[Wills is an American syndicated columnist and the author of books on such widely diverse subjects as Jack Ruby, race relations in America, and G. K. Chesterton. He is probably best known for his incisive political commentaries, especially those contained in his Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of a Self-Made Man (1970) and Confessions of a Conservative (1979). A critic of both the American liberal and conservative establishments, Wills has been described by one critic as "an undogmatic conservative who is ready to let his experiences influence his conclusions" and who is "cheerfully resigned to being a singular conservative, a renegade in the eyes of others who crowd under that rubric." In the following review of Schlesinger's Robert Kennedy and His Times, Wills praises Schlesinger's presentation of the complexities of Robert Kennedy's character and milieu.]

[In Robert Kennedy and His Times] Arthur Schlesinger has a kind of proprietary right to this subject. He was the craftsman of the framework within which Kennedys have been most often studied—the claim that Kennedys mature late; but that the maturity, when it comes, is spectacular. That was the theme of the books appearing just after Robert Kennedy's death. Authors like Jack Newfield, David Halberstam, Jules Witcover, William vanden Heuvel and Milton Gwirtzman granted that there had been a "ruthless" edge on the younger Robert Kennedy, but they maintained that tragedy and experience had mellowed, had deepened him by the time tragedy claimed him. Unfortunately for that thesis, Mr. Kennedy's last political act was to launch the charge at Eugene McCarthy in their television debate before the California primary: "You say you are going to take ten thousand black people and move them into Orange County." The authors I mention muted this problem by neglecting to quote the sentence. Mr. Schlesinger, to his credit, not only quotes it but adds: "This sounded, and was, demagogic." One comes to respect Mr. Schlesinger's confidence that Robert Kennedy does not need special pleading. All Kennedy critics are quoted frequently and fairly. The challenging, somewhat prickly charm of Mr. Kennedy is by this means more forcibly conveyed than in more protective works.

The last part of Mr. Schlesinger's title, referring to "His Times," is as important as the treatment of Mr. Kennedy's own character. He takes this opportunity to rewrite, in large part, his version of the Kennedy Presidency in A Thousand Days. A great deal more is known than when he wrote his 1964 history of Camelot. Squalid characters from the C.I.A. and the under world now move among the knights and princesses. Names like Judith Exner and Sam Giancana must be included, and Mr. Schlesinger does not balk at his duty. The Church Committee's findings are drawn on, along with material released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The C.I.A. findings are important in a biography of Robert Kennedy, because Mr. Schlesinger recognizes that the Attorney General, after the Bay of Pigs, became the principal cheerleader for Operation Mongoose, the campaign of terror and sabotage directed at Castro. Mr. Kennedy's own notes of a White House meeting on Nov. 4, 1961, present his determination: "My idea is to stir things up on island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run & operated by Cubans themselves with every group but Batistaites & Communists. Do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro but we have nothing to lose in my estimate."

Two months later, Mr. Kennedy met with the C.I.A. organizers of Mongoose and told them their work was "top priority," that "no time, money, effort—or manpower—be spared." Chemicals to incapacitate sugar workers were discussed, and the encouragement of "gangster elements" in Cuba. When an opportunity for reassessment arose, Mr. Kennedy wrote: "I am in favor of pushing ahead rather than taking any step back." Mr. Schlesinger concludes that Mr. Kennedy wanted Mongoose to unleash "the terrors of the earth" on Cuba because "Castro was high on his list of emotions." Like others, Mr. Schlesinger can find no direct evidence that Mr. Kennedy knew of the assassination plots against Castro. But the C.I.A. was being urged to acts of secret war that involved killing; it probably felt authorized by what Mr. Schlesinger calls "a driven sense in the administration that someone ought to be doing something to make life difficult for Castro." "Mongoose was poorly conceived and wretchedly executed. It deserved greatly to fail. It was Robert Kennedy's most conspicuous folly."

The one place where Mr. Schlesinger seems to hedge a bit on the evidence is his treatment of the missile crisis. A Thousand Days, preceding Mr. Kennedy's own book on that crisis (Thirteen Days), could report Robert's private pledge to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey after a decent interval ("I mentioned four or five months"), so long as this was never presented as a quid pro quo. Mr. Schlesinger thinks this offer invalidates the argument (of I. F. Stone and others) that President Kennedy did not, as he claimed, "make every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move." But the Russians knew as well as Americans that the Turkish missiles were obsolete (they had already been recalled, but the order had not gone into effect). The missiles' bargaining potential was only as a "quid pro quo" that would allow Russia to back off with better grace; their withdrawal sacrificed nothing, militarily, on our part. Robert Kennedy quotes his brother as saying, "I am not going to push the Russians an inch beyond what is necessary." But in risking nuclear war rather than admit the private deal he was making, John Kennedy pushed them hard indeed, and backed up that push with an arbitrary deadline of 48 hours. Mr. Schlesinger tried to defend the deadline as prompted by fear that nuclear warheads might be delivered to Cuba within that period. But it was not known for sure that they had not been delivered, or that 24 hours one way or the other made any difference.

