Nation: THE POLITICS OF RESTORATION

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Exile in Proximity. That long minute runs from March, when he announced his candidacy until at least August. With luck, it will last until November. But it is the minute that his legion of kith and kin have been dreaming of ever since "President John," as Ted Kennedy refers to him, died in Dallas.

During Jack's administration, there was much half-joking about "Bobby's turn." After the assassination, it became a question of opportunity. Pierre Salinger took a leave of absence from his job as an airlines vice president last Jan. 1. Asked if he knew then that Bobby would run, Salinger replied: "I knew on Jan. 1, 1964." After Johnson ruled him out as his 1964 running mate, Kennedy was asked what he would do if something happened to the President before the next election. "I'd go after the nomination," he said.

Things were to happen to Lyndon Johnson and the nation, but he could not know it then. He could only look forward to eight frustrating years of physical proximity to and spiritual exile from the seat of power. He made the best of it, preparing for 1972, and meanwhile he built on his own legend, the good and the bad.

Charging into New York, he thrust aside resident Democratic aspirants to take on Republican Senator Kenneth Keating. The avuncular, popular incumbent accused the Kennedy people of distorting his record, and the nonpartisan Fair Campaign Practices Committee sided with Keating. It seemed of a piece with Kennedy's background: his brief stint with Joe McCarthy; the prosecutor's mentality and Sicilian yen for vendetta; the management of Jack's 1960 campaign, in which lovable Hubert Humphrey had been driven from the race and humiliated. Now, in New York, "carpetbagging" and dirty pool. But he went on to win, and to capture uneasy primacy in the party.

Although Robert Kennedy chafed at the Senate's rituals and pace, he was able to use his new position effectively to hew a niche of his own. He traveled widely, spoke incessantly, and became increasingly critical of the Administration. Addressing himself to issues ranging from auto safety to social justice in the Americas, North and South, Kennedy labored mightily to establish himself as the little man's big friend.

Was it wholly an image-building performance? His critics suspected as much. TIME Correspondent Hays Gorey, who has followed the career of Bobby as Senator and candidate, does not agree: "No one who has seen Kennedy on the Indian reservations of Arizona or Idaho, no one who has seen him in the stinking hovels of Appalachia, no one who has seen him take the hand of a starving Negro child in the Mississippi Delta, accuses him of acting. Neither he nor any other politician could be that good an actor."

Colored Ruthless. Nor was Kennedy's growing unrest over Viet Nam an act. He played the issue for political advantage, to be sure, but he also became increasingly convinced that the massive U.S. military commitment was a blunder that threatened catastrophe. He had helped plant the roots of Johnson's Viet Nam policy during the Kennedy Administration, and he acknowledged it: "But past error is no excuse for its own perpetuation. Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live."