CNN - Review: 'In Love With Night'

(CNN) -- There is a widely held belief that Robert F. Kennedy, had he lived, would have been a healing force in American politics. He would have brought together a society teetering on the brink of collapse and found solutions to the enduring problems of racial tension and social injustice. Historian Ronald Steel has examined this belief, and compared it to the reality of Kennedy's life and career. In the end, he concludes, what most Americans cherish about Robert F. Kennedy is what he calls "The Bobby Myth."

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Kennedy's mystique

"In Love with Night," Steel's book about "The American Romance with Robert Kennedy," is by no means a biography. Instead, it is a re-evaluation of the man, his accomplishments, and the imprint he made on the American political and cultural landscape. He focuses on the contradictions in Kennedy's life -- for example, that this man who approved the FBI wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. is held in such reverence by African-Americans -- and searches for reality behind the images.

Steel professes that he has no political or ideological axe to grind. He insists he was driven by curiosity over the lingering power of Kennedy's memory to discover why it is so deeply imbedded in so many people so many years after his death. His conclusions, often couched in terms of ancient legends, are a thought provoking commentary on American politics.

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There could have been no Bobby, Steel argues, had there not been Jack. The younger Kennedy brother sublimated his own goals and ambitions to help his elder sibling achieve his ends. Bobby managed Jack's first congressional campaign, his senatorial campaign and his quest for the presidency. As attorney general, Robert Kennedy was in many ways a lawyer with a single client, the President of the United States. After John F. Kennedy was killed, Bobby was inconsolable. When he emerged from a protracted period of mourning, there was something markedly different about him. The fiercely competitive political strategist and dogged prosecutor had mellowed perceptibly. There was pain in his eyes, and he was seen as a champion of those who suffered.

"As with the Arthurian tale it evokes," Steel writes, "the Kennedy legend has two parts: that of the good King John, his beautiful queen, and his faithful Knights of the Oval Office -- and that of his tormented follower and surrogate son, Lancelot, whose quest for the Holy Grail to redeem the kingdom ends in failure and death." The author is decidedly uncomfortable with what he sees as imperial aspects of the Kennedy legend, including the notion that Robert F. Kennedy was the inheritor of his brother's political mantle by hereditary right.

The difference between the Kennedys, Steel suggests, is in the way they are perceived. We tend to put Jack on a pedestal, he argues, and we tend to put Bobby on the couch. Indeed, much of "In Love with Night" delves into the mental processes of the younger Kennedy-what drove his prosecutorial zeal as Senate investigator and attorney general, why he felt such disdain for Lyndon Johnson, what compelled him to seek elective office.

Steel also weighs the facts of Bobby Kennedy's career against the legend, and finds the facts wanting. He concludes that Kennedy was less interested in healing the fabric of American life in the 1960s as he was in trying to weave a fragile political coalition that would put him in the White House. He suggests Kennedy tailored his appeals to various factions -- law and order for frightened suburbanites, economic and political justice for racial minorities -- and that the contradictions would seriously inhibit his ability to be nominated for, much less win, the presidency. He is particularly critical of the way Kennedy conducted his presidential campaign, finding the seeds of demagoguery in the wild crowds that flocked to his public appearances.

"In Love with Night" finds much to admire in the life of Robert F. Kennedy, and much to criticize. It concludes that he was a mere mortal after all. Steel also concludes that the enduring image of a national healer and a political savior who was felled before he could achieve greatness may have sprouted from a seed Kennedy himself planted. But it was fed and nurtured by a country hungry for redemption. "Myths can inspire or they can imprison," Steel cautions. "The important thing is that they lead us to thought and action, not to idolatry. The Bobby Myth is our creation, not his."

L.D. Meagher is a senior writer at CNN Headline News. He has worked in broadcasting for 30 years.

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