That was the green light that Schlesinger needed. Writing to Ethel in February 1969, he confirmed that “If you [are] definite in your own mind about it, I [am] quite clear in mine that I would like to go ahead with the biography of Bobby.” The final Roosevelt volume, “so long delayed,” would again be deferred “until I finished the book on Bobby.” Work would start that year, he told her—“if you are still sure you want me to do it.” 2
Schlesinger’s original projection for publication was “early fall of 1971, or otherwise in 1973” (thereby avoiding the 1972 presidential election). In fact, he struggled with the project, which would take nine years to complete. In between times, however, he would make one of his most enduring contributions to the language of American politics with a new book, The Imperial Presidency.
Written in the style of his 1949 polemic, The Vital Center, the new book addressed Richard Nixon and the unfolding Watergate crisis. It also afforded him the opportunity to finally grasp the foreign policy nettle that he had been avoiding with the last volume of The Age of Roosevelt. In doing so, the book would show what Schlesinger called the “absolutely persuasive” influence of the realist George F. Kennan, a regular, detailed correspondent and reader of his work since the late sixties, who, like Reinhold Niebuhr for The Vital Center, added a conservative underpinning to Arthur’s essentially liberal worldview.3
Schlesinger’s first thought in the spring of 1973 had been to write a quick pamphlet. “I began it in March, expecting that it could be done in a few weeks,” he wrote after producing a quick-fire 200,000 words in five months, “but the book grew as I got further into it and as I thought harder about the inner pattern of the Nixon presidency. Then Watergate came along to provide the climax and, I trust, denouement.”4
In The Imperial Presidency, Schlesinger wrote in the foreword, he faced a conundrum. “The first concern is that the pivotal institution of the American government, the Presidency, has got out of control and badly needs new definition and restraint,” he asserts. “The second concern is that revulsion against inordinate theories of presidential power may produce an inordinate swing against the Presidency and thereby do essential damage to our national capacity to handle the problems of the future.” How then to strike a balance between restraint and flexibility?
Schlesinger freely admitted his own culpability over many years, in both word and action, in perpetuating “an exalted conception of presidential power.” American historians and political scientists, “this writer among them,” labored to give the “expansive theory” of the presidency historical sanction, he conceded. “Overgeneralizing from the [pre-1941] contrast between a President who was right and a Congress which was wrong,” scholars had developed “an uncritical cult of the activist Presidency.” In thus presenting the presidency as “the great engine of democracy” and the American people’s “one authentic trumpet,” Schlesinger writes, the dominant narrative treated the presidency as the answer to almost everything. “By the early 1970s,” he continued, “the American President had become on issues of war and peace the most absolute monarch (with the possible exception of Mao Tse Tung of China) among the great powers of the world.” This decisive executive power as commander in chief had a knock-on effect, as “the claims of unilateral authority in foreign policy soon began to pervade and embolden the domestic presidency.” Thus “The Imperial Presidency, created by war abroad has made a bold bid for power at home.”
Beginning with the Founding Fathers and their struggles with the separation of powers, Schlesinger sketches how presidents throughout the history of the Republic, “usually under the demand or pretext of an emergency,” all engaged in acts of “presidential usurpation.” Whether it was Lincoln’s imposition of martial law and suspension of habeas corpus, McKinley’s decision to send troops to China, Teddy Roosevelt’s sending the Great White Fleet around the world without congressional approval, or any number of other examples, Schlesinger argued there had been a gradual shift of power away from Congress to the White House.
