by Garry Wills
17
The Prisoner of Charisma
As a principle of domination, familial charisma has generic problems of its own, especially in regard to succession.… In any case, the whole meaning of charisma is changed in the process. From a quality that authenticates and ennobles a person through his own actions, charisma becomes an attribute of the forefathers through whose deeds a man’s authority and privileges become legitimate.
—RHEINHOLD BENDIX
Lyndon Johnson thought he had a legitimacy problem with respect to Robert Kennedy. But Robert had an even more acute problem of succession. As the designated heir, he had to demonstrate charisma in revalidating exercises, day by day. The more charismatic have expectations become, the more difficult is the problem of succession, even within the family. For charisma cannot simply be handed on to a successor, for the same reason that it cannot be fully delegated to a subordinate. It is a unique power to handle crises, and both power and crisis must be fitted to each other, repeatedly, by the original charismatic figure—and even more urgently, against the disappointments of substitution, by any successor.
Johnson tried to solve his legitimacy problem by developing his own “countergovernment” of cronies, to defeat the obstruction of Kennedy loyalists. Robert Kennedy had to move even farther out from “everyday” government to make new charismatic claims. His was not only a government in exile, but also a kind of revolution in the hills, his own personal Sierra Maestra. John Kennedy had radicalized others inadvertently; Robert Kennedy had to keep up with the forces his brother had loosed.
Civil rights was a prime example. During the 1960 campaign Kennedy criticized the President for failing to move aggressively in this area—though Eisenhower had passed the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction, and backed up the school desegregation decision with bayonets in Arkansas. Kennedy helped free Dr. King from jail during the race, and he promised to move around congressional obstruction by executive order. He would, for instance, desegregate government housing “with the stroke of a pen.” But, once in office, he delayed that move for nine months, while civil rights leaders vainly sent him pen after pen for the magic stroke. Kennedy was wooing Congress after his disabling “victory” over Judge Smith’s Rules Committee.
The difference between Eisenhower and Kennedy was less one of private disposition than of the stages of black militancy. Kennedy came to office as the movement was accelerating. He asked Dr. King to call off the freedom rides; the Attorney General said protection could not be provided unless a “cooling off period” intervened. King said no, which so angered Robert Kennedy that he telephoned Harris Wofford, asking him to intervene and end the rides: “This is too much! I wonder whether they have the best interest of their country at heart. Do you know that one of them is against the atom bomb—yes, he even picketed against it in jail! The President is going abroad and this is all embarrassing him.” At this point in his own development, Robert Kennedy not only identified the good of the country with his brother’s reputation but with the sanctity of nuclear weapons.
Robert Kennedy also considered the Civil Rights Commission, chaired by the Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, too activist; it would cause political trouble for his brother in the South. “You’re secondguessers,” he told the commission. “I am the one who has to get the job done.” When the commission planned hearings in Louisiana and Mississippi, Kennedy called Berl Bernhard of the staff and told him to call them off, without letting anyone know he had made the demand. “Remember you never talked to me.” In all this, Robert was following the lead of his brother, who had earlier told Wofford to end the freedom rides: “Stop them! Get your friends off those buses!” The President’s insensitivity to black problems astounded Wofford. When the first Peace Corps class was being sent off to foreign countries, Warren Wiggins briefed the President before he addressed the group in the Rose Garden. In that conversation Kennedy casually assumed that black people in the corps had been trained at Howard Universtiy—i.e., that young people sent out to cross cultural and national boundaries had begun their government training in segregated facilities! Kennedy also astonished Angier Biddle Duke, the head of protocol, who was disturbed at the refusal of restaurants on the highway between New York and Washington to serve UN diplomats from Africa. Kennedy’s solution: “Can’t you tell these African ambassadors not to drive on Route 40? It’s a hell of a road—I used to drive it years ago, but why would anyone want to drive it today when you can fly? Tell these ambassadors I wouldn’t think of driving from New York to Washington. Tell them to fly!”
Kennedy’s encouragement of the civil rights activists was largely inadvertent, when it was not the result of good public relations work by people like Wofford. The administration tried to cancel the 1963 March on Washington; when that failed, the White House took charge of the arrangements to keep them peaceful (and screened speeches to make sure they were not too militant). The government that tried to stop the march received credit for being its sponsor.
But Robert Kennedy’s slow entanglement in the civil rights cause became a serious commitment by the time of his brother’s death. At first he was forced to create special squads to protect federal marshals in the South, and then to protect the two students he could not warn away from the universities of Mississippi and Alabama. (In the early stages, he was naive enough to think pro quarterback Chuck Conerly, who had starred at Ole Miss, could walk James Meredith into the university). But as he gained experience of southern justice, Kennedy’s first hopes hardened into grim skepticism. He began to understand black militancy, and knew why Dr. King had been unable to call off rides and marches—he had to work to maintain his credibility with younger SNCC types becoming angrier every day. Soon Kennedy was in the same position, running to keep up with the rhetoric his brother had loosed on the nation. But Robert came to feel the bitterness himself, and was criticized for saying that he would be a rebel too if he were a black. At the outset, like his brother, he had just opposed “the system” of lawmaking and bureaucratic administration as narrow and obstructive, not as malevolent. But by the time he reached the Senate, he listened respectfully to those who hated the system because they felt it was out to kill them.
