The Roosevelts
Peter Collier with David Horowitz, The Roosevelts: An American Saga (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
The Sacred Wood
T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920).
Securities Regulation
Louis Loss and Joel Seligman, Securities Regulation, 11 vols., 3d. ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989).
Selected Essays
T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950).
The Shores of Light
Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the 1920s and 1930s (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985; originally published 1952).
The Sixties
Edmund Wilson, The Sixties: The Last Journal, 1960–1972 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993).
The Sixties Reader
The Sixties: The Art, Attitudes, Politics, and Media of Our Most Explosive Decade, ed. Gerald Howard (New York: Marlowe, 1995; originally published 1982).
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Penguin, 1974; originally published 1968).
Speeches and Writings
Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 2 vols., ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Library of America, 1989).
The Stevensons
Jean H. Baker, The Stevensons: A Biography of an American Family (New York: Norton, 1997; originally published 1996).
Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau: A Week; Walden; Maine Woods; Cape Cod, ed. Robert F. Sayre (New York: Library of America, 1985).
The Triple Thinkers
Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers and the Wound and the Bow (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984).
Turmoil and Tradition
Elting E. Morison, Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960).
United States
Gore Vidal, United States—Essays: 1952–1992 (New York: Random House, 1993).
Upstate
Edmund Wilson, Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971).
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (London: Heron, 1978; originally published 1847–48).
The Very Best Men
Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
Views from the Circle
Trustees of Groton School, Views from the Circle: Seventy-five Years of Groton School (privately printed, 1960).
Walter Lippmann
Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980).
Whittaker Chambers
Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997).
The Wise Men
Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (New York: Touchstone, 1988; originally published 1986).
Worlds to Conquer
Cary Reich, The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller—Worlds to Conquer: 1908–1958 (New York: Doubleday, 1996).
Writings of Chapman
The Selected Writings of John Jay Chapman, ed. Jacques Barzun (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1957).
Yeats
Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: Norton, 1978; originally published 1948).
1968
Jules Witcover, The Years the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America (New York: Warner, 1997).
1968 World Book Year Book
The 1968 World Book Year Book: A Review of the Events of 1967 (Chicago: Field Enterprises, 1968).
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. B. Drummond Ayres, Jr., “Reagan Joins a Kennedy Remembrance,” The New York Times, June 6, 1981, p. 9.
2. Close ties: See Wills, Reagan’s America, pp. 261–78.
3. Ibid., pp. 261–78, 285. Stein and Lew Wasserman were among Reagan’s most important California patrons; curiously enough, Stein’s son-in-law, William vanden Heuvel, was an important protégé of Bobby’s.
4. Bobby helped Ted win a Senate seat: Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 371.
5. Bly, The Kennedy Men, p. 229.
6. Ibid., pp. 203, 208, 209, 225.
7. The article was published in The Washington Monthly in December 1979.
8. Ayres, op. cit.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Reagan in Hollywood: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 143.
12. American Journey, p. 193.
13. Tribune of the underclass: Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 778–800.
14. Reagan said: “And may I say I remember very vividly those last days of the California primary and the closeness that had developed in our views about the growing size and unresponsiveness of government.” The Times sneered: “A bit of politics did creep into the ceremony. The President managed to mention smaller government, while Senator Kennedy talked of looking after the needs of the forgotten.” Ayres, op. cit.
15. Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, p. 207.
16. Ibid., p. 211.
17. Wills’s argument is nonsense for the reasons noted by Arthur Schlesinger in Robert Kennedy, pp. 801–2.
18. For an example of Bobby’s contemporary value as a liberal icon, see Peter Edelman’s March 1997 Atlantic Monthly article, in which Edelman deployed Bobby’s ghost against President Clinton in order to condemn the President for signing landmark welfare legislation in 1996. Edelman, “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 1997, pp. 43–58.
19. Schlesinger’s Robert Kennedy is 1,066 pages long.
20. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 803.
21. Ibid.
22. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 12.
23. Ibid., p. 19.
24. Ibid., pp. 19, 46.
25. Bobby, quoting Lincoln, in Collected Speeches, p. 210.
26. Robert Kennedy, foreword to Profiles in Courage, pp. ix–x.
27. Hamilton, Reckless Youth, p. 110.
28. Bobby and the intellectuals: see Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 964–65.
29. Kozol, Amazing Grace, passim.
CHAPTER 1
1. The revolutionaries who begin as revolutionaries, who never for a moment feel sympathy for the system they wish to overthrow, produce the least constructive revolutions; having never entered into the life of the system they wish to destroy, they do not understand its weaknesses or its strengths, and are thus ill-equipped to reform it.
2. See Newfield, A Memoir, p. 44. But cf. Schlesinger’s assertion that Bobby’s “devotions never … carried him to the point of contemplating the priesthood.” Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 17.
