Bobby Senator Robert Kennedy, whose deceptively slight figure passed through
London last week en route to South Africa, is, I suppose, the outstanding non-governmental personality in world politics today. How much his undoubted personal magnetism owes to his own qualities, and how much to the myth and martyrdom of the late President, is difficult to assess. But there can be no question but that he possesses a most formidable combination of new world political skills and old world political idealism.
I say `old world' deliberately, for I believe that the mainspring of Kennedy's brand of idealism is not the sentimental desire to be loved which is so characteristically American and so often politically disastrous, but essentially a version of the more austere doctrine of noblesse oblige: the conviction that great wealth carries with it great obligations. And as a member of an excep- tionally wealthy family Kennedy. like his brother, is peculiarly able to identify himself with the obligations that fall on the United States as the richest country in the world. This could prove particularly valuable at a time when America's understandably growing disenchantment with the Vietnam war is already developing undesirable isolationist overtones—witness, for example, the mounting opposition to foreign aid.
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