TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century / TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO / 1960 / 66rfk.000 < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1994-02-27 | 32KB | 577 lines

<text> <title> (1960s) The Shadow & The Substance:RFK </title> <history>TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1960s Highlights</history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> DEMOCRATS The Shadow & The Substance September 16, 1966 </hdr> <body> Popularity? It is glory's small change.--Victor Hugo He ranks 96th in Senate seniority, so far down the ladder that he occupies a seat in the very last row of the chamber. He has yet to author a bill or head a subcommittee. In his adopted state, he is so little the master of his party that he was unable last week to persuade a nominating convention to accept his candidates for either Governor or Lieutenant Governor. For all that, Robert Francis Kennedy's pockets are ajingle with the coins of popularity--and, Victor Hugo's sneer notwithstanding, such small change is a politician's negotiable currency. Few observers doubt that some day, probably no later than 1972, the junior Senator from New York will try to cash in those coins for the presidency of the U.S. Conservative Columnist William F. Buckley Jr., with an almost perceptible shudder, talks of "the inevitability of Bobby." Playwright-Novelist Gore Vidal, a longtime foe, protests that "we now have a three-party system in America--the Democrats, the Republicans and the Kennedys." Cries Los Angeles' Mayor Sam Yorty, who had an acrimonious confrontation with Bobby during last month's hearings on the plight of U.S. cities: "Bobby Kennedy is conducting a lavish campaign to build himself up and tear President Johnson down. He's trying to ride on his brother's fame and his father's fortune to the presidency, and I don't think he can do it." Perhaps not. But with the possible exception of Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Kennedy is the most-talked-about politician in the U.S. today. More than 1,000 letters cascade into his office daily, including a recent premature request for a copy of his inaugural address, and at least 50 invitations to appear as a speaker. Last week in Austin, practically on the President's front porch, 8,000 Texas farm laborers and sympathizers campaigning for a $1.25 minimum wage burst into a spontaneous cheer: "Viva Kennedy!" In Boston, a crowd of 5,000 turned out to rubberneck as Bobby and a phalanx of Kennedy kin, including Massachusetts' Senator Teddy, showed up to dedicate the $24 million John Fitzgerald Kennedy Federal Office Building. Bobby's every activity is prominently and exhaustively chronicled--from a breathtaking ride down 100 turbulent miles of Idaho's Salmon River to an out-of-breath conquest of Canada's 14,000 ft. Mount Kennedy. Ever voracious for Kennedyana, reporters besiege him with requests for interviews, including at least five or six each week from foreign correspondents whose readers from Bangkok to Bonn, much like their American counterparts, have an insatiable appetite for his latest derring- do. Perplexed & Perturbed. No man is more perplexed than the President. Two years ago, on his way to the greatest popular landslide in history--helping meanwhile to pull Bobby into the Senate on his coattails--Lyndon Johnson's pockets fairly bulged with favorable polls. Now he travels lighter, for the surveys bear uniformly bad tidings for himself and for Vice President Hubert Humphrey. In Minnesota, in California, in Iowa, in Michigan, Bobby is outpolling the President by margins as large as 2 to 1, and the Vice President by even more. When The Missouri Weekly polled the state's Bootheel section, Kennedy wound up with 72%, Lyndon 26%, Hubert 2%--though only a few years ago, in the newspaper's words, Bobby was "perhaps the most disliked American in the Bootheel, outside of the FBI's ten most wanted criminals." Most galling of all to the Administration was last month's nationwide Gallup poll. In February, Lyndon led Bobby by a comfortable 2 to 1 among Democrats. Six months later, the Democratic ratings were 40% for Bobby to 38% for Lyndon, and 38% to 24% among independents--a result that prompted Gadfly Bill Buckley's crack that the Kennedy clan must have purchased the Gallup poll. The President was not amused. It was historically unprecedented for a junior Senator, not yet 41 years old, to outpoll a hitherto-popular President from the same party. And it could prove damaging to the party, on the eve of a mid-term election that could erode the Administration's working majority in Congress. Moreover, Bobby is likely to remain in the headlines by campaigning in perhaps a core of states (Humphrey plans to stump 38, Johnson all 50) for such fellow Democrats as Michigan's G. Mennen Williams and Illinois' Senator Paul Douglas. A major target may be California, where Governor Pat Brown is in a neck- and-neck race. "I hope he comes," said Brown's opponent, G.O.P. Candidate Ronald Reagan, last week. "It would be interesting to have this citizen of Massachusetts, who serves as the