RFK: A Candid Biography by David Heymann Heinemann 596pp, 20 in UK
Like their shopping malls, the American biographies get bigger and bigger. This one, coming in at just under 600 pages, is part authorship, part light industry. Just about the only thing we don't know at the end of it all is exactly how many people were involved in the enterprise, although Heymann tells us that his "author interviews" were conducted "either by the author himself or by members of his staff", and that in almost all cases "the interviews were either typed or transcribed, or more than one person assisted with the interview".
The problem about this is that, at some points, the authorship and the industry are incompatible. Together, they engender a tendency to over-write, a temptation to smother the reader with irrelevancies. Sometimes it is illuminating - it is useful to be reminded, for example, that Eugene McCarthy was against gun control. But how many of us really want to be told, in a passage whose prose is redolent of all the stylistic felicities of the New York Times society pages, that Ethel Kennedy's wedding dress was "a white satin gown made with a fitted bodice finished with an off-the shoulder neckline and a bertha of pointe de Venise lace embroidered with pears . . . white satin mitts embroidered with seed pearls and [a] full length tulle veil fastened to a headdress of matching lace trimmed with orange blossoms"?
The same clucking attention to detail is devoted to accounts of the sexual escapades of many of the protagonists. John F. Kennedy's apparent satyriasis is by now a matter of public record, more or less. RFK also had evidently inherited his father's approach to sexuality as an area for more or less casual and sometimes instant gratification, although in his strong relationship with Ethel he never replicated Joe Kennedy's apparently malevolent coldness towards Rose, or his older brother's political accommodations with Jackie. Here, as in so many other areas of the book, there is a breathless desire not to leave anything out - to justify, with an implicit appeal to the values of frankness and candour, the exploration of not only the personal and the private, but the secret life.
The end-product, as the publisher's blurb (for once accurately) gushes, "will make President Clinton look like a choirboy". Clinton himself is probably by now heedless of such endorsements. But the Clinton saga has not only revealed things about the conduct of the US Presidency by the present incumbent, it has confirmed (if confirmation were needed) that people lie about sex more readily and more rapidly than about almost any other subject under the sun. And some, at least, of Heymann's sources - old roues, spurned lovers, nosey parkers - may well have axes of their own to grind. Combine this with the pursuit of fat royalty cheques (one of the more astonishing stories about JFK included here was first uttered in the course of negotiations for a major book deal by its source, then denied when the book deal went sour) and some of the anecdotes come across as distinctly whiffy.
Of course they can't all be untrue, and there is a serious book waiting to be written about the complex relationship between the personal and the political in the lives of public figures. I suspect that such a book, should it ever be written, would have more to do with questions of power, need and early childhood experiences than with an annotated catalogue of sexual connections, and might, in the end, be hardly about politics at all. RFK's affair with his brother's widow, detailed here, has many of the elements of a Greek tragedy; but in the telling it comes across as merely grubby.
Buried under all of this, however, is quite a good book trying to get out. RFK was interesting: not just because he was JFK's brother, and in spite of the fact that his early political advancement, like JFK's, would probably never have happened without their father's driving, projected ambition and his well-stocked wallet. Because of these factors, both the older Kennedy brothers were ushered into express elevators to political power, missing out most of the intermediate floors. Once there, they started to learn on the job.
RFK certainly needed to: Senator Joseph McCarthy was godfather to his first child; he lacked the experience to outwit J. Edgar Hoover; he became stupidly obsessed with Castro; and he was initially hesitant on civil rights; and - worst of all, although this needs to be further and more authoritatively explored - he was dangerously ambivalent about the Mafia when it suited his purposes to turn a blind eye to some of their activities. Heymann has some evidence that the Mafia, finally spurned, may have had a hand in the JFK murder: it is one of the rare instances in which one wishes that the author had given us more, rather than less, information.
JFK did not live long enough for us to find out whether he could have been a really major President, or whether some hubris would have dragged him down. RFK's good fortune was to have lived for five years after his brother's murder, and to have used those years, by and large, as part of a learning curve. He had an eye to the main chance, of course: he was cautious on Vietnam, and played the law and order card to the lower middle classes. But something had genuinely caught fire in his blood in relation to native Americans, to black Americans, and some inchoate but increasingly urgent vision of social justice.
In the latter part of his book, Heymann explores this somewhat Pauline conversion from gilded youth to social crusader deftly and with much sympathy. He worked for RFK in New York in 1968, and this section of the biography is without doubt the part that has most pace, energy and commitment. You end up - as I suspect Heymann does himself - liking RFK a great deal more than JFK, and marvelling continuously at the foetid, introspective, exhilarating and exhausting panorama that is politics played out at national level in the richest country on earth.
John Horgan teaches journalism at Dublin City University and is the author of recent biographies of Sean Lemass and Mary Robinson