Books: The Great What-If

Thomas believes Bobby's is "the story of an unpromising boy who died as he was becoming a great man." Perhaps. Thomas every now and then falls into Camelot prose, the elegiac, mock-heroic blather about bright promise and fate and doom and how the gods have it in for the Kennedys--a literary form of which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is a founding master. And at times, Thomas slips into dreamy, unthinking partisanship: "Americans were afraid in 1968, and they eventually voted their fears and elected Richard Nixon." But perhaps Americans simply decided that the Democrats, with their ruinous, unwinnable war in Vietnam and their grandiose, badly managed Great Society, deserved a rest.

But mostly, Thomas' telling of the story is clear eyed, richly detailed and riveting, mainly because of his shrewd feelings for the nuances of Kennedy's character and internal conflicts. In late May 1968, during the California primary campaign, Kennedy attended a party at the Malibu beach house of director John Frankenheimer. The novelist Romain Gary, husband of actress Jean Seberg, fastened onto Kennedy and said, brutally, "You know, don't you, that somebody is going to kill you?" A few days later, when he was 42, somebody did. Bobby Kennedy vanished to become an item of America's counterfactual history. What if? Who knows?