30. Let the Word Go Forth, p. 12.
31. Alsop, I’ve Seen the Best of It, p. 440.
32. See Syme, The Roman Revolution, pp. 78–79.
CHAPTER 8
1. Morgenthau, quoted in American Journey, p. 145; Manchester, Death of a President, pp. 146, 195; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 607.
2. Morgenthau, quoted in American Journey, p. 145; Manchester, Death of a President, pp. 195–96; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 607–8.
3. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 608; Manchester, Death of a President, p. 256. Manchester reports that Bobby’s exact words were “He died.” Manchester, Death of a President, p. 257.
4. Dean Markham picked up David Kennedy at his school. See Manchester, Death of a President, p. 259.
5. Ibid., pp. 387, 389–91; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 608–610.
6. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 611.
7. Quoted in Wilson, The Sixties, p. 164. Cf. Leamer, The Kennedy Women, p. 526.
8. Alsop, I’ve Seen the Best of It, p. 464.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Bradlee, Conversations, p. 242.
12. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 30.
13. Ibid., p. 31.
14. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 192; Newfield, A Memoir, p. 31.
15. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 193.
16. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 612–13.
17. Ibid., p. 613.
18. Ibid., p. 618.
19. The effect of The Greek Way on Bobby was considerable. Many of the passages of poetry and prose that he quoted in his speeches are to be found in Miss Hamilton’s book. Bobby was moved by the lines of Sophocles quoted on page 158 of The Greek Way (see Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 618) and was fond of quoting the lines of Aeschylus that appear on page 156 of the book (see ibid., p. 618). In one of his notebooks Bobby copied out these words from The Greek Way: “All things are to be called into question; there are no limits set to thought” (see ibid., p. 617; Hamilton, The Greek Way, p. 25). The quotation from Romeo and Juliet that Bobby used at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City was said by Schlesinger to have been suggested by Jacqueline Kennedy, but Bobby must himself have been familiar with it from his reading of The Greek Way (see Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 64; Hamilton, The Greek Way, p. 50). The Emerson quotation that Bobby so often used—about truth and repose—is also found in The Greek Way. Ibid., p. 36. Both Bobby and Jack quoted Miss Hamilton’s rendering of the Greek definition of happiness. See ibid, p. 24.
20. Ibid., p. 40.
21. Ibid., pp. 65–67.
22. Ibid., p. 66.
23. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 32.
24. See the first speech of the priest in Sophocles, Oedipus the King.
25. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 305.
26. See Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 637 (“His brother’s last wish had been a war against poverty”). Leaders who … failed to “press”: ibid., p. 151.
27. Manchester, Death of a President, p. 378.
28. See Newfield, A Memoir, p. 28.
29. Morison, Turmoil and Tradition, p. 81.
30. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 161.
31. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 200; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 667.
32. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 201; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 667.
33. On Bobby’s rudeness to Mrs. Roosevelt and former Senator Lehman, see Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 126; a similar version of the story is told by the Davids in Making of a Folk Hero, p. 6. On Bobby and Chester Bowles, see Newfield, A Memoir, p. 28. Bowles himself denied the story that Bobby jabbed his finger into Bowles’s body when he told the elder statesman that “he should keep his mouth shut and remember that he was for the Bay of Pigs.” Schaffer, Chester Bowles, p. 207.
34. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 668.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., p. 594.
37. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, pp. 205, 216; David and David, Making of a Folk Hero, p. 253.
38. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 219.
39. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 667.
40. American Journey, pp. 179–80.
41. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 669–70.
42. Ibid., p. 670.
43. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 145.
44. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 616.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., p. 877.
47. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 30.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Your brother’s dead: Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 670.
51. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, pp. 225–26.
52. Ibid., p. 233.
53. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 38.
54. Goodwin, Remembering America, pp. 267–81.
55. On his desire to emulate his heroes, see ibid., pp. 217, 259 (LBJ wished to “out-Roosevelt Roosevelt”).
56. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 285.
57. Ibid., pp. 323, 340.
58. Ibid., p. 324.
59. Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, p. 93.
CHAPTER 9
1. Collected Speeches, p. 156.
2. Ibid., p. 157.
3. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 782–83.
4. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 40.
5. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 882.
6. Vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 62; cf. Salinger, P.S., pp. 187–88.
7. Salinger, P.S., p. 188.
8. “The Senate’s Distinguished Traditions,” speech delivered in the Senate, May 1, 1957, in Let the Word Go Forth, pp. 43–49.
9. Gardner, Robert Kennedy in New York, p. 47.
10. “Blackened tunnels”: Robert Kennedy, To Seek a Newer World, p. 56; terrible housing projects: Collected Speeches, p. 180; “brutalities”: ibid., p. 156; dirt and stink: ibid., p. 160; “grotesque” violence: ibid., p. 195; “congestion,” “filth,” “danger and purposelessness”: To Seek a Newer World, p. 19.
11. RFK Press Release, February 1, 1965, in RFK Senate Papers, file 11.
12. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 241.
13. Collected Speeches, p. 157.
14. Ibid., pp. 159–60.
15. Ibid., p. 163.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p. 162; vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 83.
