He lives, after all, in a vast bedroom, removed by ribbons of concrete from the city, where his father’s work and the cultural and social amenities that are the heart of community life are located. He, too, suffers as he grows up from a sense of being unable to be an active, determining force in his own life.33
And yet if suicide, drugs, and delinquency had come to the suburbs, still it was the “child of the ghetto” who “suffered most” from the loss of community.34 The ghetto child was “the prisoner” of a “vast, gray, undifferentiated slum, isolated physically and in every other way from the rest of the city and its resources.”35 Only by restoring a sense of community in the ghettos could Americans hope to create the self-confidence that would lead to economic self-sufficiency there; only by creating a sense of civic pride in the inner city could Bobby’s entrepreneurial vision of bringing “the people of the ghetto into full participation in the economy” be realized.36
Under Bobby’s plan members of the community would themselves control the community development corporation; the corporation, in turn, was charged with attracting employers to the area, putting unemployed citizens to work rebuilding neighborhoods, and doing what it could to engender a sense of civic pride in the community as a whole. Unlike many advocates of community (e.g., Rousseau), Bobby did not believe that civic spirit was incompatible with private enterprise. On the contrary, he hoped that a strong community would attract private investment, and that this investment would in turn lead to the creation of jobs that would give purpose and meaning to the lives of the community’s citizens. “We must,” he said, “combine the best of community action with the best of the private enterprise system.”37 Government funds in the form of an “initial grant of capital” would be necessary to jump-start the project. But “for their ongoing activities [the community development corporations] should need and receive no significantly greater subsidy than is ordinarily available to nonprofit housing corporations under present law.”38 Community development corporations could not “and should not be owned or managed by Government, by the rules and regulations of bureaucracy, hundreds of miles away.”39 Bobby was hopeful that, once the essential viability of the program was demonstrated, private capital would play the most important part in the project.40 (The number of overlapping agencies to which the Bedford-Stuyvesant community development corporation was forced to apply for initial funds and approvals was itself an indication of just how bloated the bureaucratic state had become; the Department of Labor, HEW, HUD, the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Small Business Administration, the Economic Development Administration, the Model Cities Program, the Lease Guarantee Program, the Federal Housing Administration, and the City of New York each had some measure of jurisdiction over the project).41
To cover start-up costs, the Bedford-Stuyvesant community development corporation sought, and eventually obtained, $7 million in “special impact” funds for a construction and training program. (“Special impact” funds could be obtained only where there was a likelihood that such funds would lead to “private investment” and the creation of “for-profit enterprises” in a particular area; Bobby and Jacob Javits had themselves sponsored the legislation creating the “special impact” program in 1966.42) Special impact funds were to be used to teach unemployed, underconfident residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant how to restore old houses and build new ones; the process of construction would itself function, Walinsky observed, as a “social change lever.”43 The act of building houses would provide Bedford-Stuyvesant’s citizens with the best as well as the most productive kind of therapy. Bobby hoped that the Bedford-Stuyvesant community development corporation would serve as a model of how to enlist “the energies and labor of the ghetto” in a “massive program of physical reconstruction,” a program of reconstruction “consciously directed at the creation of communities—the building of neighborhoods in which residents can take pride, in which they have a stake.”44 It was a good idea; the problem lay in unsympathetic labor unions that did not like to see their monopoly on construction in New York challenged.45 By May 1967 the goal of putting people to work building their own houses was in danger of being lost.46
During the fall of 1966 Bobby, his staff, and members of the Bedford-Stuyvesant community worked out the details of the Bed-Stuy community development corporation (the organization is now known as “Restoration”). It was necessary to “be vague” about the precise details of the undertaking; it was essential that its inherent drama not be undercut by premature disclosures.47 The launch of the Bedford-Stuyvesant project was to be what Walinsky called a Kennedy-style blitz in which the element of surprise would be crucial; all the procedures that had brought the Kennedys victory in the past—secrecy, organization, careful preparation, and, as the decisive moment drew nearer, a massive investment of time and energy—were to be scrupulously followed.48 The planning and preparation would culminate in what Walinsky called “a month of intensive effort” in anticipation of the launch date. To students of Kennedy tactics this “intensive-concentration” method was familiar enough; Bobby and Jack had pioneered it during the 1960 campaign and perfected it during the crises of Jack’s presidency—the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall, the missile crisis, Oxford, Mississippi. The Kennedys, Walinsky said in a memorandum to Bobby, were masters at developing “the urgent sense of concentration that great enterprises require.” The tactics that had worked against Khrushchev and Ross Barnett would work against urban poverty; these tactics could pay off, Walinsky said, “where lesser efforts go piddling.”49 Walinsky urged Bobby not to go abroad in November or December 1966; Bedford-Stuyvesant would need his undivided attention during those months. The point, the young staffer said, “was to build an organization” that, in a single month in 1966, could “begin to make demonstrable progress towards rebuilding” a community.50
