The aim of the paper To write a chapter in history is given to few; to document one, is an opportunity to many. The number of accounts about Robert Francis Kennedy is abundant; many of his close aides and friends, like Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Goodwin and Jack Newfield, have written personal accounts with the credibility of eyewitnesses and either the expertise of historical training or the sharp perception of journalists and writers. All three wrote with the passion of a heart "twice wounded" by the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers. There are other, less favorable accounts, such as in Seymour Hersh's new book "The dark side of Camelot". The division between sympathetic and negative accounts of Robert Kennedy is legendary.

It is not the claim of this paper to present one more accurately dotted image of Robert Kennedy with just the right amount of shades and light. Nor was there new evidence digged up on the compound of Hickory Hill. And Peter Edelman, the Georgetown professor and former Kennedy aide who was interviewed for this paper, did add no surprises.

What this paper will try to do is to portray Robert Kennedy as the phenomenon that he is to a European observer -- the phenomenon of the American democratic leader. This phenomenon has first been described by the French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville over 160 years ago. In his Democracy in America, an account of democratic leadership qualities emerges against the backdrop of a chapter devoted to the question "Why great revolutions become rare". In it, he describes a time "favorable to great intellectual revolutions... somewhere between complete equality for every citizen and the absolute separation of classes", a description that seems to fit the 1960'ies, the time when Robert Kennedy was a major figure on the national level.

A Tocquevillian Portrait of a Democratic Leader Tocqueville may have produced the earliest character-sketch of Robert Kennedy -- 130 years before Kennedy's time. Though nowhere does he portray a democratic leader specifically, it is possible to extract from the text ideas about leadership that today provide a non-partisan, sociological and philosophical perspective on Kennedy that is worthwhile taking beyond the squabbles of these who felt they were part of Kennedy's "band of brothers", and those who saw themselves as his adversaries. This paper, then, will be a Tocquevillian portrait of Robert Frances Kennedy, a man with aristocratic a well as democratic qualities.

To illuminate Tocqueville's perspective, it is necessary to let Tocqueville have a few explanatory remarks. He writes of "aristocratic times":

That is contrasted with the state of equality between all citizen inherent in a democracy:

What is between reminds easily of the characteristics of the sixties:

The sixties knew no complete equality for every citizen, nor knew they the absolute separation of classes. Robert Kennedy was the aristocratic man born into the wealth of his parents' families, privileged and without a change in position from one generation to the next. Blacks, and at the end of the sixties all those forming the new rainbow coalition of the underprivileged whose champion was Bobby Kennedy, were excluded enough from, but also close enough to taking part in politics: a condition "not sufficiently fixed for the mind to sleep" and receptive to a few men "exercising great powers over the mind of others."

These few other men likely to affect "great intellectual, as well as political" revolutions need necessarily be men with aristocratic qualities - men who could perceive of different ideas, and had a security on their own that elevated them above the democratic restlessness and facelessness:

Change in a democracy must originate in aristocratic residues, in men who possess greatness in themselves, in minds that are more concerned "in seeking new principles" rather than to be "concerned with infinite variations in the consequences to be derived from known principles and in finding new consequences." - Almost all democratic movements that have shaken the world have been directed by noblemen.

The strength and ability "to seek a newer world", as Kennedy entitled his 1967 book, was rooted in an aristocratic condition. Aristocracy is not necessarily the historical state only, it is also a state of mind supported by aristocratic institutions: family, religion, the legal profession and property. Bobby Kennedy, son of the rich political families Fitzgerald-Kennedy, had roots all of those. Moreover, he held federal positions that distinguished him as a voice heard all over the nation, and he was the heir of his slain brother's charisma and appeal as enlarged by a mourning nation.

The tensions of a glorious yet troubled time But was Kennedy an "aristocratic man" only? Was he not, in many ways, also a democratic man? The condition of the democratic man, as Tocqueville has described in detail, was that of an unconditional man, a lonely man, a "kaleidoscopic man", -- much like the fragmented man in pursuit of loneliness, a man in motion and unrest, with a passing focus. The paper will make an argument that Kennedy was both an aristocratic and a democratic man, reflecting a tension within, a dialectic of abstract ideas and democratic sensibilities that may be seen at the center of the glorious, yet troubled times of the sixties.

