The Architecture of Authority: How Writing Bobby Kennedy Deconstructed My Understanding of Power

In the summer of 2022, as the United States Supreme Court prepared to dismantle the federal protections of Roe v. Wade, I found myself living a strange, bifurcated existence. By day, I navigated a world where my bodily autonomy was the subject of aggressive legislative debate, a reality that left me feeling historically disenfranchised and physically constrained. By night, I retreated into the archives, embodying the persona of Robert F. Kennedy. I was writing a novel that required me to inhabit the mind of a man who moved through the highest corridors of mid-century American power—a man whose decisions, unlike my own, possessed the weight of historical gravity.

This cognitive dissonance forced a profound reckoning with my own preconceived notions of masculinity and influence. I had entered the project with a "Don Draper" archetype in mind: the suit-clad, cigarette-smoking, unshakeable patriarch. What I discovered, however, was a portrait of power that was not only fragile but fundamentally contingent on the very traits we often dismiss as "feminine."

The Illusion of the "Great Man": A Chronology of Perception

To understand the evolution of this project, one must understand the traditional American narrative of the "Great Man"—the idea that history is forged by solitary, iron-willed individuals. My initial research into Bobby Kennedy began with the skeletal facts: the seventh of nine children, the Attorney General, the ill-fated presidential candidate, the victim of an assassin’s bullet.

The early years of my research revealed a boy who was, by all accounts, overlooked. A photograph of a twelve-year-old Bobby sitting by a garden pond in Southern France—shoulders hunched, wrists self-consciously clasped—became my anchor. He was the "runty third son," a man who only ascended the family totem pole after his older brother Joe was killed in World War II.

The Performance of Ruthlessness

As I traced his trajectory through the 1950s, the "ruthless" label—the public persona that would define his legacy—began to look less like a character trait and more like a necessary performance. His career was a rapid-fire series of adaptations:

• The Early 50s: The cold warrior under Joseph McCarthy.
• The Mid-50s: The crusading investigator of corruption.
• The Late 50s: The architect of the Kennedy political machine, acting as his brother Jack’s shadow and strategist.

This was not innate power; it was a calibrated response to family expectation and political necessity. When I viewed him through the lens of popular culture—such as the depiction in the 2016 film Jackie, where he expresses cold, calculated disappointment over the "loss" of the Vietnam War legacy—I saw the caricature. But as I dove into the private archives, the caricature collapsed.

The Counter-Narrative: Power as Caretaking

The most startling discovery in my research was the private Bobby Kennedy—the man who was not a "small god in a suit," but a caretaker.

In the summer of 1956, while the nation was fixated on Jack Kennedy’s rising star at the Democratic National Convention, his wife, Jackie, suffered a stillbirth. While the public and the media were distracted by the spectacle of the campaign, it was not the presidential hopeful who provided the essential emotional labor. It was Bobby. He rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night and handled the arrangements for the child’s burial.

This was a recurring pattern. Those closest to him, including Jackie herself, consistently described him as the "safety net" of the family. He was the one who could be called in the dead of night, the one who bore the burden of emotional maintenance for a dynasty that prioritized image above all else. This reality directly contradicts the patriarchal mythos that equates power with dominance, stoicism, and emotional distance.

Implications: The Intersection of Gender and Influence

The process of writing this book forced me to confront a question that resonates far beyond the literary: Can a woman, conditioned to be a spectator of male power, truly capture its essence without falling into the trap of mythologizing it?

The "Watching Boys Do Stuff" Paradox

I recalled the essay On Pandering by Claire Vaye Watkins, which discusses the trap of women centering their lives around "watching boys do stuff." My initial reaction to the prompt of writing a novel from a male perspective was one of resistance. I didn’t want to participate in the elevation of another man.

Yet, there was a strange, undeniable liberation in the process. Writing Bobby was a refuge. It allowed me to inhabit a world designed with a male vantage point—a world where I didn’t have to navigate the daily, suffocating complications of being a woman under political siege. It allowed me to see that the corridors of power are not populated by titans, but by men who are just as fallible, contradictory, and deeply insecure as my own brothers.

Synthesis of Findings: A New Model of Power

If we strip away the myth, what remains of "male power"? My findings suggest that power, at its most granular level, is:

1. Relational, not Solitary: It is a web of competing interests, familial duties, and public expectations.
2. Performative: The "ruthless" exterior is often a shield for internal uncertainty.
3. Dependent on "Feminine" Labor: The ability to lead often relies on the ability to care, to listen, and to provide the emotional support that the "Great Man" myth claims to ignore.

During the protest that summer, when my brother declined to join us, citing the inevitability of the Roe reversal, he was exercising a form of cynical, resigned power—the power to opt out. My sister and I, meanwhile, exercised the power of participation, even when the outcome felt predetermined. We were fighting against the very structure of the "Great Man" history that had been drilled into us since elementary school.

Conclusion: Power is Slippery

In writing Men Like Us, I learned that the distinction between the public mask and the private self is the most compelling aspect of history. Bobby Kennedy was not a monument; he was a man who, like many of the men I know, was capable of being simultaneously annoying, affectionate, self-aggrandizing, and deeply vulnerable.

By acknowledging the fallibility of these figures, we do not diminish them; we humanize them. We also dismantle the excuse that their behavior is an inevitable, biological outcome of their gender. If power is, as I discovered, a performance—a messy, negotiated, and often accidental process—then it is also something that can be rewritten.

History is not a set of carved-in-stone statues of men in suits. It is a shifting, slippery, and often irrational narrative. The more I looked at Bobby—really looked at him, beyond the suit and the cigarette—the more I realized that the "power" he held was just as fragile as the rights I was fighting to keep. Power is not just the ability to control; it is the capacity to be shaped by those around you, to be the one who stands at the bedside when the world is falling apart. That, ultimately, is the lesson I took from the archives: that power is not a monolithic force, but a human one, capable of change, and certainly, capable of being misunderstood.