A crucial turning point came with World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, as Roosevelt and Truman each saw both reason and opportunity to expand executive authority. After Pearl Harbor, when Congress declared war, “Roosevelt seized on the role of Commander in Chief with relish.” Increasingly he came to rely on the various emergency powers that he asserted as “Commander in Chief in wartime.” Roosevelt was careful to consult Congress, especially Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg, but he kept “the military and diplomatic reins of war . . . very much in his own hands.” In this way war “nourished” the presidency. “The towering figure of Franklin Roosevelt,” Schlesinger writes in a hint of what volume four of The Age of Roosevelt might have been, “his undisputed authority as Commander in Chief after Pearl Harbor, the thundering international pronouncements from wartime summits of the Big Two or the Big Three—all these gave Americans in the postwar years an exalted conception of presidential power.”5
Americans turned to this reassuring model in the alarming new environment of the Cold War and the arms race. Many feared that democracy lacked the mettle to withstand the totalitarian Soviet threat. “The menace of unexpected crisis hung over the world, demanding, it was supposed, the concentration within government of the means of instant decision and response,” Schlesinger writes. “All this, reinforcing the intellectual doubt about democratic control of foreign relations, appeared to argue more strongly than ever for the centralization of foreign policy in the Presidency.” Congress would soon “thresh around” without success to recover its lost authority. During this period of “The Presidency Ascendant,” broad consultation relied on the good judgment of the commander in chief. Although John F. Kennedy only informed rather than consulted congressional leaders during the missile crisis—“the most authentic national emergency since the Second World War”—he used the storied EXCOMM meetings to encourage “vigorous and intensive debate,” so that “major alternatives received strong, even vehement, expression.” In this way, while he took decision-making into his own hands, “it is to be noted that he did not make it in imperial solitude.”6
For Schlesinger it was Johnson who crossed the line the Founders had established. He “overrode the written checks of the Constitution” and “began to liquidate unwritten checks.” His belief that warfare anywhere in the world might constitute an attack on the United States meant that “it was hard to see why” any future president would go to Congress before leading the nation into war. “There is only one that has been chosen by the American people to decide,” Schlesinger quotes LBJ saying, adding his own acid judgment: “American history had traveled a long distance from Lincoln’s proposition that ‘no one man should hold the power’ of bringing the nation into war.”7
“So the imperial presidency grew at the expense of the constitutional order,” Schlesinger concludes his foreign policy review. “Like the cowbird, it hatched its own eggs and pushed the others out of the nest.” The process reached its apotheosis in the presidency of Richard Nixon, who “for all his conventionality of utterance and mind was a genuine revolutionary” whose “inner mix of vulnerability and ambition impelled him to push the historical logic to its extremity.” Unprecedented attacks on the Constitution followed, including, as Sidney Warren, author of The President as World Leader, neatly summed up in his review of the book, Nixon’s “usurpation of war-making power, his interpretation of the appointing power, his unilateral termination of statutory programs, his enlargement of executive privilege, his theory of impoundment, his deliberate disparagement of his cabinet, his discrediting of the press.”8
Ultimately, “the recalcitrance of institutions—the independent judiciary, the free press, the investigative power of Congress” held Nixon in check. However, Schlesinger warned, “it was a very near thing.” The fact that now “Americans tended to preen themselves on the virtues of the American form of government: the system worked” failed to take into account how “it came terribly close to not wor
king.” In the end, the political order rallied itself to “stop the revolutionary Presidency,” Schlesinger reports, adding a call for Congress to go all in by impeaching Nixon.