While it would be too much to ask of this paper to conduct an in-depth investigation of the sixties as that intermediate stage, the paper discusses Robert Kennedy as the democratic leader Tocqueville predicted to be necessary in these times, and implies that the sixties have all the qualities of that stage. Presuming that Kennedy was a man typical for that time, the particularities of the sixties will surely surface in the portrait of Kennedy, and in turn, cast a Tocquevillian light on the times. Arthur Schlesinger has described his friend Robert Kennedy as "'a representative man' in Emerson's phrase - one who embodies the consciousness of an epoch, who perceives things in fresh lights and new connections, who exhibits unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries."

The sixties, that may be the fusion of Tocquevillian ideas with and Schlesinger's observation, necessarily produced a public figure like Robert Kennedy (and some others who share his Tocquevillian characteristics) both with the bold and great ideas of a "patrician", as Schlesinger has called him - and democratically sensitive to the mood of the people.

Robert Kennedy had the persona of an aristocratic leader, but a democratic soul. His circumstances set him apart, his temper drew him to the people, to the issues, to the pragmatic solution.

The aristocratic Set-up Aristocratic institutions for Tocqueville are those which give the individual a home "beyond and above man's lot", a feeling of belonging to a superior group, a stability outside the vast democratic entity with its "continual jostling of men against each other, which disturbs and distracts the mind without stimulating or elevating it." It is, in a sense, the consciousness of particularity, as opposed to the unmediated experience of oneself as one insignificant and weak member among many others in the democratic mass of people. This idea of aristocratic institutions will resonate in the quotations of Tocqueville will introduce each discussion that follows.

The family The institution of the family is one that provides for stability and order, opposed to the democratic turmoil, according to Tocqueville:

While Tocqueville suggests that "in America, the family, if one takes the word in its Roman and aristocratic sense, no longer exists. One only finds scattered traces thereof in the first years following the birth of children", he speaks of the family in the aristocratic sense almost as if with the Kennedys in mind:

The Kennedy family, whose family flag are three golden helmets against a black background with a maroon and silver border, was conceived as an enterprise by father Joe, and held together by the resolute mother Rose. "Of nine children born to Joseph and Rose Kennedy, none seemed more irrevocably committed to Kennedy blood, pride and ties than Robert. Joseph Kennedy once said, "I always felt that if I died, Bobby would be the one to keep the family together. Bobby is a disciple of my theory -- if you have a family with you, you have a headstart on others who must rely on making friends."

The girls were "less important than boys." Asked who of his brothers had most influenced his youth, Kennedy replied: "Joe [the eldest]. He was Dad's favorite and the model for all of us, except for Jack." And at another time: "Dad idolized Joe. We all knew he was the one. But I was closer to mother."

Robert Kennedy was, until his brother's John death, the son of an aristocratic family, serving his brother first as successful campaign manager, then as Attorney General despite his original concerns and "deep reluctance." His father's opinion prevailed: "'You've got to be in the cabinet.' By cabinet Joseph Kennedy meant Attorney General. This had been a subject of family badinage. At Christmas time in 1959 Eunice Shriver, joking about the future, said, 'Bobby we'll make Attorney General so he can throw all the people Dad doesn't like into jail (...)'" In the end, Kennedy accepted because "[John] said he thought it would be important to him and that he needed some people around that he could talk to so I decided to accept it." His older brother John remained his chief - "[Bobby] had tried for a moment to escape his brother and confirm an independent identity. But, if his brother wanted him, he would not say no...", observed Arthur Schlesinger. He remained dependent on John who rewarded and criticized him when giving Robert a copy of The Enemy Within with the inscription: "For Bobby - The Brother Within - who made the easy difficult. Jack, Christmas 1960."

He remained his brother's keeper until his death. Attorney General was just one form of Bobby's service. He took it upon himself to do the President's dirty work as his "lightning rod, as a scout on far frontiers, as a more militant and somewhat discountable alter ego, expressing the President's own idealistic side while leaving the President room to maneuver and to mediate. When his brother died, "he didn't know where he was... Everything was just pulled out from under him."

