AMERICA

The King Over the Water

From MURRAY KEMPTON

NEW YORK

WHATEVER Robert Kennedy is after, its pursuit rather plainly embarrasses him. On a Friday, he had suggested that, if we want peace, we should have to resign ourselves to a South Vietnamese government in which the Viet- cong had a place of responsibility. The next day, he had been denounced by Vice-President Humphrey, his brother's oldest political rival, and by McGeorge Bundy, one of his brother's most intimate advisers. He seemed to have ended where he had so long been tending, all the way outside the consensus.

It is not a place where Robert Kennedy delights

to live. Three days later again, he flew home from ski-ing to explain himself before the cameras of the Today show, which Americans get with their breakfasts. The Senator came like an uneasy ghost at the obscene hour and to the bizarre place which is the largest forum our people can give their politicians out of campaign season. He went on just after an advertisement for Alpo Dog Food. And very quickly, he was wondering aloud how we could ask North Vietnam to live next to a government 'dedicated to their destruction.' He would be interested to know what we have said to Hanoi that might indicate our interest in concessions. We have announced that there would be no preconditions for negotiations. 'But it is evident that there is one precondition : we are not going to abide by free elections.'

`Do you understand why the reaction was so

sharp?' he had asked earlier. He had expressed the same curiosity in public later; but there was a noticeable cutting edge to his bewilderment on television. After all, he observed with a strained effect of innocence, he had only been searching for some way to peace; 'and, I understood that was what the administration is interested in.' The tone aimed at surprise; but most of what emerged sounded like confirmed mistrust.

What was new and unexpected was the detach- ment, almost the coldness, of the performance. There was not one of his brother's gestures; and yet there seemed to be a concentrated effort to be his brother's interior, to talk not as John Kennedy did on the platform, but as he seems to have talked in private moments of crisis. The re- membered formulations kept coming back : 'We have to understand the realities . . . we have to give them some reason to come to the bargaining table.' The most reckless and romantic of the Kennedys seemed as though deliberately re- shaping himself according to his tr. —nory of the coolest and most detached of them.

His judgments seem to have their roots in that

memory; he is to be explained, one begins to think, not by his ambitions for the future but by his unappeased grief for the past. If there is a flaw in his judgment, we would do better looking for it, not in his youth, but in the condition that, for him, Lyndon Johnson will never measure up to what his brother was. For he is, right or wrong, in one way the oldest man in our politics, being a messenger, self-conscripted, from his cherished dead. We cannot say that he knows what his brother would have done in these circumstances; but Robert Kennedy's every word seemed ii.he product of a desperate wrestling to find out.

After the questions, he had breakfast in a

Madison Avenue coffee shop. His mind ran back, as it seems so often to do. to October of 1962 and the Cuban missile crisis, the one coolest and luckiest moment in their lives in power. 'You know, I have been thinking,' he said. 'that, if we' could just get Sorenson and Bundy back in that room and we could just talk it through the way we did then, and if those men who have not, after all, always been right in the past would just talk all this through, then, if they found an alternative, they would know it was the only alternative.'

He stopped and seemed miles away, as though to summon up that table had reminded him of the one essential and irrevocably lost presence at its head.

One of the diners came over and introduced himself as a White House telephone repairman named Eugene Scott.

'We miss him,' he said. 'Why don't you come over and see us?'

`Do I dare?' Robert Kennedy answered; and then he was gone to Washington and his adjust- ment to the illusion of consensus.

That evening. the Senator and the White House had issued separate statements, each expressing his confidence in the other's agreement. President Johnson, as a sign of unity restored, if ever threatened, invited Senator Kennedy to come to New York with him and sit on the dais at a banquet in his honour.

Almost any public occasion these days makes us rather desperately wish that we were a tidy nation as well as a prosperous one. His hosts

did their utmost to give him the comfort of a monarchical occasion; still there were 4,000

Vietnam protesters outside and, as soon as the President rose to speak, a guest in a tuxedo leaped up and shouted 'Peace in Vietnam' and went on dolefully bawling his slogan while the security guards dragged him out.

Our world is all that insecure; someone has only to shout and we remember that Vietnam has made us two nations.

In making his case, Mr. Johnson had occasion to remind those present of what other Presidents had said about Vietnam; and he came at last to a long quotation from Mr. Kennedy's Inaugural about America being able to bear any burden, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival of liberty.

The President read these words and his tone became harsh and almost bitter; suddenly he was not quoting a beloved predecessor but flogging an objector and Robert Kennedy sat frozen and even there, we seemed to be two nations.

One doubts that the President can bring us together except intermittently and through short pauses for rest. The differences are too funda- mental: at one extreme there is Vice-President Humphrey exulting that 'the tide of battle in Vietnam has turned in our favour' and, at the other, there is Robert Kennedy saying 'We're going to have to be satisfied with a very unsatis- factory settlement.' The difference is that Mr. Humphrey trusts the President and Senator Kennedy does not, And Mr. Humphrey is for- tunate that his conscience and any calculation he might have about his political future coincide; it is easier to imagine a bright future for him rather than for Robert Kennedy; it is a good rule in our politics that people who take loyalty oaths seldom starve.

That does not mean that Robert Kennedy is not an immense presence, even when choosing internal exile.

'You can see the pattern emerging in the steady output of White Papers . .

—Harold Wilson, Carlisle.