18. Ford Foundation Proposal, March 9, 1967, pp. 19–20, in RFK Senate Papers, file 11. Bundy collaborated with Stimson in the writing of On Active Service in Peace and War, an account of Stimson’s career.
19. Ford Foundation Proposal, March 9, 1967, p. 19, in RFK Senate Papers, file 11.
20. Ibid., p. 20.
21. See Tom Wolfe’s essay “The Radical Chic.”
22. See BSDPO, 7; memorandum, Thomas Johnston to Bobby, May 3, 1967, in RFK Senate Papers, file 11; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 786.
23. Marian Wright Edelman, quoted in American Journey, p. 124; cf. ibid., p. 279. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 794.
24. American Journey, p. 279.
25. Ibid., p. 124.
26. Ibid.; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 795.
27. Vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 171.
28. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 82.
29. Like the Lord: see Matt. 19:14.
30. The quotations in this paragraph are taken from a memorandum from Walinsky to Bobby entitled “Program for the Fall,” 1966, in the Walinsky Papers, file 2.
31. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 95.
CHAPTER 12
1. Baldwin, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” in Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket, p. 339.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. 376.
4. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 330–31.
5. “Martin Luther Queen”: Vidal, Palimpsest, p. 360.
6. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 331; American Journey, p. 119.
7. American Journey, p. 119.
8. Ibid., p. 122.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 119.
11. Ibid., p. 120.
12. Ibid., pp. 119–20.
13. Ibid., p. 120.
14. Ibid., p. 121.
15. Ibid., p. 122; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 334.
16. Cf. the definition of the verb “humiliate” in the Oxford English Dictionary.
17. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 878.
18. American Journey, p. 259.
19. Ibid., p. 260.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., pp. 305–6; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 908.
22. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 908.
23. American Journey, pp. 305–6.
24. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 909.
25. Cf. ibid.
26. “Did you touch him?” was a refrain heard wherever Bobby appeared. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 335.
27. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 239.
28. American Journey, p. 282.
29. Ibid.
30. White, The Making of the President 1968, pp. 173–74.
31. Ibid., p. 174.
32. Ibid.
33. American Journey, pp. 295, 299–300.
34. Ibid., p. 295.
35. “I can’t plan. Living every day is like Russian roulette.” Newfield, A Memoir, p. 31; cf. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 902; American Journey, p. 293.
36. Cf. Charles Quinn, quoted in American Journey, pp. 294–95. After I wrote these lines, I discovered that Ralph de Toledano made a similar point in R.F.K., p. 304.
37. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 17.
38. Arthur Schlesinger said that when Bobby “went to an Indian reservation or saw poor white families in Appalachia, those children became his children. The food they were eating was the food he might be eating; the hovel in which they were living was his.” American Journey, p. 277.
39. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 90.
40. Keats, p. 37 (March 13, 1819).
41. Quoted in Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 95.
42. Cf. Newfield, A Memoir, pp. 59, 280.
43. Newfield described Bobby’s presidential campaign as a “narcotic ritual.” See Newfield, A Memoir, p. 252.
44. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 809.
45. Vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 171; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 697.
46. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 785.
47. Peter Edelman, quoted in American Journey, p. 278.
48. Emerson, “Friendship,” in Essays and Lectures, p. 353.
49. Ibid., p. 342.
50. Herndon’s Lincoln, p. 344.
51. Ibid., p. 474.
52. Ibid., p. 250.
53. Ibid., p. 483.
54. Nietzsche, Human, p. 125.
55. See The Taming of the Shrew, Act I, Scenes I and II.
56. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 15.
57. Navasky, Kennedy Justice, p. 502.
58. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 79.
59. Joseph Kennedy did not “leave a stone unturned to encourage his boys,” Franklin Roosevelt’s eldest son said. He “was a great father.” Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 18.
60. E. Kennedy, The Fruitful Bough.
61. Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 31.
62. Ibid.
63. Alsop, I’ve Seen the Best of It, pp. 408–9. See also Leamer, The Kennedy Women, p. 405.
64. Alsop, I’ve Seen the Best of It, pp. 408–9.
65. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 18–19.
66. See, e.g., Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 20.
67. Matthews, Kennedy and Nixon, p. 65.
68. Ibid., p. 149.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. Reeves, President Kennedy, p. 76; Beschloss, Crisis Years, pp. 107–8.
72. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 59.
73. Bright sunshine lifted Bobby’s spirits: ibid., p. 225.
74. Vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, pp. 376–77.
75. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot, p. 15.
76. Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 38.
77. Richardson, Emerson, p. 181.
78. Beschloss, Crisis Years, p. 123.
79. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 600.
80. Ibid., p. 857.
81. Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, pp. 93–94.
82. Halberstam, Unfinished Odyssey, p. 110.
83. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 591.
84. Ibid.
85. Horowitz, Radical Son, p. 353.
86. Ibid.
87. See Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, p. 139.
88. Sallust, Bellum Catalinae, LIV.
89. See, e.g., Vidal, United States, p. 817.
90. On Joan Kennedy, see Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, pp. 39–40, 48–52.
91. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 3, p. 185. Theodosius’ humiliation was part of an act of penance.
92. Matt. 4:24.
93. See Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion, pp. 219–34.
94. Statement of the Honorable Robert F. Kennedy, Attorney General of the United States, before the Subcommittee on Education of the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Education and Labor, H.R. 7178, July 12, 1961, in Speeches.
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid.
97. Walinsky, memorandum entitled “Précis and Summary,” circa 1964, in Walinsky Papers, file 43. Cf. