ABSTRACT
Bobby Kennedy gave the educated the mantle of morality and progress and leadership. What constituted the new morality of the New Frontiersmen was their studious avoidance of the word. Farewell to the morality of the rural culture of the past. Thus, Kennedy passed from being the pragmatist par excellence, the hatchet man, the tough-minded Boston Irish kid, the ruthless, dangerous influence at his brother's right hand, to being a leader of the new abolitionists, a hero of the kids of the new class, a voice of political morality in avant-garde America. McCarthy disliked the intense moralism of the later Kennedy years; he disliked the harsh pragmatism of the Kennedy underside; and he disliked the Kennedy-style organizers: the lawyer-engineers. On into 1969, on television and in the press, the word "moral" belonged to the educated young and the active. The very fact of being young seemed to carry a certain moral superiority.