But recent events would only provide a temporary halt on the Imperial Presidency unless people recognized Nixon as its symptom, not a cause. Other elements of the system could draw “new confidence as institutions from the exercise of power they had forgotten they possessed.” Watergate, he concluded optimistically, by provoking the reassertion of congressional authority, “was potentially the best thing to have happened to the Presidency in a long time,” because “many, many years would pass before another White House staff would dare take the liberties with the Constitution and the laws the Nixon White House had taken.” (When the Iran-Contra scandal broke thirteen years later, Schlesinger sighed, “If a presidency is inclined to do dumb things, it is far better that it be weak rather than strong.”9)
Reviewers by and large embraced the central idea of the book, not least because, as Garry Wills pointed out in the New York Times, Schlesinger “puts his own name in the list of ‘uncritical’ men . . . [and] since he here means to write like a scholar, he is not afraid to apologize forthrightly.” Such “generous confessions . . . [earn] him the hearing he deserves.” The New York intellectual Alfred Kazin paid a similar, albeit more backhanded, compliment in the New York Review of Books. “His attack on Nixon comes wrapped in a more theoretical and seemingly even-handed consideration of presidential authority,” he rasped, “than I would have expected from that politically scrappy, but as a historian, old-fashioned hagiographer.” Academic reviewers also welcomed the book, and Schlesinger even picked up some unexpected friends among those historians of the New Left who had in part forged their name as revisionists of his earlier work. “I was very interested in what he had to say in The Imperial Presidency,” says Cornell professor Walter LaFeber, who had recently published Origins of the Cold War: 1941–47. “I used The Imperial Presidency in my lecture course, my senior seminar and my graduate seminars. It was a very important book, not only because it was easy to read and made his points very clearly, but also because it had a particular point of view which could be discussed in general terms, not just as historical evidence.”10
Having completed The Imperial Presidency, a revivified Schlesinger returned “with a certain feeling of confidence” to the life of Robert Kennedy. By 1976, he was telling the historian James MacGregor Burns that “the book is turning out to be far longer than expected—500 pages, and I’m only up to 1960!” He completed a massive draft three times that size by the middle of 1977, when he moved “from creation to destruction” in a desperate effort to prune the text. “The RFK book is finished,” he told a friend, “but is overlong and I am now struggling to cut.” Even after this process, the book came in around the thousand-page mark when it was published the following fall.11
Unlike The Age of Roosevelt and A Thousand Days, which both began with the optimism of Inauguration Day, Schlesinger opens Robert Kennedy’s story at the end, as the author travels aboard RFK’s funeral train from New York to Washington, DC, on a “sweltering June afternoon” in 1968. Thousands crowded along the railroad tracks, some joining hands and singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The train’s whistle “blew in long, piercing, melancholy blasts.” Most touching of all to Schlesinger were those moments as the train moved south through the Pennsylvania countryside when “one occasionally saw a man or woman, far from any visible town, standing gravely and alone, enveloped in private grief.”12
Schlesinger’s beginning with the train ride embeds in the reader’s mind the idea of a long if unfulfilled journey. In the foreword, he describes Kennedy’s life as “a labor of education.” These are notes that he will sound time and again throughout the book, summed up by Bobby quoting a well-known saying often attributed to Mark Twain that “Good judgment is usually the result of experience and experience is frequently the result of bad judgment.”
This mechanism of education through experience becomes the way in which Schlesinger deals with two problematic ideas that had already taken hold in the public mind about Robert Kennedy by 1978. First, that he was a nasty piece of work, a man with a sharp tongue and even sharper elbows, whose ruthless political and personal ambition knew no bounds; that he was, in the words of his father Joe Kennedy, “as hard as nails” and someone who “hates like me.” Second, that RFK’s appetite for advancement and power was not matched by any great ability or quality of mind and temperament; that in the words of one who might know, former president Dwight D. Eisenhower, “It is difficult for me to see a single qualification that the man has for the presidency. I think he is shallow, vain and untrustworthy—on top of which he is indecisive.”13
Describing a journey of self-education gave Schlesinger room to acknowledge these criticisms. At Harvard, Bobby was a D student put on academic probation, although he did stand out in sports by playing on the football team (alongside his roommate Ken O’Donnell). Harvard revealed the start of a pattern. Those like O’Donnell who got inside the Kennedy circle developed a fierce and protective loyalty toward him. Those outside saw only arrogance and entitlement. John Knowles, later head of the Rockefeller Foundation, regularly sat next to Bobby in lectures (with students arranged alphabetically) and found him “kind of a nasty, brutal, humorless little fellow when he got going.” Ted Sorensen, whose relationship was with JFK alone, took a similar view once Bobby was working in Congress for Joe McCarthy, finding him to be “militant, aggressive, intolerant, opinionated, somewhat shallow . . . more like his father than his brother.”
