RFK RECALLED, 30 YEARS LATER

TWO BOOKS ON ROBERT KENNEDY REMIND US OF WHAT WE LOST WITH HIS DEATH

Author: By David M. Shribman, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, May 31, 1998

Page: N1

Section: Books

And though we now sit smugly at the hinge of a new century, the stock market at giddy heights, the Cold War transformed from menace to memory, we are haunted, still, by 1968. The tell-tale heart of that year may have been buried beneath the floorboards 30 years ago, but if we listen carefully to the rhythms of life in America we can still hear it beating.

This is its sound: The Tet offensive. The student and antiwar rebellions. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. cut down in Memphis. Violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The election of Richard Milhous Nixon. And the coda: the Apollo astronauts, in a lunar orbit, reading from Genesis at Christmastime.

All that plus the death of Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, brother of a tragic president, senator from New York, candidate for the presidential nomination, gentle soul with a reputation for ruthlessness.

The 30th anniversary of his assassination is Saturday, and with it, along with a flood of memories, come two volumes, one a meditation on the meaning of Robert Kennedy, the other an affectionate remembrance from the daughter of one of his confidants. And through the pages of Michael Knox Beran's ``The Last Patrician'' and Helen O'Donnell's ``A Common Good,'' we can begin to rethink the legacy of a man who was an attorney general by dint of his blood, a senator by dint of his sweat, and a martyr by dint of his countrymen's tears.

O'Donnell's volume covers the high points of the Kennedy era, and through the pages of her book stride such Kennedy insiders as Dave Powers, Steve Smith, Peter Edelman, Richard Goodwin, and, of course, Kenneth O'Donnell, the author's father. While Helen O'Donnell brings us inside Bobby Kennedy's circle, Beran brings us inside Bobby Kennedy's head.

Both books are reminders -- of how passionate the political figures were, how divisive the issues, how (and this we have forgotten) helpless and hopeless America seemed, and in some sense was, that year. O'Donnell, who has carried on her father's legacy of political activism and whose research was actively aided by the Kennedy family, reminds us of how the personal and the political intertwined for the generation she recalls. And Beran, a lawyer with the lilt of a poet, sees Kennedy himself as a reminder, not only for liberals but also for conservatives.

``He reminds liberals of the importance of remaining true to the 19th-century liberalism of Emerson and Lincoln; he teaches them that reforms should help to create self-reliance and self-respect in individuals, not undermine those qualities,'' Beran writes in the very last paragraph of his book, adding: ``He reminds conservatives that any genuine conservatism must be allied to compassion, and that, in their devotion to the principles of a free market, conservatives should not forget their obligations to the less fortunate among us.''

But the purpose of Beran's book-length essay is not to argue that Kennedy was a latter-day Thomas More, a man for all seasons, but to argue that, in his heart and in his head, RFK struggled with the signposts of American politics and sought to find his own way. If we have a sense of loss this week, it is not only because we lost Bobby Kennedy, but also because we know that after his death we lost our way, or at least the way he tried to point.

At the heart of Beran's thesis is the notion that the United States was governed through much of the century by an American establishment that suffered its own identity crisis. The family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, wanted his sons to join an establishment not of Henry Adams and Henry James (a little on the effete side) but of Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt -- muscular, masculine, what Beran calls ``an aristocracy of action and power.''

But Bobby Kennedy was a rebel, or would become one. He thought more deeply than either of the Roosevelts -- or any of the other Kennedys, for that matter. The others, in the contemporary argot of sports, played through the pain; Bobby lingered on the meaning of pain. They excelled within the strictures and confines of politics but were content to live within them. RFK was not.

He was a man of action -- he climbed mountains, forded streams, rollicked in the surf with the kids and the dogs -- but by the end of 1963 he was principally a man of thought. And he rethought American politics and its meaning and its purpose, finally taking on the welfare and national-security consensus that governed his party, his class, and his nation. More than TR and FDR and JFK -- each of whom reveled in being a rebel -- he was the true rebel of the patrician class.

Here was his greatest act of rebellion: At the height of the Great Society he broke with the welfare state. He saw and understood poverty more clearly than did any other American leader, even (and especially) Lyndon B. Johnson, who had seen it up close as a boy and as a young teacher. And though RFK was a child of privilege reared on elite private schools and summers at Hyannis, he came to believe that the entire anti-poverty effort of the 1960s was futile. He was famous for opposing LBJ's prosecution of the Vietnam War, but it was his opposition to the way the War on Poverty was being prosecuted that was truly revolutionary.

With Emerson, Lincoln, and the democrats of ancient Greece as his guideposts, Kennedy was more interested in community strength than in national greatness. Perhaps he saw them as the same thing. And in his effort to build community, especially among the poor, RFK sought to fight poverty with capitalism, not with socialism.

``Bobby did not believe that civic spirit was incompatible with private enterprise,'' Beran writes. ``On the contrary, he hoped that a strong community would attract private investment, and that this investment would in turn lead to the creation of jobs that gave purpose and meaning to the lives of the community's citizens.''

It's a commonplace idea for conservatives in 1998. It was a radical departure for liberals in 1968.

Beran has written an engimatic little book about an enigmatic American giant. It is a meditation that meanders, looking into the forgotten crannies and corners of American political and cultural life, and it succeeds in having us do what Bobby Kennedy himself did: look again at what we think we know. The result is a luminous look at Kennedy and at the country he wanted to lead (and to save). And now, as we approach the 30th anniversary of his assassination in a Los Angeles hotel, it makes us wonder if the one brief shining moment that we hold so preciously in memory and mythology might have occurred not after the election of 1960 but just before the election of 1968.