Maximum Attorney General

By Laurence I. Barrett

KENNEDY JUSTICE by Victor S. Navasky. 482 pages. Atheneum. $10.

As Attorney General, he started with an abundance of will, energy, style, shrewdness and good intentions. He appointed brilliant, loyal subordinates. He had in reserve a big brother who happened to be President. Applying these strengths in the normally stagnant Justice Department, Robert Kennedy quickly made waves--but then declined to walk on them.

In Kennedy Justice, Victor Navasky both mourns and explains the absence of miracles. He also coolly outlines and assesses what he regards as Kennedy's limited achievements: the elan with which he infected all echelons, the crackdown on organized crime, his ever-expanding view of his department's mission. Obviously, Navasky is no blind Kennedy fan. His arguments are credible, his reportage exhaustive, his approach as dispassionate as writing about the Kennedys customarily allows. His book also considers the latter-day liberal's ambiguous feelings about the use of power. Once things seemed simple: you elected good guys like F.D.R. and H.S.T., shouted "All power to the President!" and depended on the Executive Branch to protect the public weal. But by the '60s, the illusion of simplicity was fading. Looking back on that period, sophisticated observers like Navasky realize how easy it is for even well-intentioned leaders to abuse executive power in some cases and abdicate it in others. Since all power is compromised, how to reduce the opportunity for abuse and still get things done?

Ivy League Code. The constitutional and personal dilemma is as ageless as politics. But it makes a compelling contemporary theme. Navasky wishes, for instance, that Kennedy had applied the same determination to getting J. Edgar Hoover into retirement that he spent getting James Hoffa into jail. He would like Kennedy to have been as consistently intransigent toward foes of integration as he was toward the Mafia. Ideally, the Attorney General should have been as sensitive to individual rights when considering wiretapping and bugging as Candidate Kennedy later became on many other issues.

In Navasky's analysis, Kennedy's power sources were also disguised traps. The brother in the White House had to be protected; that meant trying to salvage some support from white Southerners and avoiding a showdown with Hoover. The classy subordinates whom Kennedy recruited compensated for his own lack of legal expertise. But Navasky, himself a Yale Law School graduate who taught legal research before becoming a journalist, argues that they represented "the code of Ivy League gentlemen." They revered genteel negotiation and the separation of powers even when the situation--as in dealing with Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett--demanded blunter instruments. In the end, Kennedy's ranking aides were more hindrance than help in bringing innovation to the pursuit of justice.

Quiet Combat. Yet Kennedy had an insatiable appetite for action and a knack for getting his department to move. If politics prevented the application of total vigah to promoting the civil rights movement, there was no pro-gangster lobby to impede new methods of assault on big bad guys. His own experience as the investigator had given him a taste for gangbusting. To carry it out, Kennedy first had to persuade the FBI that organized crime existed (Hoover had been a doubter). The bureau, long a self-governed island within the department, reluctantly agreed to enlist --though on its own terms. The indictment rate soared, and Hoover was more firmly entrenched than ever.

The remarkable thing about Navasky's critical treatment is that Kennedy does not emerge as a shattered icon; the zest and the victories he brought to his department are not merely noted for the record but given equal time. The equation, then, is a sad one. If Kennedy, with all his personal and political assets, could be so entrapped, then pity the ordinary mortals who customarily wrestle with reform in high office. sbLaurance I. Barrett

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