3. Joseph Kennedy’s motion picture company: Whalen, Founding Father, pp. 63, 91; Kessler, The Sins of the Father, p. 52. Bootlegged liquor: Kessler, The Sins of the Father, p. 38.
4. Collier and Horowitz state that the Kennedys spent their first summer on the Cape in 1928. Collier and Horowitz, The Kennedys, p. 45. The authors would seem to have confused the year in which Joseph Kennedy bought the Malcolm cottage with the year the family first stayed in the house (as tenants). See Damore, Cape Cod Years, pp. 19–21. On Joseph Kennedy’s early career, see Whalen, Founding Father, pp. 18–113; Birmingham, Real Lace, p. 176.
5. Damore, Cape Cod Years, p. 20.
6. Kennedy’s claim that he lost $1 million on the project is doubtful; see Birmingham, Real Lace, p. 183.
7. On Silver King, see Whalen, Founding Father, p. 80.
8. Damore, Cape Cod Years, p. 156.
9. Bly, The Kennedy Men, p. 325.
10. Whalen, Founding Father, p. 59; Leamer, The Kennedy Women, pp. 169–70; Birmingham, Real Lace, p. 185.
/> 11. See Alsop, I’ve Seen the Best of It, p. 410.
12. When in 1951 Joseph Kennedy spoke up at a meeting of Hyannis Port’s Civic Association, he was interrupted by a woman who “told the chairman she had not come to listen to that ‘Johnny-come-lately’ make a speech.” Damore, Cape Cod Years, p. v.
13. Quoted in Whalen, Founding Father, p. 59.
14. Ibid.
15. Birmingham, Real Lace, p. 185; Wills, Kennedy Imprisonment, p. 63.
16. FDR said to Henry Morgenthau: “Who would have thought the English could take into camp a red-haired Irishman.” Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, p. 76.
17. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 5.
18. Birmingham, Real Lace, p. 179.
19. Cf. Whalen, Founding Father, p. 91 (Hyannis “came to be the place the Kennedys meant when they spoke of ‘home’”).
20. Kessler, The Sins of the Father, p. 74.
21. Collier and Horowitz, The Kennedys, p. 263.
22. Rovere, The American Establishment and Other Reports, pp. 11–15. See also Vidal, Palimpsest, pp. 357–58.
23. Alsop, Centenary Remembrance, p. 29.
24. Whalen, Founding Father, p. 103.
25. Ibid., pp. 338–48.
26. Harbaugh, Lawyer’s Lawyer, pp. 451–52.
27. Though at ease with the patricians, Davis never embraced the theories of grand government that men like the Roosevelts espoused, and he remained, to the end of his life, an unreconstructed Jeffersonian Democrat. See ibid, pp. 336–82 (chapters 21–22).
28. On Joseph Kennedy’s insistence that his sons attend elite secular schools, see Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, pp. 98–99.
29. See Whalen, Founding Father, pp. 22–24, 26.
30. Aldrich, Old Money, p. 104.
31. Ibid., pp. 273–74.
32. In Johnson’s book Stover played football at Yale; in high school at Lawrencville he had been the captain of the football team.
33. See Matthews, Kennedy and Nixon, pp. 18, 184. By the time Nixon talked to Monica Crowley in the early nineties, his admiration of JFK was considerably less extravagant than it had been forty years before; Crowley characterized Nixon’s later, cooler attitude toward his old rival as “a curious blend of admiration, exasperation, esteem, and healthy rivalry.” Crowley, Nixon off the Record, p. 29. Nixon insisted that, contrary to what others had written, he “never envied Kennedy.” Ibid., p. 36
34. American Journey, pp. 171–72.
35. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 72–73.
36. Recognition signals: Alsop, I’ve Seen the Best of It, p. 23.
37. American Journey, p. 39.
38. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 623.
39. White, The Making of the President 1960, p. 17.
40. Ibid., p. 18.
41. A quintessential Boston Catholic: Newfield, A Memoir, pp. 33, 45.
42. Bly, The Kennedy Men, p. 326; Damore, Cape Cod Years, p. 40; Damore, Senatorial Privilege, p. 111.
43. Damore, Senatorial Privilege, p. 95. Mother and Dad frowned upon excess: Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 120.
44. Damore, Senatorial Privilege, p. 73.
45. Ibid., pp. 73–74.
46. Ibid., p. 105.
47. Bly, The Kennedy Men, p. 179.
48. Damore, Senatorial Privilege, pp. 23–28.
CHAPTER 2
1. Cf. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, pp. 131–73 (chapter 4). Although Hofstadter’s account of what he calls “the status revolution” differs considerably from mine, I am nevertheless indebted to his suggestive essay.
2. See Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen, p. xi.
3. O’Connor, Boston Irish, pp. 118–33.
4. Ibid.
5. Wilson, “John Jay Chapman: The Mute and the Open Strings,” The Triple Thinkers, p. 150.
6. See Lutz, American Nervousness, passim.
7. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, pp. 138–39, n. 6; Davies, Hereditary Patriotic Societies, vol. II, pp. 441ff.