That view, Schlesinger writes, teeing up his own first proper encounter, “was widely shared.” In 1956 Bobby helped on the Stevenson campaign. Initially Schlesinger found Bobby cold, “making notes, always making notes,” speaking only “occasionally . . . but in a rather solitary way.” But there were also glimpses of hidden emotion. Visiting the Lincoln house in Springfield, Illinois, Bobby “grew even more silent than usual,” so that older hands “understood there were depths of feeling in him I had never suspected.”14
By the time JFK ran for the presidency in 1960, Bobby was his brother’s most trusted consigliere. But as Robert Kennedy and His Times moves onto this territory and the subsequent Kennedy administration, Schlesinger hits a problem quite literally of his own making: he has already told the guts of the story before in A Thousand Days. This presents him with a number of challenges, which he surmounts with only limited success. At the outset, Arthur explains that he will “avoid retelling familiar stories,” but the reader is often left with the uncomfortable sense of him falling between stools. Have we been here before, or not? Jack inevitably pushes Bobby out of the limelight. The younger brother is often relegated to “Robert Kennedy” in the text, while Jack gets the stand-alone “Kennedy,” with the result that Bobby can seem a bit player in his own biography. Schlesinger attempts to sidestep this problem through a series of thematic chapters, including on J. Edgar Hoover, the Mob, civil rights, poverty, and Martin Luther King Jr. These overlong chapters create problems of their own by slowing the pace to a crawl and losing the narrative thrust of Bobby’s life.
For all the problems of the middle four hundred pages of an eleven-hundred-page book, there were still moments when Schlesinger could hit the high notes. The chapter on the relationship between Bobby and Jack is brilliantly done. We see the impact that office had on the younger brother as “unrelenting pressure was etching lines in his face.” We find him “still diffident and often uneasy” among strangers, a man “at once magical and desperate.” Yet between Jack and Bobby there seemed an absolute trust. For Schlesinger, drawing on his favorite historical parallel, “Jack Kennedy used Robert in part as Franklin Roosevelt used Eleanor—as a lightning rod, as a scout on far frontiers, as a more militant and somewhat discountable alter ego, expressing the President’s own idealistic side while leaving the President room to maneuver and to mediate.” At the same time, Schlesinger contin
ues, “the Attorney General was John Kennedy’s Harry Hopkins, Lord Root of the Matter, the man on whom the President relied for penetrating questions, for follow-up, for the protection of the presidential interest and objectives.” The brothers were two perfectly balanced personalities. “John Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic,” the man who had worked for both concluded. “Robert Kennedy was a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist.”15
The chapter on the two brothers is an immediate prelude to the tragedy of JFK’s assassination and the final third of Robert Kennedy and His Times. As Bobby becomes the central character in his own story again, the pace and quality of the book pick up, with Schlesinger recapturing the tone of A Thousand Days, not least in seamlessly inserting his own experiences into the narrative. The tempestuous relationship with LBJ is parsed (“Robert Kennedy baffled Johnson. Johnson repelled Robert Kennedy”), as are his opposition to the administration’s policy on the war, and a growing commitment to social justice, civil rights, and overcoming poverty. Schlesinger does his best to explain why Bobby aroused such hostility when he ran in 1968. “Kennedy’s greatest disappointment,” he writes, “was the young,” who gravitated to his opponent Eugene McCarthy. For them, as with Clinton versus Sanders in 2016, Kennedy represented the Establishment machine, while McCarthy was the populist outsider. Schlesinger in 1968 had shared qualms about Kennedy declaring when McCarthy had been the one brave enough to face down LBJ. Now he let the poet Robert Lowell do his talking for him. “I personally like and admire Senator Kennedy,” Schlesinger quotes Lowell saying. “Still, it’s hard to forgive Kennedy his shy, calculating delay in declaring himself, or forgive the shaggy rudeness of his final entrance.”
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