Walinsky advised Bobby to “maintain contact with Lindsay” in the weeks preceding the “crash effort” but to withhold the key dates from him; by surprising Lindsay and other officials, the Kennedy team would throw its rivals off balance.51 The urban crisis had become a hot political topic; each politician had his own preferred solution, and none was above stealing the best features of a competitor’s program. Javits was busy pushing his own ideas; after Bobby completed his August testimony, Javits hectored him about the inferiority of the community development corporation concept to proposals he had put forward.52 When the Ribicoff hearings resumed at the end of November 1966, Edelman urged Bobby to “hit as many witnesses as possible” with the community development corporation idea and contrast it with the “monolithic” federal approaches favored by Javits and Ribicoff.53
In October the Senator made a final decision to go ahead with the project.54 On December 10, 1966, the mighty and the humble gathered together in the auditorium of Public School 305 on Monroe Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant.55 Lindsay was there, and so was (an undoubtedly envious) Javits.56 Bobby began his speech with a quotation and a question: “‘If men do not build,’ asks the poet, ‘how shall they live?’”57 It is difficult today to comprehend the optimism that prevailed during the early days of the Bedford-Stuyvesant project; there was a sense among all involved that they were participants in a “pioneering effort” to remake the ghetto, that they could transform an impoverished slum into what Bobby called a “self-reliant community.”58
The optimism soon faded. It was not that the program failed; indeed, it can today boast of important achievements. But neither was its success as great as its promoters hoped; Bedford-Stuyvesant did not solve the problem of the ghetto. Would it have been more successful if Bobby had lived? Perhaps. Kennedy aides William vanden Heuvel and Milton Gwirtzman said that the “most important element in Bedford-Stuyvesant’s survival was Kennedy’s own involvement.”59 But, of course, the whole point of the project was to demonstrate that the ghetto did not need the help of a Kennedy in order to flourish; it was supposed to be able to make progress on its own. It was not Bobby’s death that created problems for Bedford-S
tuyvesant, it was the project’s reliance on the efficacy of a single fundamental idea. The Bedford-Stuyvesant restoration project was premised on the idea of community, and that idea has had a troubled history.
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The belief that men must revive a sense of community is among the oldest in the intellectual’s repertoire of ideas, and has over the centuries been the cause of uncounted elegiac laments and prophetic exhortations. Bobby was not the first statesman to call for the restoration of community; if we are to evaluate his program, we must see it in the context of the larger intellectual tradition to which it belonged.
The roots of the communitarian creed are ultimately Hellenic; the prototypical ideal of its communicants is the Greek polis. Aristotle described the essential philosophy that underlay the cult in a few pregnant passages in the Politics. Man, he declared in that treatise, was a zoon politikon; he was, that is, a political animal, a creature of a polis. Aristotle was a dispassionate philosopher, an objective student of natural phenomena; in describing man as a political animal, he believed that he was stating a scientific fact. But the attitude of the typical Hellene toward the polis in which he lived was, if the ancient commentators are to be believed, anything but dispassionate. The polis, in Aristotle’s words, made possible life on a “plane” that was neither too high nor too low for “the divine element of human nature.” Man was neither a beast nor a god; but he yet possessed an element of divinity within him, and only by participating in the life of the polis—only by offering up “liturgies” in its name, sacrificing to its gods, attending to its public business, and participating in the purifying spectacles of the comic and the tragic drama—only by doing these things could he fully realize the divinity lodged within him. The typical Hellene was, we are told, devoted to his city, and the special quality of his devotion made a lasting impression upon the imagination of the West.
Intellectuals have never succeeded in reconciling themselves to the decline of Athens; and ever since the demise of that splendid city they have never ceased to lament the death of public virtue. Sophisticated Romans living in the age of empire, enamored of the old Hellenic ideal of community, lamented the corruption of their own once-virtuous city, and looked back wistfully to a golden age when citizens supposedly possessed a high purpose in life, lived on friendly terms with their neighbors, and spent their days contributing to the welfare of the res publica. A thousand years after the fall of the Western Empire, European intellectuals rediscovered the city-states of antiquity; they contrasted the virtue of Rome and Sparta with the mean and selfish spirit of their own times. Machiavelli lived in what we all know to have been one of the most brilliant ages man has ever known, and yet he cursed Fortuna for having been born in the midst of the Renaissance. He cursed the “malignity of the time”: in it one came across nothing “but extreme misery, infamy, and contempt”; all was “besmirched by filth of every kind.”1 It was, of course, an age of genius: Machiavelli himself knew Leonardo. Leonardo’s plan to divert the Arno, and deprive Pisa of it, seized Machiavelli’s imagination, and he used all of his influence at Florence to get the plan accepted.2 But if Machiavelli admired the scientific genius of Leonardo, he admired it not as a thing worthy in itself, nor even as a thing instrumental in the discovery of truth. He admired it as a means of realizing those communitarian ideals that he cherished—those ideals of public virtue, civic glory, and republican heroism, which were the central passions of his life.