"Because of family death and disease, Bobby is now Kennedy-in-Chief". He had, of course, long had his own family. At the time he ran for Senator his wife Ethel was pregnant with the ninth child. It was a traditional family, Ethel adoring her husband, "[her] view of her life approaches the epitome of domestic womanhood. 'Bobby and my children are really the only things that count.... I try to do what Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy did." For Bobby, observed Thimmesch and Johnson in 1965, "nothing ranks higher... than Ethel and her rollicking flock of youngsters." He was a family man first, then a politician: "On the phone with some important person, he may break into the conversation with an abrupt 'Hold it, Governor' or 'Excuse me, Senator,' then leave the phone to extricate a baby squawling beneath a chair or to comfort a little boy with a newly skinned knee."

By all accounts then, Robert Kennedy did find solace, strength and purpose for public life in as aristocratic a family - both his parents' family as well as his own - as it can get in the United States.

The religion Religion, for Tocqueville, was "the most precious heritage from aristocratic times".

In other words, religion prevents people from the materialistic self-occupation with themselves, and provides a landscape for the mind that reaches beyond the daily horizon of democratic self-interest. It is here where great ideas and abstract principles have their origin.

Robert Kennedy was deeply pious, "the most religious among the sons.". "I just got out of about 3 hours of praying in Chapel," he wrote from Pourtsmouth Priory, a Benedictine school his mother had sent him to at the age of 14, "and so I feel like a saint." A college friend observed the distinguishing qualities of religion that Tocqueville describes when he stated that Bobby's "absolute faith in God... gave him faith in himself and appeared to make him oblivious of his lack of popularity among many of his classmates." He shared his piety later with his wife Ethel, who "insists that, besides grace at meals, and saying their Rosaries, [her children] read two chapters of the Bible before bedtime." His faith was tested, but not affected by the various family disasters, most notably the loss of his brother Jack, although he admitted with dry wit: "Of course, we do occasionally think that someone up in heaven is out to lunch when he ought to be attending to business."

Just how much the Catholic religion might have instilled a decisive reservoir of moral concern that sustained his public activities, is suggested by David Burner and Thomas West. They write that the church was "a central influence, [offering to Bobby] the incalculation in him of a conscience as demanding as it was abrasive." Having received a more intensely Catholic upbringing than his brothers, "perhaps that is a reason why there was always something of the driven moralist about Robert Kennedy, whose stern Catholicism contrasted with Jack's easy observance; he had the moralist's capacity for arrogant, overbearing anger and for self-criticism and growth. His temperament, aggressive in politics and sports, could be mild in other circumstances". "He was a moral, perhaps morally simplistic young man. His aggressions were a function of whatever moral idea held him at a given moment. So far it had been first anti-communism and then the putting down of labor corruption... In the 1960s his zeal was to find its final object in a progressivism more morally urgent and more convincing than the anticommunism of the McCarthy years." Jack Newfield suggests similarly: "The two characteristics Kennedy inherited and had reinforced by his environment, that were at the core of his personality, were competition and religion. His central values were toughness and morality, determination and discipline, neutral enough in themselves to be put in the service of either McCarthyism or the dispossessed."

The wealth and property Wealth, too, sets people apart - distance being the Tocquevillian condition that breeds ideas and leadership:

Joseph Senior had seen to the wealth of his family. Through the banking business, stock speculations, Whiskey and Gin licenses after the Prohibition, oil, Hollywood movies and real estate he made enough money to "set up million-dollar trust funds for his children, allowing them to reap a handsome return over the years. True to Joe Kennedy's word, each of the Kennedy offspring is now [in 1965] worth at least $ 10,000,000." Money, in other words, set the Kennedy's far apart from the rest of the democratic crowd. And of course, they owned a family estate, Hyannis Port. Later on, Robert established himself in "Hickory Hill", for his friends as legendary 10 acre-estate near McLean, VA, and host to many distinguished guests.