Senator from New York, explain why he's qualified to tell us how to run California." On the surface, the Bobby boom seems incomprehensible. Robert Kennedy, the ruthless kid brother, the vindictive Senate investigator of the 1950s who made no secret of his admiration for his onetime boss, the late Joe McCarthy, the heavy-handed hatchet man of 1960 who ran Jack Kennedy's campaign the way Captain Ahab ran the Pequod, the glowering, omnipresent Attorney General who always seemed to be under fire--Robert Kennedy upstaging the greatest vote getter of all? Politics of Expiation. Yet there it is. In part, it reflects the persistence of the legend surrounding J.F.K.; time seems to enhance rather than diminish the glow of his martyrdom. To the almost 200 Kennedy books, two more were added in recent weeks by ex-Press Secretary Pierre Salinger and a former J.F.K. buddy, Paul Fay; a "definitive" account of the assassination by William Manchester is scheduled for publication early next year. In part, the phenomenon grows out of what Indiana's Democratic Senator Vance Hartke calls a "national guilt complex" over the assassination, a sort of politics of expiation whose chief beneficiary is Bobby. And in part, there is seemingly in the U.S. today a subterranean yen for a pseudomonarchical Kennedy "restoration," with Bobby currently playing the part of the exiled king. "There is a religious fervor building up about this guy that is even stronger than the one they built up around Jack," says Barry Goldwater. "Bobby's becoming a god, an idol." Not to everybody. His name is still anathema to most of the South, and many Northerners manage to resist his spell. But those who like him do so uncritically. "His position on Viet Nam is not that of my district," says Michigan's Democratic Congressman Jim O'Hara. "But this doesn't hurt him a bit. His popularity transcends the issues. They like him because they like him." There is an undeniable magnetism about him. He lacks Jack's graceful wit and easy intellectuality, to be sure, and his reedy voice is oddly suggestive of a Bostonian Bugs Bunny. Yet his slight (5 ft. 10 in., 165 lbs.), wiry frame, his sandy, sun- bleached mane (to which a hand keeps straying nervously), his electric blue eyes all project an image that youngsters, in particular, see as the embodiment of his brother's appeal. His steady outpouring of statements on everything and anything, often aimed a cagey centimeter or so to the left of the President's, attracts a growing array of voters who have been overexposed to Johnson. Bobby's forays to more than a dozen countries since he became a Senator, and such bold ploys as a speech on racial discrimination at the University of Mississippi, have widened his following. No Basket Case. Despite his heady popularity, it would be foolhardy for Bobby even to think of reaching for the presidency in 1968. No President who wanted renomination in this century has been denied it, however weak his record. And Lyndon Johnson's record--at least in domestic legislation--is unsurpassed by that of any other President. As for the second spot, Lyndon has pointedly reaffirmed his attachment to Humphrey. "As long as I am President," he told labor leaders at a private White House dinner, "I want Vice President Humphrey by my side." Thus Bobby has been urging overeager supporters to remove the "Kennedy in '68" billboards and bumper stickers that have sprouted from Baltimore to Berkeley; he flatly denies any such ambitions for 1968. But 1972 is another story. Historically, the vice-presidency has by no means been a foolproof route to the White House. This has been so because mediocre men have often been chosen for the job--a description that scarcely fits Hubert Humphrey. The fact remains that only three Veeps in U.S. history have ascended to the presidency via the ballot (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Van Buren); initially, at least, all the others who reached the White House, from John Tyler to Lyndon Johnson, were elevated by the death of a President. Bobby denies that he is laying plans six years in advance. "If I tried to, I'd destroy myself as a Senator," he says. "I'd be a basket case in three months." Besides, a strong streak of fatalism runs through him. "There's no use figuring out where you're going to be later on; you may not be there at all. So the sensible thing is to do the very best you can all the time." Still, he has a 20/20 eye on 1972. When a Georgia Democrat asked him which of six gubernatorial candidates he was supporting in that state, Bobby replied: "None. Your Governor can't succeed himself. But I'll be interested in the one who succeeds him. He's the one who'll be in office in 1972." How About You? While Jack Kennedy was alive, there was always an amount of kidding about a whole succession of Kennedys occupying the White House. Back in 1959, a newsman decked out as Family Patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy sang this ditty at the satirical Gridiron Club dinner: <qt> <l>All of us,</l> <l>Why not take all of us?</l> <l>Fabulous--</l> <l>You can't live without us.