Bobby hesitates
AMERICA MURRAY KEMPTON
'Others therefore may rush into the fray. I shall read history.'—Henry Adams to Henry Cabot Lodge, August 1876.
New York—The posture of Senator Robert Kennedy at this moment is a reminder that, in America, the only ancestral warning which is an article of religion to the owners of property is that one must never dip into capital.
The Senator calmly observes the season of the risk-takers. Mayor Lindsay of New York may well be intruded as a write-in candidate in the New Hampshire Republican presidential pri- mary; Senator McCarthy of Minnesota announces himself as an alternative to Mr Johnson in the Democratic primaries.
Only Senator Kennedy does not move or, if he does, it is in gestures reflective of his recogni- tion that, if you possess the largest inherited political capital in the country, every turn in the market is equally an advantage and equally an embarrassment to you.
Senator Kennedy is, of course, Mr Johnson's putative political heir whatever happens. It is an inheritance at once valuable enough to arouse doubts in him about imperilling it and imperilled enough to raise doubts in thedetached about its lasting value. It is possible to think that Mr Johnson is the last of the Romanoffs and that his whole party has hemophilia. Even if this is not so, there is considerable discomfort in waiting for one's inheritance in his company.
The President gives every sign that he intends to fight on in a temper which threatens to destroy first those who cross him and then the cause he is defending. His last televised press conference was the mixed coo and bellow which used to be so awesome in the Senate cloakroom and which, as "President, he had until now put aside for a funereal passivity apparently directed exclu- sively at persons more than eighty-eight years old.
This diversion to his old self was the result of long reflection, and it at once cheered his atten- dants to announce that Americans were now seeing the real Mr Johnson for the first time and that henceforth things would be different. Still, certain doubts abide : the real Mr Johnson is not irresistibly attractive and, after three years of the ceremonial Mr Johnson, the voters may have lost interest in looking at either.
This aside, a bellicose attitude would in- evitably demand that the Kennedys stand with him against all disorders within. The President's men are reported to be pressing Senator Edward Kennedy to lead the resistance to Senator McCarthy in the Massachusetts primary; he is the more malleable of the two brothers and can probably be trusted to go along. Even Senator Robert Kennedy moves no farther from the President than to one of those unhappy middle grounds where he seems condemned to stand and wait: he would take no sides, he said, in the primary contests, and would accept any can- didate nominated by the Democratic conven- tion. That candidate must inevitably be Presi- dent Johnson, should he insist, no matter what strength Senator McCarthy shows in the primaries.
Senator McCarthy has Robert Kennedy's good wishes, but there can hardly be much private warmth between them. Eugene McCarthy is one of the most charming Ameri- cans alive; but he has always been much closer to the President than to the Kettnedys. He is a serious and reflective man, often a trial to the liberals because his thoughts on government - seem so negative. He is a politician of the opposition: Senator Kennedy is a poli- tician out of power. Senator McCarthy is best remembered for his nominating speech for Adlai Stevenson at the 1960 Democratic convention, an aesthetic triumph which stole all the style from the Kennedys- and left them only the sub- stance. That performance has been generally recognised as a service to Stevenson's•memory and Mr Johnson's aspirations; the only hope of stopping the Kennedys then and giving Mr Johnson his chance for the nomination was to distract enough Kennedy delegates behind Stevenson to deadlock the convention. Senator McCarthy failed in a particularly heroic fashion; and the memory of that display has held him divided from the Kennedys ever since.
His revolt against the President provides compelling evidence of that poor man's decline in private and public trust. How well McCarthy will do in the primaries cannot be estimated; his style of dissent runs more to regret than to rancour, and rancour may be what is called for in the present envenomed state of public feeling. The country is sick enough to make anyone grateful for an opposition as measured and dig- nified as Senator McCarthy's will be; but it is hard to say whether he can strike an echo from that virulent distaste for the President which appears to be the only passion left in any por- tion of an electorate otherwise filled only with its own sense of futility. Senator Kennedy then stands aside, while two men considerably removed from his personal sympathies fight over the presidential nomina- tion of the.party he will inherit. It is no wonder that his interviews leave the impression that the journalists invade his privacy to no great profit. He is plainly a man with more worries than solutions. His new book came out last week. Gibbon might have been thought exces- sive if he had acknowledged as many sources as are thanked in the Senator's preface; but the text, while earnest, isn't especially helpfuL Its careful avoidance of extremes compels sympathetic notice that we are in the presence of an author whose great wish is to be left alone. There is also a continual sense of inopportune- ness : the Senator used to argue that what we had to do was to think of what we should do once Vietnam is over; now he suggests that we may have had a chance for peace last January and may have lost it for ever.
Vietnam is for him, then, either part of the irredeemable past or the indefinite future; the time is never new. It is either too soon or too late to begin. The best and worst of times are those in which the possession of great property becomes irrelevant.
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