Property as an aristocratic institution lends the owners a sense of spatial as well as historical dimensions:

Though not in the sense of old European aristocracy, the Kennedy estates were significant in terms of defining who they were. "Hickory Hill" was enemy estate for Johnson, and Kennedy's biographers speak of "Hickory Hill" the way they speak of "The White House", or "Capitol Hill" - with the sense that it is a fortress and synonym with Robert Kennedy.

The legal profession The legal profession, which Robert Kennedy studied "without distinction", as many biographers put it, but which's highest office he held as Attorney General very successfully, is one more residue of aristocracy - a profession that keeps men apart from the crowd:

Clearly the early Kennedy enjoyed his distinction as a man of the legal profession on the various Congressional committees he served. Did he feel superior to defendants and witnesses? "Mr. Kennedy appears to find congenial the role of prosecutor, judge and jury, all consolidated in his one efficient person," observed Yale law Professor Alexander Bickel. Kennedy clearly had a sense of legal distinction when he wrote in his "The Enemy Within" that "much of our most important legislation has grown out of the factual basis laid by Congressional investigations." He saw himself as the crusader against a "conspiracy of evil", basing investigative work on the assumption that "a man with Hoffa's power and position, and so corrupt, cannot survive in a democratic society, if democracy itself is going to survive."

Robert Kennedy had a sense of his distinction as public servant. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP observed in 1964 "I never got the impression you're communing with Robert Kennedy [in contrast to JFK]. You're talking to him, you're arguing with him; and you're dealing with a hard, clear-thinking, determined public servant who has, in addition to a conviction, a moral concern." - Inhowfar the legal distinction made much of a difference for Kennedy later in his life is arguable. His aide Peter Edelman estimates that "his legal education did not have much influence on his way of thinking."

The charisma of the federal figure Change in a democracy comes only, according to Tocqueville, when men can be set on fire for ideas:

Being a federal figure, Bobby Kennedy could naturally command a certain charisma that people were willing to recognize in the rather shy senator. The advantage of a federal structure is, according to Tocqueville, that the central federal government can enforce universal ideas, whereas the local or state government close to the people can pay attention to the particularities of a situation. Thus Robert Kennedy, who had always played his game on the national ivy chessboard, rather than the crooked local ones, could easily assume the role of the ambassador of universal rights to those who were deprived of these universal rights on the local level.

The specific fascination of the poor with the Kennedys might well have derived from the enchantment of their world that they attributed to either brother:

"Black Americans trusted the Kennedy family. A youth was asked why (Robert) Kennedy's visit to his neighborhood could make for such excitement. 'His brother, the President, was like a father to me', came the answer..."

Robert Kennedy, to many of the forgotten and dispossessed, could appear as the liberator enforcing the universal ideal of freedom and justice: "Watching Bobby tour a black ghetto was to see the man himself. His evident passion evoked an equally intense response, as if he had come as liberator (...) They didn't care about his policies, the programs that - for campaign purposes - had been so carefully crafted to meet the needs of the poor and dispossessed. They knew he was on their side. And that was all that mattered." He was, to them, "a symbol of royalty and glamour."

Had Robert Kennedy not been the federal figure - and as a federal figure and brother of the slain beloved president an aristocratic figure in it's own sense, he might not have been able to command such a wide appeal among people.

More than pure greatness He found purpose and comfort in his family, zeal and moral concern through his faith, financial security through wealth, style through the legal profession, and social standing and recognition as a federal figure. In short, Robert Kennedy began his final years as Senator, and finally Presidential candidate, with all the attributes that make him a Tocquevillian aristocratic figure and leader. The named institutions had fostered an aristocratic persona - yet, there was something in Robert Kennedy that was far from pure aristocratic grandeur (coupled so often with arrogance or indifference): "The gentle self was never extinguished, and the tension between Robert Kennedy's soul and his persona took the form of dialectic, rather than war."

