He hung up the phone, and a smile played about his lips; talking to his brother was in some ways like talking to himself. They had been together so long that they understood, with few words, a universe of meaning. A close friend who often saw them together thought it strange to hear them converse. Neither finished a sentence. They were so much on the same wavelength that they interrupted to complete each other’s thoughts.
They were so different, he mused. The words people used to describe him — cool, detached, ironic — were not the words they spoke about Bobby. The boy in the middle of the pack, always competing for the attention of his two older brothers, the boy who identified with his mother’s silent suffering, Bobby threw himself into things with an intensity that at times startled even his brother. If the man in the Oval Office seemed a Catholic Brahmin, if he pulled away at times from the unruly tribe that was his family, Bobby was fiercely tribal, pure Celt. The poet Robert Lowell, meeting Bobby for the first time, murmured, “My, he is unassimilated, isn’t he!”
He leaned back in his chair, his fingers tapping restlessly on the edge of the desk. He had thought, when he was younger, that his brother Joe would be the figure at the center of the tribe, that Bobby would orbit around that centrifugal force. He had seen a life for himself somewhat apart, as a journalist or a college professor. But they had become more than brothers. Sometimes, it seemed that they were two men sharing the same life. They both knew that the bond existed, he mused, but rarely did they speak of it. Only once had he voiced his need, when his brother asked, “Well, Johnny, what about me?” as he was forming his presidential team. He wanted his brother as his attorney general, and he met the arguments against it with the one appeal his brother could not resist. “What I need is someone who’s going to tell me what the best judgment is, my best interest. There’s not a member of the cabinet I can trust in that way. I have nobody. There is nobody.”
His brother warned him, “If you announce me as attorney general, they’ll kick our balls off.” And he had grinned and said, “You hold on to your balls and I’ll make the announcement.”
His brother amused him, sometimes, with his passions. The world he saw was one of complex shades of gray, shadows constantly shifting. For Bobby, the world was black and white, in high relief. He sometimes joked about “Bobby and his Negroes,” but he knew that he relied on his brother to feel that mysterious and hidden pulse he himself could not sense so viscerally, of those who were suffering. Bobby was getting an ear for it, the way a dog hears a whistle pitched too high for humans. And he admired, grudgingly, the Puritan strain in his brother so lacking in himself.
If his brother was a prism, through which the world was refracted, so too was he a lightning rod, drawing off all sorts of fevered hatreds and resentments. The South could hate Bobby and believe the president simply misguided. That was useful.
He worried sometimes about his brother, who was perhaps less than half the life they shared. Had he sacrificed a life of his own to be part of two as one? They shared even the woman who was the most glamorous sex symbol of the day (as their father had taken as a mistress a glittering star of his time). He had first been attracted to Marilyn’s freshness, the sensuality that seemed as natural as breathing. It was not a love affair for the ages. She complained to friends that his lovemaking was perfunctory, that he made love like an adolescent. Light, not heat. But the two would gossip for hours, on the phone or at Peter Lawford’s beach house on the Pacific, about the rise and fall of the powerful in Hollywood, a subject that had long fascinated him. In time, her desperate need for self-esteem, her plunge into drugs and alcohol, alarmed him. It made her dangerous. He did not wish to be cruel, even when he was, but he had been unwise to send Bobby as the emissary to tell her it was done.
Like the Puritan he was, he fell desperately and guiltily in love with her. Perhaps it was her very vulnerability — the thing that alarmed the man in the Oval Office — that was such a magnet for his brother. Bobby was a sucker for strays. But he was tribal. His wife and his children were too close to his heart for him to ever think of leaving them. Her illusions were forlorn, and doomed to fail, and her rage at being used and discarded was white hot. They had hovered close to the flame of scandal. But she was gone and the tracks of their involvement hastily covered after her suicide. If the escape had tempted him to thoughts of invulnerability, there was always J. Edgar Hoover to remind him of catastrophe.
Some people even talked of another Kennedy presidency someday. Did not a dynasty have its heirs! It troubled his image of himself that he did not want to imagine Bobby as president. He had thought of himself as generous. But, to be honest, it was not that Bobby would fail but that he would succeed that was troubling. Might Bobby’s reach be greater than his own! Could that moral fervor be transmuted into a greatness he himself could only wave at!
He shook his head. There was no sense worrying about the future. What would be, would be. For now, their twinship served its purpose. There would be time, later, to sort it out, to uncouple.
They were young; they had at least half a lifetime to do it.