The same communitarian ideal that inspired the Renaissance sages inspired their counterparts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Men as different as Milton, Bolingbroke, Rousseau, and Jefferson were each seduced by the idea of community. Jefferson’s ideas about community were of particular importance to Bobby. In his book To Seek a Newer World Bobby noted Jefferson’s belief that “the salvation of the Republic” lay in “the regeneration and spread of the principles of the New England townships,” communal structures that were in Jefferson’s time already beginning to be “overshadowed by growing state governments.”3 To meet the problem, Bobby observed, Jefferson “urged the division of the nation” into a “‘republic of wards’—areas perhaps a fourth the size of a (nineteenth century) county—that would provide for their own elementary schools, a company of militia, their own lower courts, police, and welfare services.” Bobby noted with approval Jefferson’s assertion that each “ward would thus be a small republic within itself and every man in the State would thus become an acting member of the common government, transacting in person a great portion of its rights and duties, subordinate indeed, yet important, and entirely within his competence.”4
In recent decades the idea of community has continued to provoke enthusiasm. Critics like Edmund Wilson studied the influence of old-fashioned civic ideas on Robert E. Lee, Justice Holmes, John Jay Chapman, and Woodrow Wilson.5 Scholars like Lewis Mumford and Edith Hamilton drew from their study of the Greek polis conclusions about the importance of community in modern life. (Mumford testified at the Ribicoff hearings; following Aristotle, he declared that “democracy, in any active sense, begins and ends in communities small enough for their members to meet face to face”).6 During the 1960s a younger generation of scholars that included J. G. A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, and Gordon Wood demonstrated the extent to which classical notions of citizenship and community influenced the founders of the American republic. Their researches inspired a number of contemporary theorists of community, among them Amitai Etzioni, Michael Sandel, and Bruce Ackerman. In his second inaugural address President Clinton himself paid homage to the communitarian tradition, declaring that Americans’ “greatest responsibility” was to “embrace a new spirit of community.”7 Hillary Clinton’s book, the title of which derives from the saying “It takes a village to raise a child,” would have made perfect sense to an Athenian, who would have understood it to mean “It takes a polis to make a citizen.”
The idea of community is for intellectuals what snake oil used to be for traveling salesmen; there has scarcely been a time, since the dawn of the Renaissance, when a skillful academic or literary charlatan could not earn his bread by peddling the notion of public-spiritedness and palming it off on naive takers. The very complexity of our modern Enlightened world has made men peculiarly susceptible to the appeal of a golden age of small villages and pristine republican virtue. But the attractiveness of the communitarian ideal does not make it an intellectually compelling one, and at a distance of thirty years even his most devoted admirers may wonder whether Bobby, in making the communitarian ideal central to his attempts to reinvigorate the ghetto, did not stumble into a blind alley.
It’s easy to understand why Bobby should have been attracted to the communitarian tradition. When Aristotle said that men fully become men—that they become indeed partly divine—when they participate actively in the life of their city, when Pericles said that those men who did not participate in the public affairs of Athens were idiots, ciphers, savages, both men were saying, in the idiom of old Greece, that citizenship gives men self-confidence; that it makes them vital, capable, fully developed human beings; that it permits them to realize their highest potential. And this, of course, is precisely what Bobby hoped the restoration of the communitarian idea would accomplish in places like Bedford-Stuyvesant—that it would transform underconfident, underperforming, underdeveloped men and women into self-reliant citizens. But if it was ingenious of Bobby to have made the connection between the communitarian tradition of old Hellas and America’s own late-twentieth-century problems, he failed to perceive the extent to which the tradition in which he placed such great faith was a chimerical one.
If community is the snake oil of the intellectuals, it is the opium of disgraced politicians and idealistic dreamers. At no time in history does the ideal res publica of which the communitarian philosophers dreamed seem ever actually to have existed; the extant literature is almost exclusively nostalgic, it is almost exclusively elegiac.8 The great civic philosophers never celebrate the existen
ce of community; they always lament the lack of it. We are shown not virtue, but the memory of it. Neither Sallust, nor Machiavelli, nor Rousseau ever saw, with his own eyes, the ideal communities each of them celebrated in his writings; they could do no more than claim to have discovered, in the uncertain and fragmentary record of the past, dim evidences of a civic felicity that had long since vanished from the earth. Rousseau’s description of classical Sparta and Machiavelli’s description of early republican Rome belong to the realm of myth and fiction, not of history and fact; they are civic mirages, fantasies that comforted their troubled creators in the midst of difficult lives. Rousseau dwelt, throughout his life, in a world of solipsistic dreams, and after the return of the Medicis to Florence, so, too, did Machiavelli. They escaped a sordid reality and lost themselves in the pages of Livy and Plutarch.9 Their writings on the idea of community are best regarded as a form of personal therapy, and as such must be treated with the utmost wariness by statesmen who, like Bobby, would resurrect their ideas and put them to a practical use. The community that is at once wholly loved and wholly loving: it doesn’t exist and never has existed. (Friedrich von Hayek went so far as to say that it shouldn’t exist; classical republican politics, he argued, is bad policy.10) Bobby, in emphasizing the importance of human dialogue and political participation in the ghetto, accepted the communitarian fiction that these activities necessarily improve and elevate the soul. They don’t. Jack Newfield tells us that Bobby admired Tacitus more than any other Roman writer. But he seems to have overlooked the great lesson of Tacitus—that the virtuous republic is a beautiful but impossible thing.11
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