Democrats: Socking It to 'Em

• Share

Physically, the differences are marked. John F. was taller than Robert F., squarer of jaw and shoulder, fuller of face and chest, less prominent in teeth and nose. But when Bobby Kennedy rises to full passion on the podium, his brother's spirit and image fill the hall.

The audience's nostalgia contributes to the transfiguration. Even college kids, who cannot quite remember the debits and credits of the Kennedy Administration, are moved in memory by the lucency of the thousand days, the bravura of Jack's life and the trauma of his death. Bobby has made it all historic and contemporary at the same time. All at once, the past seems within reach again.

Almost everything about Bobby's style and presence strengthens the association. He makes a child's fist, thumb on top, pointed out; the gesture was often Jack's. Bobby's voice is normally thinner and higher; but at the height of his delivery of late, it has gained body and begun to resemble that earlier voice. The Harvard-trained Boston diction, the rhetorical, rising cadence—these are hauntingly similar.

Unstinted Adulation. Bobby's key phrases—"We can do better"; "This is a time to begin again"—are borrowed almost verbatim from Jack's vintage-'60 speeches. He makes the same effective use of statistics, from rates of birth to frequency of rat bites; he, too, sprinkles his talks with erudite quotations, from Archimedes and Camus, Goethe and Shaw. And like Jack's, his political persona is considerably more adventurous than his explicit statements and positions.

Bobby elates the disenchanted with his blanket condemnation of the way things are, but his alternatives for the most part are either vague or on the safe side. On Viet Nam, he does not advocate peace at any price or unilateral U.S. withdrawal: presumably, he would continue to prosecute the war if the negotiations he seeks were to fail. Domestically, he stresses the need for more and better, as many others do. But when he comes down to a concrete proposal, he mentions reducing the strings on federal grants to the states in such fields as education and health, something the House Republicans have long urged. Rarely is he caught without an apt response in the question-and-answer sessions—though in Idaho, when pressed to propose a new farm policy, he was both hesitant and hazy.

To the crowd however, the words seem not to matter. Just as Bobby draws the same kind of abuse from skeptics that his brother did—charges of arrogance, ruthlessness, opportunism, a lackluster Senate record—he also elicits unstinted adulation from sympathetic audiences. Frequently he hears the war cry, "Sock it to 'em, Bobby!" (which has a sexual connotation to some youngsters), and he does. Bobby, 42, can be less formal than Jack, who was also 42 eight years ago but felt that he had to convince voters of his maturity. As Roman Catholicism is no longer a handicap in American politics, neither is relative youth—both thanks to J.F.K.