But Kennedy's impact does not stop at the power shifts his campaign style encouraged. He brought to the electorate the feeling that political life could be meaningful as well as exciting. Campaigning against the "politics of joy," he was the first American politician since his brother to bring a sense of gleeful buoyancy back to the hustings. Kennedy's name and good looks aside, much of this happy frenzy was due to his audience's knowledge that only Kennedy gave sure promise of ending -- or at least transforming -- the dull pain emanating from the nation's capital these days.
Perhaps this helps to explain the curious coalition Kennedy forged in Indiana--poor blacks and lower-income, frustrated whites who otherwise might have leaned to Governor Wallace. Herein lies the sad paradox of Kennedy's truncated campaign: the most bitterly opposed Presidential aspirant was somehow able to unite briefly America's two most mutually explosive groups.
Kennedy's call was unfamiliar to most Americans. The New York Senator asked for rapid political and economic change, law and order, a halt to war. By the fatal end of his run he was keeping his appeal relatively free of recrimination. His strongest words were reserved not for segregationists, economic malefactors, or regressive political bosses; he harpooned the national leaders of his own party. Richard Nixon was no more than the butt of a few jokes. More than "poor-mouthing," Kennedy evoked a new sense of self-awareness and self-realization--more like Teddy Roosevelt than any 20th century Democratic President. The promise of dignity and security he held out to his "special constituency" was matched by his attempt to teach the well-off the perils of smug self-isolation.
Unlike his brother, who campaigned primarily for a refreshed national leadership, Bob Kennedy sought publicly to invigorate American political and social thought. Like many Republicans, he questioned the efficacy of a burgeoning federal bureacracy. In the same breath, though, he infuriated the G.O.P., insisting that renovated, upgraded state and local government would have to take up any slack. His seemingly conservative outlook on federalism was shaped by a liberal goal--government-backed social and economic justice.
It is too early to tell whether Kennedy's career, his campaign, and the impulses he stimulated will have an immediate effect on American political life. On the national level, where his urgent voice and prod will be most sorely missed, the prognosis is tragically dim. Almost as depressing, the nation has been cut off from perhaps its most educational sport--watching and listening to the noisest, most enterprising U.S. Senator since George Norris.
Yet Robert Kennedy was really a good deal more than a healthy spectator sport, more than a major reformist influence in American society, more than a sympathetic, concerned friend, even more than what Jack Paar called "the most beautiful man I ever knew." In a tragic historical sense, Robert Kennedy was one of the few, and surely the most effective of America's political leaders who liberated themselves from the strangling moralisms of the 1950s. Bob Kennedy got over Communist watching, shucked the blinders of Cold War interventionism, and found ghetto residents more enlightening Congressional witnesses than labor racketeers. Sometime in the decade before his death, Bob Kennedy put the Red threat and the New York Daily News headlines in the back of his mind, took a long look at the American people and decided the needed help. He may not have lived long enough to transmit to his countrymen the compassion and concern he discovered in himself. Maybe that's why Yenan looks attractive.