controversial step he took and every threatening letter he received, the drama of his life increased. His mother had her own secret anxieties. “The attorney general was fighting against Hoffa,” Rose recalled. “Dealing with criminals was tough. They said they would throw acid in the eyes of his children. Bobby kept all those dogs there and they were very apprehensive at times.”

Bobby was a brave man, but it diminishes the nature of courage itself to imagine that he was without self-doubt, fear, or anxiety. “My father, all of us really, were always around brave men, great athletes, people who had done great things,” reflected Bobby’s son Christopher. “We had constantly to risk ourselves to feel that we could be with them. Risk was a way to feel God.”

When it came time to appoint the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harris Wofford was the obvious candidate, but Bobby did not trust him to subordinate his passionate convictions about civil rights to the president’s or the attorney general’s agenda. Wofford was an odd mixture—an attorney who graduated from both Yale University and Howard University Law Schools, spent several years at the prestigious Washington law firm of Covington and Burling, and taught at Notre Dame Law School. But his other side had drawn him to study Gandhi in India, to work closely with Martin Luther King Jr., and to advocate civil disobedience in the civil rights movement.

When Bobby first met Wofford, he was puzzled that the attorney had attended Howard as the first white male student. “I can understand going and teaching there, but why would you go to Howard Law School to learn law?” Bobby asked. “It’s not a great law school. Why would you go to a Negro law school as a student?”

Wofford had been one of those responsible for helping to deliver about 70 percent of the black vote to Kennedy, a voting bloc that was as important as any one factor in his narrow victory. He deserved an important position in the administration, but Bobby considered Wofford “in some areas a slight madman.” Men who care injudiciously about human liberty are often thought crazy, and Wofford was slightly mad about injustice. It was acceptable to have an undersecretary of Commerce concerned solely with