Wofford, who helped Sargent Shriver set up the Peace Corps, tells how they worked to keep the President from turning it into an anti-Communist propaganda operation. Their resistance to this heavy-handed approach (meant to disarm congressional objections to the program) finally made Kennedy tell his own policy offspring to fend for itself. At this juncture, Shriver got needed support on Capitol Hill from Vice-President Johnson, whose aide, Bill Moyers, had become a Peace Corps official. John Kennedy, the cool and pragmatic leader, used the young without sharing their passion. But Robert Kennedy was easily infected with it. The resistance of the young eventually did as much to change his views on Vietnam as did reversals on the battlefield. He sought out radical leaders in 1967 as he had cultivated black leaders five years earlier. When Jack Newfield wrote his book on Kennedy as the “existential” politician, the term was more apt than when Arthur Schlesinger used it of John Kennedy: “He defined and created himself in action, and learned almost everything from experience.… When his brother died, he passed through a night of dread and learned about the absurd. He had the capacity to trust his instincts and become authentic. He was always in a state of becoming.”
Admittedly, this was “kid talk,” of the sort Tom Hayden had used in his Port Huron Statement on “finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic.” But the point is that Kennedy began to like, in some measure, this assessment of his later role. He was becoming a kind of genteel outlaw-rebel, giving a muted performance of the Abbie Hoffman claim: “The revolution is where my boots hit.” Where his brother had been tailored and aloof, he became tousled, shirt-sleeved, surrounded by longhaired guitar-playing aides who were his liaison with the Haydens and Chavezes. These people were praising Kennedy for educating himself by acting. It was a code that Abbie Hoffman liked to qu
ote from Ché Guevara: “The best way to educate oneself is to become part of the revolution.”
There is nothing stranger in our recent history than the way this puritanical Catholic became, in his final months, a hero to people whose earlier heroes were Ho, Mao, Fidel, and Ché. To appreciate the reversal involved, we have to remember that Kennedy had dutifully read the works of Ho Chi Minh and Ché Guevara when his brother first took office. It was part of the “counterinsurgent” mania—know your enemy, the better to beat him with his own weapons. Later, after the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro became a personal obsession of Kennedy’s—the man who had defied his brother, made him look ridiculous. The CIA plotted to humiliate Castro, to “unman” him with drugs or depilatories; at last, to kill him. Castro brought out every combative instinct of the Kennedys. He was a hero to the young and a charismatic leader in both the superficial and the profound sense. John Kennedy was attempting a “charismatic” but very limited raid on certain aspects of America’s bureaucratic legal order. Castro was charismatic in the fullest, most authentic way—he overthrew the old regime entirely and instituted a revolutionary order based on his personal authority. His “little brother” Ché was a rebel himself, off in other countries fomenting revolution. They had an all-out dash and vigor the Kennedys could only imitate in covert or surreptitious ways.
But by the rule that you begin to resemble the enemies that haunt you, Robert Kennedy toward the end of his life was taking his brother’s charismatic tendencies farther out from the center of government, flirting with language that was framed in the hills of Cuba, becoming a mini-Fidel. He could only solve the successor problem by being more deeply charismatic than his brother—not in the superficial sense, not as a Prince Charming, but in the Weberian sense, as a rebel against the system. The more he tried to become a successor to the charisma of his brother, the less likely became his inheritance of power in the legal order. He was being “radicalized” just as the country was showing its revulsion against campus disorders, war protest, and civil rights militancy. Some of Robert’s admirers felt that he could win over the “long hairs” and get the blue collar vote as well in 1968. They relied on some polls that showed George Wallace supporters—of all people—speaking kindly of the “mean” kid brother. But that was a protest reaction that would wilt under the realities of electoral alignment.
Richard Nixon narrowly beat Hubert Humphrey in 1968, but only because George Wallace and Curtis LeMay won thirteen percent of the electoral votes. The combined Nixon-Agnew-Wallace-LeMay vote was one for silencing “the kids.” The proof of that is not only Nixon’s landslide reelection of 1972 after Wallace’s shooting, but the fact that Nixon, at the peak of popular dismay over Watergate, could not be impeached for his repressive acts—not for the mass arrests of May Day, the violations of civil rights, the illegal suppression of Black Panthers and “Weathermen.” Those acts were still too popular for House members to include them in the articles of impeachment.
The attempt at charismatic succession within a legal order is self-defeating, a thing Lawrence O’Brien realized when he wept that Robert was senselessly killed because “he didn’t have a chance.” He didn’t have a chance, not because he lacked his brother’s charisma, but because he embodied its next stage, the only stage he could have embodied, given his place in succession and his own fierce character.