</l> <l>My son Jack</l> <l>Heads the procession.</l> <l>Then comes Bob,</l> <l>Groomed for succession.</l> </qt> Jack joined the kidding. After his 1960 nomination, he gave Bobby a cigarette box inscribed, "When I'm through, how about you?" In the old days, Bobby brusquely dismissed such banter. "The idea is so obviously untrue," he said, when a reported asked him in 1962 if he was aiming for the White House, "that it's foolish even as a rumor." The gunshots in Dallas changed all that. By 1964, when he emerged from his long months of brooding, Bobby had quit scoffing at the idea and begun subtly to encourage it. "In traveling through my own country and now in Germany, I have come to understand that the hope President Kennedy kindled is not dead but alive," he said in West Berlin two years ago. "The torch still burns, and because it does, there remains for all of us the chance to light up the tomorrows and to brighten the future. For me, that is the challenge that makes life worthwhile." The Loner. Who would be better suited to carry the torch? Not long ago, the form makers figured that the politically adept Teddy, rather than Loner Bobby, would eventually succeed Jack in the first brother act in the history of the presidency. [Though there have been father-son (John and John Quincy Adams), grandfather-grandson (William H. and Benjamin Harrison) and cousin-cousin (Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt) takeovers.] However, Teddy began fading soon after Dallas. It might have been that the Kennedy sense of primogeniture dictated the leading role for Bobby, who is six years Teddy's senior and, while the seventh of Joseph and Rose Kennedy's nine children, the oldest surviving son. It might have happened because of Teddy's severe injuries in a 1964 plane crash (he still wears a back brace, only recently set aside his silver-headed cane). Or it may simply have been that Bobby is a far more intense and ambitious soul than his brother. In any case, it was R.F.K. who all at once found himself regarded as a prime presidential prospect. The shock of Jack Kennedy's death and the new weight of responsibility on Bobby have matured him--but not to the point where he can sit still for more than a few minutes at a time. Such is the range of his activities that when a reporter asked Ethel Kennedy if her husband had taken up any new hobbies lately, she could only gasp, "I hope not." He still delights in frolicking with his nine children (Kathleen, 15; Joe, 13; Bobby, 12; David, 11; Courtney, 10; Michael, 8; Kerry, 7; Christopher, 3; Matthew, 20 months.) and their menagerie of dogs, rabbits and horses, but the sea lion that once flippered out of the Kennedy pool to a nearby supermarket is long gone, along with the carefree days of pool dunking. Bobby no longer sails through Maine's reef-studded Penobscot Bay with an Esso road map, as he did three years ago; over the Labor Day weekend, he and nearly a dozen guests aboard the chartered 31-ft. yawl Connamara relied on Coast Guard charts while cruising to IBM Chairman Thomas Watson's summer home for a visit. He did run out of cooking fuel, and relied on Czech vodka to kindle the stove--and, it was said, some of the guests. Slightly greyer and considerably more weathered in the past two years, he seems touched by melancholy; he no longer sees the world with an etcher's eye--all blacks and whites. His father once wrote, "Jack used to persuade people to do what he wanted; Bobby orders them to do it." But that approach does not work with Senators--or voters. Some things, of course, have hardly changed. The mean streak is still there; and occasionally, when a Sam Yorty sits down in the witness chair opposite him, it shows through. "He doesn't like to lose," says Teddy, and it is hard to imagine his ever learning to do so with grace in anything from touch football to politics. He evokes intense responses, from fiercely loyal affection to unalterable hostility--and occasionally the baffled feeling that he has yet to find his own identity. Bobby is aware of such reservations and occasionally tries to dissolve them with humor. When Pennsylvania's Democratic Senator Joe Clark routinely congratulated him on a recent speech, Bobby sent him a note of thanks. Next time Clark saw Bobby in the Senate, he slipped him a note asking, "Why do you have to be so polite?" "Because," wrote Bobby in reply, "I'm trying to conceal the ruthless side of my nature." "My Only Constituent." In the light of Bobby's ambitions, getting shut out of the vice-presidency in 1964 was possibly the best thing that could have happened to him--as for Jack Kennedy was his loss of the 1956 runner-up spot to Estes Kefauver. Humphrey, fenced in by the responsibilities of the office and his allegiance to "my only constituent," as he calls the President, is powerless to counter Kennedy's growing appeal. "He's been too good a Vice President," says a Democratic Congressman of Humphrey. "He's absolutely dead," says another. Both could be wrong, of course, for six years is a long way off. "As far as we know," shrugs a Humphrey aide, "the 1972 Democratic candidate for President may now be