18. Excerpts from the speeches were later published in Collected Speeches, pp. 165–76.
19. To Seek a Newer World, p. 20.
20. Ibid., p. 8. Bobby found in Edith Hamilton additional support for his growing dislike of bureaucracy and the dull standardization of mind it fostered. See To Seek a Newer World, pp. 7–8, 61–62. Bureaucracy, according to Bobby, made it impossible for human beings to live up to the Greek ideal of happiness—“the exercise of vital powers along the lines of excellence in a life affording them scope”—that he had adopted as his own. To Seek a Newer World, p. 61; cf. Hamilton, The Greek Way, p. 24.
21. Collected Speeches, pp. 208–9.
22. See David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd; Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit; Mills et al., The Power Elite; and W. H. Whyte, The Organization Man. On this point I am indebted to Halberstam, The Fifties, pp. 521–36.
23. Collected Speeches, p. 170.
24. Draft of a speech, RFK Senate Papers, file 120.
25. Address, Day Care Council of New York, May 8, 1967.
26. Collected Speeches, pp. 209–210 (emphasis added).
27. Cf. ibid., p. 171.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., p. 188. It was “absurd,” Bobby said, “to think that the federal government can find all the answers or meet our needs in any significant fashion.” Ross, Apostle of Change, p. 113
.
30. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 783.
31. Collected Speeches, p. 173.
32. Ibid., p. 190. That which “is given or granted can be taken away,” that which “is begged can be refused,” but that which “is earned is kept,” that which “is self-made is unalienable,” and that which “you do for yourselves and your children can never be taken away.” Ibid, p. 188.
33. Ibid., p. 205.
34. Vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 80.
35. Quoted in Ross, Apostle of Change, p. 159.
36. “We cannot,” Bobby declared, “expect people to become independent and self-supporting if we treat them as entirely dependent.” Draft of a speech, in RFK Senate Papers, file 120.
37. See vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 90.
38. Collected Speeches, pp. 209–10.
CHAPTER 10
1. Fortune, Machiavelli wrote, “is a woman and if she is to be submissive it is necessary to beat and coerce her.… Always, being a woman, she favours young men, because they are less circumspect and more ardent, and because they command her with more audacity.” The Prince, p. 80.
2. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits, p. 140.
3. White, The Making of the President 1960, p. 166 (“As Caesar, after he had conquered Gaul, used the Gallic cavalrymen to mop up Pompey in the ensuing civil wars of Rome, so now Kennedy was using the big-city bosses to mop up Stevenson”).
4. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 66.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., pp. 99–100.
7. Quoted in vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 86; cf. Ross, Apostle of Change, p. 115.
8. Vanden Heuvel, On His Own, p. 86.
9. Quoted in Newfield, A Memoir, p. 73.
10. With the possible exceptions of Theodore Roosevelt, his father, and his older brother Jack.
11. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 26.
12. Ibid., pp. 26–27; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 801.
13. Vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, pp. 16–17.
14. Manchester, Death of a President, pp. 602–3.
15. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Essays and Lectures, p. 265.
16. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in ibid., p. 65.
17. Ibid.
18. Chapman, “Emerson,” in Writings of Chapman, p. 163.
19. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Essays and Lectures, pp. 259–60.
20. Ibid., p. 276.
21. See Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 801.
22. Halberstam, Unfinished Odyssey, p. 9.
23. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Essays and Lectures, p. 263.
24. See Lincoln, letter to Thomas Lincoln and John D. Johnston, December 24, 1848, in Speeches and Writings, vol. 1, pp. 224–25.
25. RFK notes on testimony of Dr. Robert Coles during the Ribicoff Hearings, in RFK Senate Papers, file 18.
26. Adams, History of the United States (Jefferson’s administration), p. 107.
27. James, Hawthorne, in Literary Criticism, pp. 351–52.
28. Wilson, FND, pp. 264–65.
29. William James rejected his brother Henry’s faith in institutions and the traditions they perpetuate. At the time of the Dreyfus affair James wrote: “We ‘intellectuals’ in America must all work to keep our precious birthright of individualism, and freedom from these institutions [church, army, aristocracy, royalty]. Every great institution is perforce a means of corruption—whatever good it may also do. Only in the free personal relation is full ideality to be found.” Quoted in Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism, p. 39.
