THE RFK CONTINGENT

AUTHORS PICK UP AWARDS AT HICKORY HILL

More than books, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Awards honor ideas, the ones their namesake felt passionately about. So when Sen. Edward M. Kennedy rose to address the lunch guests gathered yesterday at Hickory Hill, Ethel Kennedy's house in McLean, he spoke of the impact of ideas. This year's winning books, he said, "move us closer to the day when we can say: No more Vietnams. No more homelessness. No more children in poverty."

These three sentiments refer in turn to "A Bright Shining Lie," by Neil Sheehan, and "Rachel and Her Children," by Jonathan Kozol, the winners, and this year's honorable mention, "Within Our Reach," by Lisbeth Schorr with Daniel Schorr.

"If there are genuine heroes and heroines" from the Reagan era, Kozol told an awards forum at American University earlier in the day, "they are people like Pat Stanley," one of the homeless women he met at the Martinique Hotel in New York while researching his book.

A trained nurse, a mother and grandmother, Stanley had been shunted with her family of 12 into the city's shelter system, one of thousands of families "whose only crime was to be born poor in America," he said.

Kozol, author also of "Death at an Early Age" and "Illiterate America," reflected that Americans have come to think that "mercy is somehow maudlin and archaic, a throwback to the time of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King ... I'm afraid the crime we're committing is going to come back to haunt us."

Sheehan, whose book on John Paul Vann and the U.S. experience in Vietnam previously won this year's National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, also reflected on the example of Robert Kennedy.

"He was taken from us at a moment when, of all of the political figures of that time, he might have rescued us from that war. He would have come to office with his mind changed" about the Vietnam war, Sheehan declared. Today, he said, "we need men and women who can change their minds and see the world anew."

Lisbeth Schorr recalled meeting Kennedy upon his return from a trip to Mississippi in the mid-'60s, and being struck by his "anger and passion and determination to do something" about the hungry children he had seen there. "He helped a generation define what was unacceptable," she said.

She described her book of strategies to address the problems of the disadvantaged as an answer to the hopelessness many people feel about social problems. " 'Nothing works,' " Schorr said, is a position that "can't be maintained in the face of the evidence."

The authors and their families and guests were joined around the lunch tables at Hickory Hill by a host of Kennedys and their friends and retainers, by three of the four judges for this year's awards (Frances FitzGerald, Alex Haley and Edwin Guthman) and by Pat Stanley, Kozol's friend from the Martinique Hotel, and Mitch Snyder of the Community for Creative Non-Violence.

Also on hand were Rose Styron, Roger Wilkins, Joseph Rauh, Art Buchwald (snapping pictures throughout) and, from the halls of Congress, Democratic Reps. Barney Frank, Bart Gordon, Sander Levin and Joseph P. Kennedy II. Among the last congressman's siblings, home for the family affair, were Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Courtney Kennedy Ruhe, Michael Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kerry Kennedy, accompanied by her current beau, Andrew Cuomo, son of the New York governor.

During the presentation of bronze RFK busts and $2,500 awards to the winning authors, there were a few notes of levity.

Daniel Schorr, who had been praised by his wife for making her book "readable," said when it came his turn to be recognized, "I knew if I stuck with my wife long enough I'd get invited to Hickory Hill."

A tanned Sen. Kennedy seemed as lean and fit as he has looked in years. But when his lunch partner Sheehan rose from his seat to retrieve his award and circled their table the other way, Ethel Kennedy couldn't resist asking, sympathetically and for all to hear: "You can't get by Teddy?"

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.