8. Mills, The Power Elite, p. 55.
9. Kessler, The Sins of the Father, pp. 145–48.
10. Lutz, American Nervousness, p. 79.
11. Theodore Roosevelt a hero to Bobby: Newfield, A Memoir, p. 48.
12. Quoted in Hofstader, APT, p. 272.
13. Cf. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, pp. 140–41.
14. Ibid., p. 136.
15. Adams, Education, p. 1176.
16. Morison, Turmoil and Tradition, p. 120.
17. In seeking a structure “superior to the energies of the corporation,” the men of Theodore Roosevelt’s and Henry Stimson’s generation “turned instinctively to the state.” Ibid., p. 122.
18. The patricians championed a strain of Enlightened thought, ultimately French in origin, that emphasized the importance of rational planning superintended by a central agency (such as an enlightened despot or an executive and legislative authority that expressed, in an enlightened way, the “general will” of the people). This strain of Enlightened thought must be distinguished from the Anglo-Scottish strain, which emphasized the importance of economic and political freedom in making human progress possible.
19. Wilson, Upstate, p. 12.
20. Jack Kennedy told Theodore Sorensen that “I’ve almost never seen him [Joseph P. Kennedy] read a serious book.” Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 32.
21. Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, p. 98.
22. Ibid., pp. 159, 268.
23. Whalen, Founding Father, p. 71.
24. Cf. Sir Robert Vansittart, quoted in Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 32.
25. Ibid., p. 5.
26. On the regulation of capital markets and securities issuances by the federal government prior to the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, see Loss and Seligman, Securities Regulation, vol. I, pp. 152–285.
27. Abe Fortas, a protégé of William O. Douglas and Thurman Arnold, worked at both the AAA and the SEC before he became general counsel to the Bituminous Coal Division of the Department of the Interior.
28. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 11.
29. Steel, Walter Lippmann, p. 24.
30. Whalen, Founding Father, pp. 112–13.
31. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 15.
32. Whitney’s watch chain: Chernow, The House of Morgan, p. 422.
33. See Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, p. 140.
34. Ibid., p. 146.
35. Cf. Alsop, Centenary Remembrance, p. 30.
36. See Hofstadter, APT, p. 416.
37. Hofstadter used the term “Mugwumps,” not “Stimsonians.” Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, pp. 91–93, 167 et seq.
38. Bundy and Stimson, On Active Service, p. 17.
39. Cf. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, p. 182, where the author states that the “Point Four” passage of Truman’s 1949 inaugural address “amounted to a promise to extend the New Deal and Fair Deal to the world.”
40. On the New Deal’s “commitment to retaining and expanding the institutions of the welfare state,” see Brinkley, End of Reform, p. 7. On a number of occasions Franklin Roosevelt expressed misgivings about certain features of the welfare state; at one point relatively early in his presidency he called the dole “a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” But the welfare state nonetheless remains an enduring part of his legacy.
CHAPTER 3
1. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 44.
2. Other graduates of Groton include Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, Sumner Welles, Joseph Alsop, McGeorge Bundy, William Bundy, Francis Biddle, Douglas Dillon, Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, John Bross, George Rublee, and Stanley Resor.
3. On Endicott Peabody’s “indifference” to business and his preparation of boys for “the ministry and statesmanship,” see Louis Auchincloss, “The Different G
rotons,” in Views from the Circle, p. 243. Cf. John Train, “Letter to a Classmate,” in Views from the Circle, pp. 288–89 (“many graduates are made to feel that there is something infra dig. about being a builder or a professional man” as opposed to making “a career in government”).
4. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 42.
5. Brooks Adams, introduction to Henry Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma. Public office did tempt Henry Adams when he was a young man. Adams said of his friend, Secretary of State John Hay, that “he did what I set out to do, only I could never have done it.” Brooks, Indian Summer, p. 271.
6. Quoted by Harry Sedgwick, in Stein, Edie, p. 33.
7. Walter S. Hinchman, “My Groton Years,” in Views from the Circle, p. 158.
8. Ibid.
9. Gibbon, Memoirs, pp. 75–91.
10. Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin, p. 39.
11. See, e.g., Biddle, An Artist’s Story. The relevant material is reprinted in an essay, “As I Remember Groton School,” in Views from the Circle, pp. 111–28, especially p. 122.
12. Alsop, I’ve Seen the Best of It, p. 59.
13. Mary Bailey Gimbel, quoted in American Journey, p. 37.
14. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 45.
15. Ibid., pp. 44–46.
16. Mary Bailey Gimbel, quoted in American Journey, p. 37.
17. See Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 67–68.
18. Ibid., p. 66.
19. “hitting the honors”: ibid., p. 53.
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