If Robert took the charismatic protest against legal system too far for the politics of the late sixties, his younger brother has always seemed to err in the opposite direction. He lives easily with the everyday. He alone of the brothers liked and worked within the Senate system. He joined the establishment; he did not make waves. He respected his elders, deferred to the rules, worked his way up. His whole Senate career has been an enacted rejection of the Neustadt scorn for governmental machinery as obstructive. In fact, by 1980 he was under attack as the last New Deal liberal, a defender of the bureaucracy his brothers derided. He represented a Veralltäglichung so drastic as to mean the dissipation of charisma rather than its routinization.
Yet the trappings of charisma, or residues of it, were also present. Memories of his brothers were stirred by the accent, the gestures. He presided over a large and talented staff, attracting people with the promise of his future presidency. He had to reach beyond his “ordinary” status if only to solidify that status. He was such a good Senator in large part because he was perceived as on the verge of becoming something more—this won him special treatment from his Senate peers, special attention in the press, the brightest and best speechwriters and legislative assistants. Even if he never aspired to the presidency, he had to keep up a shadow campaign for it, to remain powerful in the Senate.
And then, the worst thing of all, he had to use his charisma, his exemption from the rules, to defend the indefensible after Chappaquiddick. Those who rushed to protect the Kennedy legacy contained in his person (as in some unworthy vessel) made the maximum claim for charisma on a minimum of performance. At this stage, charisma degenerates to mere totemism, protecting the sacred object as an endangered relic, not rallying to it as a center of active leadership. The way people rushed to tend his person, to remove the evidence of any wrongdoing, to hurry the bodies away (his and Ms. Kopechne’s, along with those of the partygoers) looks like a farcical replay of the Dallas tragedy. There, too, a frantic “saving” of the body made loyalists bunch around their fallen leader and defy the world of legal order. Surrounded by aliens, Kennedy’s people ignored the hospital official who said they would break the chain of evidence if they removed the President’s body. Dave Powers and Kenneth O’Donnell told Dr. Earl Rose to get out of their way. Dr. Rose was expressing the legal rejection of charisma: “There are state laws about removing bodies. You people from Washington can’t make your own law.” Manchester, who completely agreed with O’Donnell in this confrontation, tells the story:
As O’Donnell and O’Brien were shouldering their way toward Rose they were stopped by Burkley and McHugh, who proposed another solution. They explained that a local justice of the peace was present. He had the power to overrule the medical examiner. Everyone waited while the judge was summoned; then he arrived and disappointed them. He could do nothing, he said. If a JP suspected homicide, it was his duty to order an autopsy. There were plenty of grounds for suspicion here, and he couldn’t overlook them. Ergo—he guessed the procedure wouldn’t take more than three hours.
O’Donnell asked that an exception be made for President Kennedy.
Although the din was atrocious, both he and O’Brien heard the justice of the peace say, with what they regarded as a distinctly unsympathetic inflection, “It’s just another homicide case as far as I’m concerned.”
The effect on O’Donnell was instantaneous. He uttered a swart oath recommending monogenesis. Thrusting his head forward until their noses nearly grazed, he said, “We’re leaving.”
The policeman beside Rose pointed to the medical examiner and the justice of the peace and told O’Brien, “These two guys say you can’t go.”
“One side,” Larry said cuttingly. Jerking his head, Ken said, “Get the hell over. We’re getting out of here. We don’t give a damn what these laws say. We’re not staying here three hours or three minutes.” He called to Dave, who had backed Jackie into a cubicle. “We’re leaving now.” To Kellerman he snapped, “Wheel it out!”
At this juncture, in O’Donnell’s words, “It became physical—us against them.” Kellerman, who hadn’t even heard Ken, had begun to pull the church truck on his own, butting flesh with his shoulders; the agents and Dugger were pushing.
There could not be a more clear-cut confrontation of the legal with the charismatic order. Law, procedure, the orderly preservation of a record, these mattered to officials, who are taught to think of each case as “just another homicide” for the record’s purposes. But it was unthinkable to the Kennedy people that such orders could dictate the movement of their leader’s body, which had been given into their keeping to be protected fr
om violation by the “everyday.”
Dr. Rose, as it turns out, was right. All the confusions caused by an autopsy in Washington, away from the doctors who first worked on Kennedy’s body, created a disorderly record rife with targets of opportunity for conspiracy theorists. A later critic like David S. Lifton quotes Dr. Rose with approval, arguing that the chain of custody over the body was broken, leaving discrepancies of reporting at either end of the journey. Robert Kennedy later compounded the problem by giving the Warren Commission only limited access to the autopsy photographs, taking the photos and the medical remains (including the elusive brain) into his personal custody, allowing others to see them only after five years and then by application to the Kennedy crisis-manager Burke Marshall.