30. Burke, Reflections, p. 76.
31. It will not be thought surprising that T. S. Eliot disliked Emerson or that Henry James found him wanting. See James, Literary Criticism, pp. 268–70. Eliot rejected the democratic and individualist creed that grew out of the Puritanism of his own (and Emerson’s) ancestors; he was received into the English church in 1927, and became the subject of an English king (as James had before him). For Eliot, Emerson’s essays were “already an encumbrance,” a burden, a moral and intellectual dead end. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 193. Eliot found his calling not in the profession of his own genius and powers (self-reliance), but in the assimilation of these to a series of larger traditions and creeds (reliance on others). He wrote poetry not merely with himself or even his own generation “in his bones,” but with the feeling that “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer” had a meaning and canonical significance. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 4. A mature poet could not, in Eliot’s view, rely on his own subjective self as the principal source of his poetry, even if such experience was always, at some level or other, present in his work. Gordon, Eliot’s New Life, p. 2 (describing her “attempt to elicit the autobiographical element in Eliot’s poetry by measuring the poetry against the life”). Far more important than the poet’s own personality was what Eliot called “the historical sense,” a sense that he believed “nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year.” Eliot was dismissive of the type of poet—and of the type of man—who had too little historical sense, too little “maturity,” too excessive a reliance on his own individual self. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, p. 49. Eliot’s conception of the “historical sense” helps, of course, to explain his own poetic technique; his own poetry is haunted, perhaps burdened, by the weight of the whole of “the literature of Europe from Homer.” The notes Eliot appended to The Waste Land give the impression almost of a pastiche of Baudelaire, Dante, Webster, Shakespeare, Ovid, Virgil, Spenser, Marvell, Augustine, Kyd, and Frazer. See Eliot, Collected Poems, pp. 70–76. Edmund Wilson observed that in reading Eliot “we are sometimes visited by uneasy recollections of Ausonius, in the fourth century, composing Greek-and-Latin macaronics and piecing together poetic mosaics out of verses from Virgil.” Wilson, Axël’s Castle, p. 111. “Immature poets imitate,” Eliot asserted. “Mature poets steal.” Eliot, The Sacred Wood, p. 125.
32. Emerson, “Literary Ethics,” in Essays and Lectures, p. 97.
33. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in ibid., p. 259.
34. The popularity of the drug Prozac seems in large part attributable to the fact that a person who, prior to taking it, exhibited all the signs of insufficient self-confidence is said to be miraculously transformed by the drug into a person who displays all the characteristics of a highly self-confident person.
35. See LeMoyne Billings’s remarks in American Journey, p. 37.
36. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 42; Mary Bailey Gimble, quoted in American Journey, p. 37.
37. Quoted in Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 33.
38. Ibid., p. 42.
39. American Journey, p. 37.
40. Trilling, “A Washington Memoir,” p. 62.
41. Ibid.
42. Halberstam, Unfinished Odyssey, p. 127.
43. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 18; American Journey, p. 294.
44. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 18.
45. Ibid., p. 35; American Journey, p. 279.
46. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 35.
47. American Journey, p. 194; Newfield, A Memoir, p. 18.
48. Halberstam, Unfinished Odyssey, p. 96.
49. Collected Speeches, p. 208; cf. vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 86; Ross, Apostle of Change, p. 105; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 804.
50. Collected Speeches, p. 172.
CHAPTER 11
1. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 95.
2. Vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, pp. 91–92; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 785–86.
3. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 786.
4. See letter, Bobby to McGeorge Bundy, in the Walinsky Papers, file 1.
5. See Newfield, A Memoir, pp. 95–102; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 787–88; vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman,
On His Own, pp. 92–93.
6. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 97; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 788; Walinsky, memorandum to Bobby, undated, concerning the need for action in Bedford-Stuyvesant to be consistent with “the community’s own expression of will and interest,” in the Walinsky Papers, file 2.
7. See Collected Speeches, p. 188.
8. Bobby believed in the necessity of “cooperation with the private business community” in the attempt to create “self-sustaining economically viable enterprises” in the ghetto. See Collected Speeches, pp. 188, 190, 191.
9. Ibid., p. 172.
10. The use of tax incentive and forgiveness schemes to stimulate private investment in underdeveloped areas was pioneered in the so-called Bootstrap program for Puerto Rico in the 1940s. See John R. Newsom and Herbert Sturz, “A Proposal for Major Economic Aid to Harlem,” August 12, 1964, in Walinsky Papers, file 2. As David Rockefeller observed in his testimony during the Ribicoff hearings on urban affairs, the tax code had also been used to encourage American investment in developing nations. See Bobby’s memorandum re: Urban Housing Investment Act, circa 1967, in RFK Senate Papers, file 11. By January 1967 Edelman was at work on a scheme to use “the Internal Revenue Code to encourage private enterprise to go into the ghetto.” See memorandum, Edelman to Bobby, January 25, 1967, in RFK Senate Papers, file 112; letter, Edelman to John R. Newsom, January 16, 1967, in RFK Senate Papers, file 112. On July 12, 1967, Bobby introduced a bill “to provide federal tax credits, accelerated depreciation schedules, and job-training programs as incentive for businessmen to locate industry in poverty centers.” See Ross, Apostle of Change, pp. 155–57. President Johnson declined to support the bill. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 789; Newfield, A Memoir, pp. 105–6.
11. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 105.
12. The letter is dated January 18, 1967, and can be found in the Walinsky Papers, file 1.
13. Ibid.
14. Ford Foundation Proposal, March 9, 1967, in RFK Senate Papers, file 11.
15. Ibid.
16. See Ross, Apostle of Change, p. 153.
17. Memorandum noting questions for Walter Reuther in connection with testimony in the Ribicoff hearings on urban affairs, December 1966, in RFK Senate Papers, file 18; cf. Walinsky, memorandum to Bobby, undated, concerning the need for action consistent with “the community’s own expression of will and interest,” in the Walinsky Papers, file 2.
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