the mayor of some small town in Ohio." Not if Bobby can help it. Ironically, he once thought of the Senate as one of the worst possible paths for Jack's presidential bid, because he had to face one issue after another and was bound to lose some favor with every vote. Bobby believed that Jack could more effectively advance his career as Governor of Massachusetts, but J.F.K. scorned the job. "Who wants to sit in a corner office of the statehouse," he asked, "and hand out sewer contracts?" As for Bobby, a thoroughgoing activist attuned to the uses of power, he at first viewed the Senate as a "consolation prize" for the loss of the vice-presidency. "You could accomplish more in the executive branch," he said. "You could accomplish more with a telephone call." Yet he has already shown signs that he will be a far more influential Senator than Jack, whose most memorable accomplishments in the upper house were his Algeria speech and a bill to correct union abuses that was incorporated into the Landrum-Griffin Act. Though still a freshman, Bobby has successfully introduced four well-reasoned amendments--one providing for federal checks on the quality of schools receiving Government aid; one extending Appalachian aid to 13 New York counties; one aimed at the state's 1,000,000 Puerto Ricans, permitting non-English-speaking citizens to vote if they have attended American-flag schools and are literate in another language; and one directing the President to establish a long- range planning committee for foreign aid. Talent Scout. Bobby's Washington staff of 37--one of the capital's largest--operates out of three jampacked rooms in the new Senate Office Building. A steady flow of tourists trickles by, newsmen pop in and out, and inevitably there is a constituent demanding an immediate audience with "my Senator." Bobby's own office is an almost shrinelike oasis of calm. On one wall hangs William Walton's impressionistic Before His Last Mission, showing Joe Jr., eldest of the Kennedy children, in flying togs just before his death in 1944, when an explosive- laden plane in which he was flying blew up over the English Channel. Opposite Bobby's desk, in stark contrast to the collection of his children's watercolors, are memorabilia of J.F.K.--whom he almost always calls "the President" or "President Kennedy," rarely "my brother" and never "Jack." There are several photos, a framed scratch sheet with Jack's pencil doodlings from his last Cabinet meeting (Oct. 29, 1963), and a photo of J.F.K. accompanied by some words from Tennyson's Ulysses: "Come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world." When writing a speech, Bobby calls for drafts from key staffers; as a rule, he later edits and adds considerably to their versions. His small New York staff can tap some five dozen volunteers, mostly young lawyers or professors, to work up memos as well. Beyond his staff, Kennedy often relies on a wholly informal brain trust--hardly a cabal, but a loose network of friendships acquired during his 15 years in politics. Foreign affairs? He may get help from Richard Goodwin, who wrote both J.F.K.'s "Alliance for Progress" and Johnson's "Great Society" speeches, or from Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who is also known as the best gagwriter of the lot. Military strategy? Roswell Gilpatric, ex- Deputy Secretary of Defense, may offer suggestions. Civil rights? Burke Marshall, Bobby's civil rights chief at Justice and now IBM's general counsel, offers ideas. James Allen, New York State's commissioner of education; Dr. Eugene McCarthy of Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons; Richard Boone, director of Walter Reuther's Citizens' Crusade Against Poverty; and Economists J.K. Galbraith of Harvard and Edwin Kuh of M.I.T. are other sources. When in New York, Bobby often calls on Columbia's Dean David Truman or ex-White House Speechwriter Ted Sorenson, spends hours discussing issues with them by way of clarifying his own thoughts. Constantly on the lookout for new academic and legal talent is Brother-in-Law Stephen Smith, who directs old Joe Kennedy's interests in New York. The "Advocate." Less gregarious than his younger brother, Bobby often broods in solitude at his Senate desk, sometimes leaves without trading the customary pleasantries. The more genial Teddy is generally well accepted and is working his way into the Senate. "Establishment" by dint of such seemingly inconsequential actions as lingering in Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland's office one morning a few years ago to sip bourbon with him. "Teddy's more casual," says Fred Holborn, a White House aide under J.F.K. "Ask Teddy to put more bite into a speech, and he'll refuse, saying `Listen, I'm not Bobby.' Bobby plays `risk' politics." As his colleagues see it, Bobby is shaping a career as a Senate "advocate" rather than an "insider"--meaning that he speaks out often on major issues and will risk stirring up debate, but pays less heed to the obscure grind of drafting laws and hammering them into shape through painstaking negotiation. Whereas Jack waited five months to deliver