Free The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby by Richard D. Mahoney Page A

brothers, Jack in particular. The figures Powers evoked fit my family’s conception of them — men full of wit, charm, and purpose who, in those Watergate years, seemed nothing less than heroic.
    Yet scholarship was beginning to offer a second, far harsher evaluation of the Kennedys. President Kennedy, some scholars charged, was responsible for bringing America into the nightmare of Vietnam. Other scholars claimed that Attorney General Robert Kennedy had, for reasons of political expedience, done the minimum on civil rights. I decided that I would take a look for myself at an area of the Kennedy record that had not yet been analyzed — the Kennedy administration’s policy in Africa, where I had spent part of my youth.
    Over the years, I became a familiar figure to the staff of the Kennedy Library. Much of my first book, JFK: Ordeal in African, published by Oxford University Press in 1983, was based on what I found in the National Security Files, which the library staff had effectively declassified. Between 1974 and 1980, I also did 223 oral history interviews. These encounters opened doors that led to unexpected places. I remember a winter day in 1976 in Princeton, New Jersey. At the conclusion of an interview with the late George Ball, undersecretary of state during the Kennedy years, he invited me to have a look at his transcribed telephone conversations, about ten thousand in number. For three weeks, I read through those telephone conversations in Ball’s home, often leaving at daybreak and then returning a few hours later.
    I was stunned by what they revealed. The picture they painted of the Kennedys was very different from the treasured anecdotes, those memorable and canonized speeches, or the top-secret memos covering “policy options.” What emerged first were traits common to powerful men — expediency, calculation, and manipulation. But the transcriptions also revealed other qualities that were, I came to believe, unique to the Kennedys — an icy wit, an awareness that they were players on a stage, and a capacity for growth nurtured by their constant collaboration. Depending on the conversation, they could be idealistic or Machiavellian, utterly conventional or suddenly imaginative, hot or cold. The Kennedy brothers seemed neither as grand and omniscient as the “court histories” that sprang up after the president’s assassination portrayed them, nor as cunning and shameless as later books, such as Seymour Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot , argued. They were both self-creative and self-destructive.
    I began to question the standard portrait of the male Kennedys as a perfectly functioning juggernaut. That Jack, Bobby, and their father, Joseph P. Kennedy, worked as seamlessly and relentlessly as a combat unit on their path to power seemed true. That Bobby, as executor of his father’s fearsome will and facilitator of Jack’s ambition, was the key actor in the triumvirate seemed obvious. But I heard accounts of tensions among them. Former Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, another friend of my father, told me that Bobby, in his crusade to destroy the American Mafia in the McClellan Committee investigation in the late 1950s (a committee on which Goldwater served), had stumbled over evidence of his father’s dealings with the underworld. “It just killed him,” Goldwater recalled. I wondered what other kinds of combustion Bobby’s moral ambitions had touched off, both within and without the family.
    In 1987 I was appointed the John F. Kennedy Scholar at the University of Massachusetts and the Kennedy Library. I spent a year lecturing, writing, and organizing symposia at the Kennedy Library. Revisionary analysis of the Kennedy years had shifted once again, this time to “character issues.” Private sins were said to be revealing of the Kennedys’ deficient public character. I gave a lecture in which I suggested that the Kennedy story might simply be a projection of America’s own unresolved