Bobby Kennedy Was No Hero

[Phil Dragoo]

Joseph McCarthy
Reexaming the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator
By ARTHUR HERMAN
Free Press

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/her...arthy.html

Robert Kennedy served McCarthy loyally as assistant counsel for his Subcommittee on Investigations, until a personal quarrel with the chief counsel, Roy Cohn, forced him to quit. But he and Joe remained close, and Joe McCarthy stood as godfather for Bobby and Ethel's first child. One day after McCarthy's censure by the Senate in 1954, Bobby was sailing on the Potomac with a group of reporters. He started defending McCarthy against their criticisms. "Why do you reporters...feel the way you do?" he wanted to know. "OK, Joe's methods may be a little rough, but after all, his goal was to expose Communists in government a worthy goal. So why are you reporters so critical of his methods?" Even after his own conversion to left-to-center liberalism, he refused to disown or even criticize his old boss. "A very complicated character," he would muse to himself years later. Robert Kennedy had seen in America's Grand Inquisitor a man who, for all his glaring faults, had "wanted so desperately to be liked."

John Kennedy's views, on communism and the Soviet threat, were not so different from McCarthy's either. Although a loyal Democrat, Kennedy had also bashed the Truman administration for its dismal China record. One night in February 1952 he heard a speaker at Harvard's Spree Club denounce McCarthy in the same breath as Alger Hiss. Kennedy shot back, "How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!" Later he would back the Communist Control Act, a measure that went far beyond anything McCarthy had ever proposed, by virtually outlawing the Communist Party in the United States. During the debate on McCarthy's censure in 1954, while most Democrats lined up against him Kennedy warned that censure might have serious repercussions for "the social fabric of this country." And when the actual censure vote came, John Kennedy carefully contrived to be in the hospital for a back operation, so that he would not have to cast a vote against a man who was wildly popular with not only his father but his Irish and Italian constituents.

Such are two paragraphs of an interpretation by Arthur Herman to counter the unremitting slur of the unionist David Macaray. Herman depicts the Kennedys as patriots, personally loyal to the late senator though well aware of his excesses.


As for Macaray's slandering Robert Kennedy as anti-uniononly if we allow Macaray to conflate Hoffa with unions.


Macaray takes Doris' word for Bobby "bullying" LBJ to fight the Vietnam War? Is he her crack dealer? In the September 18, 1964, phone call by Senator Russell to LBJ listen to the president going on about the Tonkin Gulf incident. He wasn't bullied by Robert KennedyI wouldn't trust Doris to be objective about LBJ.


The overall tone of Macaray is a Saturday Night Special firing cheap shots like Sirhan the good little hypno-doper.


The throwaway cracks about Mahatma Ghandi, Cesar Chavez and Che Guevara versus Lee Atwater, John Gotti and Henry Kissinger? The man can't shoot straight.


McCarthy was godfather to Bobby's first child, and was vindicated by the Venona decrypts. Bobby separated himself from the Cohn businessthere's no call to smear himunless you're a unionist on your hobby horse.


And just who compares Bobby to ANY of the six straw men Macaray throws up?


The man became quite thoughtful, reached out to Chavez, spoke in Indianapolis and likely averted a riot.


And as for that killing Castro nonsense, it smells like Helms to blame it on Bobbybut it came out of Ike and Allen Dulles to Helms to Harvey, not out of John and Bobby.


We'll have enough cartoon crap coming out of the Mardi Gras marriage of Tom Hanks and Vincent Bugliosi, magic thinking in abundance to blame it all on the dead president and the dead scapegoat.