his maiden speech, and Teddy 16, Bobby weighed in with his Appalachia amendment all of three weeks after his swearing-in, has since given major speeches on Latin America, poverty, the cities and nuclear proliferation. Fully aware of his appeal to youth, Bobby has done more than grow his hair out practically to Beatle length. On a number of issues, he has established positions in tune with the restless, questioning spirit on U.S. campuses. He approved the idea of Americans' giving blood to the Viet Cong, criticized the Justice Department for refusing an Arlington burial for a war hero who was also a Communist Party member, and most sensationally, proposed that the Communist guerrillas in Viet Nam be represented in whatever Saigon government is established after peace talks. "Not Satisfied." That position embroiled the Senator in his most acrid controversy yet. "Senator Robert Kennedy proposes Communists be included in the Saigon government," wrote New York Times Columnist C.L. Sulzberger at the time. "It would be more honest to suggest abandoning Viet Nam without even bothering to negotiate." Kennedy contends that he was misinterpreted, maintains that what he was, and is, saying, was this: three alternatives are open to the U.S. in Viet Nam--a military victory that would turn the country into a desert, a withdrawal that would undercut the U.S. position throughout Asia, and negotiations. The last, he argues, is the only one worth considering. And if the U.S. is truly interested in peace talks, he adds, the Viet Cong must be offered a place at the conference table and the hope of something more than unconditional surrender. His own solution is to allow them "to play a position in the government" after negotiations, but under rigid international controls to prevent a renewal of terrorism. Kennedy has been down-playing these views lately. "Bobby did get into water above his ankles on Viet Nam" says an Administration official, "and he quickly stepped toward shore." Still, the fact that he got his feet wet at all was enough to encourage many dissident intellectuals to take him for a new hero. Almost overnight he became a rallying point for Democrats and independents with all manner of gripes against Lyndon Johnson. His refrain seemed to be "I'm just not satisfied," and his solutions often involved increased spending. Bobby insists, nonetheless, that he has no use for "programmatic liberals" who automatically call for more cash to solve every problem. Not Enough Schmalz. There is considerable irony in his role as idol of the intellectuals--and he is fully aware of it. As Jack's campaign manager, he showed open contempt for quarreling reform groups ("They hate everything and everybody, including each other"), and they responded with intense distrust. Despite an impressive record as Attorney General--particularly in such areas as civil rights, prison reform and immigration--the liberal-intellectual community remained leery of him because of the old McCarthy connections. When he decided to run for the Senate in New York, the Americans for Democratic Action refused to back him because "his record is not one of a liberal." So did the local chapter of the National Association of Colored People. A spate of Manhattan liberals, including Gore Vidal, Actor Paul Newman, Columnist I.F. Stone, Novelist James Baldwin, formed a Democrats for Kenneth Keating group. Two years later, having practically read Co-Founder Hubert Humphrey out of its ranks, the A.D.A. is bear-hugging Bobby-- though neither party is entirely relaxed in the embrace. "For some liberals, Kennedy is unacceptable because he has a zero quotient of schmalz," says former Justice Department Attorney Ronald Goldfarb. "He is not the type to picket or sit cross- legged on the floor, smoking and debating important issues. He is not glib, he has too much hair, he drinks milk, and he doesn't have a Phi Beta Kappa key." Says Novelist Vidal: "Bobby is now projecting a liberal image because politically it happens to be the smart thing to do. He's following a political course that could have been charted by a computer." Nobody is more aware of the rapidly shifting alliance of this group than Humphrey, who has seen his liberal following crumble over his support of the President's Viet Nam policy. "Bobby is winning over the intellectual camp," said a Humphrey aide, "but they are fickle. They kicked Jack Kennedy around until he was dead, and then he was a hero." Bobby himself admits that Hubert got a raw deal and that the intellectuals' disagreement "on one very complicated matter like Viet Nam is no reason to walk away from him." As for the extremists of the New Left, Bobby frankly rejects them. "I don't want the support of the beards," he says. Actually, the polls and headlines distort Bobby's real influence. As a Kennedy, his potential strength is enormous. As a freshman Senator, on the other hand, his real power is severely limited. As leader of his party in New York State, Bobby thwarted Tammany Hall by engineering the election of a reform-backed judge to Manhattan's surrogate's court. But his efforts to pick his own candidates