This dialectic between the aristocratic shield - a requirement for the somewhat daring, defiant, righteous and arrogant presumption of democratic leaders that they are fit to lead a nation - and the soul of a vulnerable and sensitive human being could fully develop only after Bobby's inner self was ripped from clinging to his brother. Being the new Kennedy-in-Chief put the seventh of nine children into a position he had never been before. He was now the leader, the hope of the family. But who was he, traumatized by so deeply by his brother's death because with his brother, a big part of Robert died? What was the "something else - deeper, more unpredictable, more intuitive and more mysterious - existential"?

The democratic condition Robert Kennedy was also a deeply democratic man in the Tocquevillian sense. The variety of his interests and the restlessness of the democratic man in Tocqueville occasioned Professor Joshua Mitchell of Georgetown to speak of the democratic soul as a "kaleidoscopic soul". And indeed, Newfield speaks of the "kaleidoscope of Robert Kennedy's character."

Face-to-face encounters He did not rest above the crowd, he partook in the jostling thereof, in the sensibilities, concerns and fights of ordinary people. One of the best things that could happen to a democracy was that people met each other in their day-to-day encounters, to recognize their common humanity. In a democratic society, said Tocqueville, citizens engaged in public affairs must at times forget their interests and be drawn out of themselves. Especially

Democracy tears down the wall of aristocratic separation - the Kennedys, certainly "opulent citizens", never having encountered many Blacks in their upbringing - and leads to the face to face encounter that Kennedy so often sought, visiting street-gangs and reformatories, college campuses, ghettos in the inner-cities (such as Bedford-Stuyvesant), Indians on their reservations ect. "Poverty was a specific black face to him, not a manila folder full of statistics." "Because he had no fixed ideology, and could best comprehend himself in action, Kennedy forged his consciousness out of what he saw and felt in the rural South and the urban ghettos."

Pragmatism Kennedy had a flair for action and getting things done, with a "pragmatic, goal-oriented intellect." In democratic societies, said Tocqueville, " men's minds are unconsciously led to neglect theory and devote and unparalleled amount of energy to the application of science, or at least that aspect of theory which is useful to practice." - "He was not interested in abstract theory. He cared primarily about how ideas could be related to concrete action and specific programs."

On this matter, Goodwin recalls: "During the Kennedy administration, Bobby held occasional 'seminars' at Hickory Hill, inviting distinguished intellectuals to address a small group of high officials and family friends. The impulse was beneficent, 'self-improvement' being a typically American obsession, but the results were occasionally disastrous. At one time a nationally renowned psychiatrist explained the principal tenets of psychoanalysis to an increasingly restive audience. When he finished, Bobby stood up. 'That's the biggest bunch of bullshit I've ever heard. You are trying to tell us that people can't help being what they are.' (Which is not what he was saying at all). And then, interrupting her husband, came the indignant voice of Ethel Kennedy: 'Everything isn't sex.' The session came to an abrupt end, our 'instructor' retiring in confused humiliation."

Change and ideals And indeed, he was also restless, "always on the move", as his aide Peter Edelman recalled, in the quest of changing things to the better. A democratic man, one can gather from Tocqueville, "always seem(s) excited, uncertain, hurried, and ready to change their mind and their situation" . Jack Newfield observed: "Kennedy had an instinct for the contemporary. He almost seemed an addict of change. He got bored very easily, and once said that quality within himself he most disliked was 'impatience'."

Yet the democratic man, according to Tocqueville, preserved ideals even in his restlessness, or rather, he restlessly aims to follow these ideals: "When old conceptions vanish and new ones take their place, then the human mind imagines the possibility of an ideal but always fugitive perfection." Kennedy was restless not for the democratic power or wealth, but for occasioning a process of betterment toward the ideal. He mused: "I think back to what Camus wrote about the fact that perhaps this world is a world in which children suffer, but we can lessen the number of suffering children..." Tocqueville further predicted:

And Newfield observed: "He was an activist who thought 'people should make that extra effort', and that 'one person can make a difference.' But at the same time he was a fatalist who knew how much of life was absurd." The sense of "serious purpose commingled with absurdity" did he find, explains Goodwin, in "the writings of Camus, who preached that 'the acceptance of mystery and of evil' does not permit the moral man 'to accept history as it is.'"

