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The myth does not integrate the bad Bobby, the mean Bobby, into its memory. | It glosses over the young Kennedy who, as counsel to Joseph McCarthy, relished hunting down Communists; the zeal with which he pursued Jimmy Hoffa; the campaign manager who cut down political bosses who did not toe the party line; the Attorney General who acquiesced in J. Edgar Hoover's request to tap the phone of Martin Luther King.
But without the bad and the ugly, the picture is distorted and the political odyssey incomplete. If he had not been a hardball player, he would never have entered the presidential primary after Eugene McCarthy had cleared the way. Without his ruthless, hard-nosed side, Bobby might not have been able to put together the coalition he did. Conservative working-class whites may have been willing to help the needy, but fearful of being taken advantage of, they wanted a tough guy in charge. The impetuous young Bobby helped make the grownup Bobby more compassionate.
As a Senator and candidate, Bobby revived for millions the hopes that died with his brother. Even among skeptics, there was a sense that Kennedy grew into his own after his brother died. History -- two assassinations, a war, a racial struggle -- changed him, says Schlesinger, and given time he might have changed history.
The shooting of Martin Luther King, 19 days after Bobby plunged into the 1968 campaign, accelerated his transformation. The war, Kennedy's ostensible reason for getting into the race, gave way to a near desperate plea for an end to racial hatred and intractable poverty. In speeches scribbled on note pads in the days after King's death, Kennedy made some of his most eloquent appeals. "For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly," he declared. "The violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors."
The compassion he preached was not part of a cold political calculus designed to forge a winning electoral coalition. Though much of what Bobby did was carefully planned, his pleas for racial harmony and social justice -- delivered to conservative whites in Terre Haute, Ind., as well as to blacks in Gary -- seemed to reflect deep and true personal feelings. He was a latecomer to civil rights when he saw it as a threat to his brother's political standing, but he was passionate in the cause of social justice after being exposed to the sight of young blacks falling outside a system that seemed to hold no promise for them.
Kennedy was credible to blacks and whites because he delivered messages to % each they did not want to hear. He told blacks there would be no guaranteed income. He told poor whites in Kentucky to get up off their porches and clean up the abandoned cars pocking the landscape. He told everyone to "work their butts off." He didn't pander to labor by promising to work for the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, which curbs strikes. He told students he would end the shame of college deferments. He preached, as only Jesse Jackson has been able to since, that fathers must take care of the babies they made. He spoke of the crippling effect of welfare. And when an audience of medical students asked who was going to pay for the help that he said must be provided to the poor, Kennedy had a simple answer: "You are."