Mr. Schlesinger's difficulties in this area are complicated by the fact that his own Watergate-era book, The Imperial Presidency denounces secret Presidential pledges as a device of executive diplomacy. To say that Mr. Kennedy did make a deal on the missiles (and so was being pacific), he has to admit what critics like Richard Nixon accused Mr. Kennedy of—some secret concession. The Kennedy Administration, when it denied that charge, was both usurping power and lying about it—the very thing Mr. Schlesinger's Imperial Presidency finds distasteful in the Nixon Administration. Mr. Schlesinger nods warily to "those who think that no President would ever make a secret commitment," slips into the supposition that "perhaps there may be a place for secret diplomacy," then sprints hopefully toward the conclusion that "the missile crisis was a triumph, perhaps the only triumph of flexible response." Mr. Gwirtzman and Mr. vanden Heuvel say that Robert Kennedy considered the missile crisis his finest hour, and Mr. Schlesinger makes it clear that Mr. Kennedy took a stand far more sensible than that of his own hero, Maxwell Taylor. But Mr. Kennedy joined others in "jumping on" Adlai Stevenson for proposing an open bargain of Turkish missiles for those on Cuba.

There is no denying that Robert Kennedy was fierce in his enmities—toward, Roy Cohn, Jimmy Hoffa, Lyndon Johnson, Eugene McCarthy; or that he personalized struggles, even at the highest policy level (as in turning the C.I.A. loose to get Castro.) He was also fierce in his loyalties, and paradoxically, fiercer in tenderness. Mr. Schlesinger quotes Shirley MacLaine on the way his "psychic violence" produced gentleness. Mr. Kennedy had the scrapper's instinct for underdogs, and a restless desire to know about the different forms of human suffering. All these aspects of the man are captured in this learned and thorough, balanced yet affectionate book. I don't know if Mr. Schlesinger is right about the gradual but inevitable improvement of Kennedys with age; but his own books about Kennedys keep getting better. The one on Edward, when he gets around to it, should be a gem.

Mr. Schlesinger is most admirable in his restraint when it comes to the "might-have-beens" of 1968. Others indulge the hope that Mr. Kennedy could have made sense of that year's chaos—won his party's nomination and the Presidency, ended the Vietnam war and brought us peace, with ourselves as well as other nations. I doubt all that, for reasons strengthened by a reading of Mr. Schlesinger. People do not want to remember how torn and angry the nation was; and Robert Kennedy polarized, at his best as well as his worst. The war was losing popularity in 1968, but the critics of the war were losing popularity more dramatically. Mr. Nixon and Mr. Wallace, between them, took a landslide number of votes.

Mr. Kennedy was not popular in the South because of his civil rights achievements as Attorney General. He would have been even less popular when he arrived there trailing his antiwar "kids." And no Kennedy would move in 1968 without Mayor Daley. Through all his in-again-out-again lunges and withdrawls of 1968, Mr. Kennedy thought constantly of Mr. Daley, consulted and cultivated him. How would he be able to keep Mr. Daley and keep his kids?

President Johnson's anger and will to sabotage would have been something on an entirely different scale with Mr. Kennedy than it was with Hubert Humphrey's late not-quite rebellion.

To say Mr. Kennedy could not have put the nation together again in 1968 is less an indictment of him than of the nation. Richard Nixon actually looked moderate between the kids of Mr. McCarthy and the anti-kids of George Wallace.

Mr. Schlesinger, an adviser during the time when Mr. Kennedy felt drawn both to run and to withdraw, reflects the dragon flying of his spirit as new depths paradoxically tossed him on the surface. The feckless gestures to Mr. McCarthy, the meetings where Edward Kennedy said "I don't know what we are meeting about," the insomniac pacing of Mr. Kennedy from those he wanted to urge him on and those he wanted to hold him back—all show that the man of narrower earlier focus was giving way to a freedom that felt the chaos but made him helpless to handle it with Mr. Nixon's nasty efficiency.

Mr. Kennedy had become a person gulping at delayed knowledge with an almost haunted ferocity. Some of the signs looked like delayed adolescence—the Tennyson quotes, and sudden tears; the maudlin use of post-Camelotisms. "His favorite song—one heard it so often blaring from some unseen source in his New York apartment—was 'The Impossible Dream.'" This was the Kennedy who slandered Mr. McCarthy while he envied him, who wondered if there was not something to Adlai Stevenson after all. Death did not take away a successful candidate in 1968, but something more interesting.