The underlying sadness Tocqueville had observed:

Already as a young boy, Bobby "used to walk with his head down, buried in his neck, like a bird in the storm", and later was remembered for his shyness. As a 19year old he perceived himself as "my usual moody self. I get very sad at times..." There wasn't much that he did that did not stand in the shadow of his older brothers who got better grades and were more athletic, nor was there anything he could do against the wishes if his parents, whether he wanted to work on a fisher boat, or go overseas. His parents were unhappy about his grades. He changed schools more than ten times in his young life, never being able to make many friends. He was withdrawn, yet found solace in his Catholic identity.

Whereas religion may have been an aristocratic residue, Tocqueville had observed early on a special role for the Irish Catholics:

For a brief time, he tried to do like his brothers and serve in the Navy during World War II. As Tocqueville had said, in a democracy men seek military honors to distinguish them. But nothing much came of it. He wrote his parents: "I am certainly not hititng the honors like my older brothers."

Virginia Law School didn't do much to bolster his ego. His biographers repeatedly use the word 'undistinguished' for his performance. He proceeded to work for the department of Justice, then as counsel to McCarthy. It was "a low time in his life (...) He was, thought Theodore Sorensen, "militant, aggressive, intolerant, opinionated, somewhat shallow in his convictions...". Without much direction, Robert Kennedy stumbled towards the future knowing only that he would not become a lawyer, until his brother became President and Bobby Attorney General, something he had not really wanted at first, as shown above.

"As Attorney General, Kennedy really started visiting local communities," recalls Peter Edelman. It started sensitizing him about the plight of the Black community and the suffering in the country, something he would be even more exposed to when he began to travel and speak as a Senator in 1964. As he was called to be the leader of the Kennedy clan, and dreamed of as the successor of his brother, the aristocratic features were called upon. At the same time, the death of his brother caused him much unrest. The 'persona' and the 'soul', as Schlesinger called it, the aristocrat and the unconditional, the democratic, the existential man, began to develop their dialectic tensions more intensely and more publicly than ever.

Facing himself existentially The death of his brother " changed the course of his life, modified his public purpose, altered his emotions and the convictions founded on those emotions - his intensities, beliefs, even his God" in the remaining years of his life. "Nourished by both personal tragedy and sympathetic openness to his experience", "an expanding tolerance... had largely - not completely - drained the force from his less attractive certitudes. The line between right and wrong became blurred, erratic". Kennedy, maybe for the first time in his life, began accepting the questions of suffering as a teacher, rather than merely accepting suffering as part of the Catholic doctrine. When he started reading "the Greeks" after his brother's death, and read Camus, he became what his speechwriters Goodwin and Newfield, themselves more intellectual than Kennedy, might have longed to see in him, one might suspect: an existential hero, a more authentic man. "I think he was the existential man, but I don't think he saw himself that way," recalls Peter Edelman.

A man of his torn time Murray Kempton, recalls Jack Newfield, "exclaimed, after leaving an interview with Kennedy, 'God, he's not a politician! He's a character in a novel!'" And in her eulogy on the floor of the House on June 6th, 1968, Representative Green of Oregon would say: "And I discover that I am not reminiscing so much about the Senator, or the candidate, or the critic, or the leader of men, as I find myself reminiscing about the essential phenomenon which was the man himself... It was Goethe who said: 'We ask not that a man be a hero, but only that he be everything that makes a man.'"

Maybe that was the current of the sixties: to become more authentic a nation by living up to an ideal, like Kennedy tried to live up to his ideals, as he wished in his obituary to be said that "I'd done something to lessen that suffering [of the children Camus had talked about]." If America tried to live up to its ideals, it meant that these universal and aristocratic ideals of the dignity of men confronted the particular and democratic sensibilities of the nation, much the same way Kennedy was confronting his own 'persona' with his 'soul'. Both ideals and sensibilities had, for some time, a coexisting right and way. The nation displayed its best in people like Martin Luther King and its worst in the people who threw stones at him. But it is not too daring to say that at the end of the sixties, when Robert Kennedy was shot and Richard Nixon won the presidency, high aristocratic ideals had lost against democratic pettiness.