for statewide office proved so futile that Gubernatorial Nominee Frank O'Connor was quoted last week as wisecracking that his first-ballot victory was "easy--I just rounded up all the people Bobby Kennedy asked to run for Governor, and that was more than enough." Cultural Exchange. Inevitably, the Bobby boom has had a divisive effect on the Democratic Party. Every time a candidate pops up wearing a PT-109 tie clasp, stories crop up that he is a Kennedy man pitted against a Johnson man or a Humphrey man. The Johnson-Kennedy rift is all but complete. About the time that Bobby was barred from the vice-presidency, he shrugged that Lyndon was "not the sort of guy I'd like to make trip around the world with, riding tandem on a bike." As for Lyndon's feelings, some California Democrats are quoting him as saying that he "wouldn't take Bobby in 1968 if he were the last Democrat on earth." From now on, anything Bobby says on behalf of Lyndon-- and vice versa--is bound to be suspect. The antagonism has not yet infected most other levels of Government, but there is constant and abrasive speculation over what officials are in which camp. Some authorities--inside the White House as well as out--got to talking one recent evening about bedrock allegiances in the Cabinet. Their remarkable conclusion was that in the showdown Bobby would ultimately command the loyalties of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz, Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall, United Nations Ambassador Arthur Goldberg and even Housing and Urban Development Secretary Robert Weaver, despite the harsh treatment that Kennedy subjected him to during the recent hearings on cities. Behind Johnson, the experts speculated, would be Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler, Commerce Secretary John Connor and Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner. Postmaster General Larry O'Brien is considered a question mark. In the second and third tiers of the federal bureaucracy around the U.S., the preference for Bobby is even more pronounced. Efforts are being made to paper over the feud--at least until November. "There's plenty of room for popular people in the Democratic Party," Humphrey says bravely. At New York's Democratic Convention in Buffalo, Hubert and Bobby were all smiles when they met, and the Vice President gamely noted that Kennedy would be campaigning in Minnesota this weekend under a sort of "cultural exchange" program. Slopping Over. Despite Huberts efforts to achieve a rapprochement, the evidence of the polls continues to gnaw at Lyndon Johnson. He can take solace from a couple of hopeful facts. One is that other Presidents have dipped to even more drastic depths of disfavor and have then recovered--most notably, Abe Lincoln in 1864 and Harry Truman in 1948. Another is that many citizens will eventually realize that Bobby has soared in the polls at least partly because he does not have to shoulder the onus of high office. "If Kennedy were President," says Democratic Congressman Morris Udall (Stewart's brother), "he'd have the same trouble." Still, Lyndon Johnson suffers from one further problem: Lyndon Johnson. "The prevailing weakness of most public men is to slop over," Humorist Artemus Ward wrote a century ago. "G. Washington never slopt over." The pun aside, Ward stated a problem that has plagued the President all along, and now threatens to overshadow his truly impressive domestic record. He does slop over. He speaks--or preaches--with the accents of the Depression in an age of prosperity. His rustic reminiscences seem irrelevant to a predominantly urban electorate. At 58, Johnson is roughly midway in age between Bobby Kennedy and old Joe Kennedy, who last week turned 78--yet he somehow seems much closer in outlook to the older man. Unreliable Fate. By 1972, when Hubert Humphrey will be 61 and Bobby Kennedy 46, one in every three U.S. voters will be under 35. That is the group that Kennedy is aiming at--and few politicians have been as skillful as the Kennedys in tailoring their images to the times. In a study of Kennedy campaign tactics forthcoming this week, Boston University Political Scientist Murray Levin notes that "the Kennedy brothers and the men who help manage their careers and campaigns have mastered the art of creating shadows and taking advantage of substance." Aided by such tactics, Bobby Kennedy may be firmly set upon what one Administration officials calls "a paved road to the presidency." If he establishes an acceptable legislative record in the Senate, if he avoids a backlash of enmity from Lyndon Johnson's supporters within his party, if his popularity proves more than ephemeral, then the impetus that Bobby describes as "this thing" could well carry him all the way along the paved road. This all adds up to a lot of "ifs," and Bobby is reluctant to dwell on them. "How can you make plans for a period of time when you don't know you're going to be around?" he broods aloud. "Fate is so unreliable. I have no plans." That, if true, would be about the biggest news that Robert Kennedy has made yet. </body> </article> </text>