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Back in Tokyo, Bobby Kennedy rounded out his week with a luncheon appearance at the foreign correspondents' club. "I had seaweed for breakfast yesterday," he told the audience. "To tell you the honest-to-goodness truth, it didn't taste bad. When I went to Central Asia with Justice Douglas in 1955, they brought in a goat, very dead, plucked out its eyes and served them to us. Justice Douglas turned to me and said. 'For the sake of America, Bob, make like it's an oyster.' So things have gone up since then." But it was on a sober note that he closed his speech. "My greatest impression of Japan is the great thirst for knowledge of the people. I'm amazed at how interested they are and how much they know about the United States and what is going on."
Right Where He Is. Leaving Tokyo at week's end. the Kennedys had only begun their journey. Ahead lay Formosa, then Hong Kong. The Attorney General would spend six days in Indonesia, where rioting students last week broke the windows of the U.S. embassy. Beyond that was Thailand, whose government is nervous about Communist inroads in nearby Laos and Viet Nam, expects to hear reassuring words from the President's brother. After that would come visits to Rome, Berlin, Bonn. The Hague and Paris—and finally the return to Washington.
What then? Because of his increasing activities in foreign affairs. Washington is alive with rumors that Bobby is tiring of the Department of Justice, might want to move over to State. But President Kennedy, even while encouraging Bobby's global interests, is blunt about saying that he has no intention of moving his brother out of Justice; he likes Bobby right where he is. and hopes to keep him there for the next seven years.
Beyond that, there is the possibility—once just a joke about the numerousness of the Kennedys, now sometimes talked about seriously—that Bobby might try to succeed Jack in the White House. Any mention of this notion angers Bob Kennedy. "This idea is so obviously untrue." he says, "that it's foolish, even as rumor." Voters might agree. Bobby lacks his brother's easy grace; he is earthier, bristling in his loyalties (the U.S., Jack, and his church; other Kennedys; other Democrats), implacable in his enmities. Jack has been called the first Irish Brahmin; Bobby is the Irish Puritan, not an ascetic but a man of burning zeal. If he does not want to become President, it is safe to say that he wants his brother to become a great President, assisted by a great Attorney General. Meanwhile, as President John Kennedy of the U.S. had long known, as the U.S. has come to realize, as the peoples of the nations he visited were discovering, Bobby Kennedy is a power in his own right.
* Unlike the U.S. federal judiciary, Japanese judges do not receive lifetime appointments, but are subject to periodic review. Lower-court judges, appointed by the Cabinet, must be reappointed every ten years. But justices of the Supreme Court, each ten years, appear unopposed on the general election ballot and must receive a majority of the national vote to remain on the bench.