The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [465]
The attorney general may also have been so tired out by the endless struggles of government that he had begun to make bad judgments. Few cabinet members in American political history have taken on the range of activities and concerns that Bobby had during these years. He was a man who had to touch and feel before he could think and act.
Early on in the administration, Bobby had gone up to Harlem to visit young gang members. He didn’t travel with a large entourage. He didn’t have journalists with him. He sat on the curb listening to members of the Viceroys talking about their lives. Bobby was seeking to learn how the federal government could help combat juvenile delinquency, and he sought answers not in written reports, expert testimony, but in these individual troubled lives. He wanted to learn, and though he left these gang members to live just as they had before, he saw that beneath these lives that were such tragic admixtures of bravado, resignation, cynicism, and despair, there were flickers of hope.
When Bobby talked about black children, it was not enough to look at studies and slides. Instead, he might call in his old friend and aide Dave Hackett, and they would visit a D.C. school where he could take children in his arms and hear their dreams. In the Justice Department he developed the government’s first major program for dealing with juvenile delinquency. He learned that there were twenty-three lawyers in the Justice Department working on reparations to Indians for land stolen from them years before, and he not only pushed that forward but met with American Indians and celebrated their lives and ways in a manner that few officials had done before. He kept up his push against organized crime, though involving men like Giancana in the Castro assassination attempts had made prosecution far more difficult.
Bobby had time for his Cuban friends and their attacks against Castro, and he was the secret goad and force behind these efforts. His brother called him on a multitude of issues, from trade to foreign policy, and he made his own firm mark on most of the major initiatives in the White House. He had his family too, Ethel and now eight children, and he was there for his children, out tossing a football, playing games.
At times Bobby displayed a mindless bravado. In May, when the first Americans climbed Mount Everest, Bobby’s reaction was, if they could do it, he could do it too. Justice Douglas called him to talk about a climb. “I’ll talk to Ethel about it,” he said in what was a joke and not a joke. “Maybe we can work it in for a week in July after the baby comes.”
Bobby was living on the natural adrenaline of action. But his face was gaunt, and he was so tired that he may not have realized how tired he was. He had always been abrupt, but he was more abrupt now. At a party celebrating Bobby’s thirty-eighth birthday on November 20, one of his aides, John Douglas, thought that the attorney general seemed “quite depressed.” That was an emotion that had always seemed foreign to Bobby. As fatigued as he was, the election lay ahead. And over in the White House sat his brother, about whose health and well-being Bobby knew far more than any man.
31
To Live Is to Choose
Kennedy’s preeminent concern these days was his reelection. Barry Goldwater, the conservative Arizona senator and Kennedy’s most likely opponent in the 1964 election, was far behind the president in the polls. Goldwater, though, was becoming better known and slowly rising in popularity, giving credence to the president’s prediction that he would have a “long, hard fight to the White House” in 1964. The Republicans had already begun to step up their criticisms of his presidency as full of promises and rhetoric but few accomplishments. “The New Frontier is a little like touch football,” Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan told one Republican gathering.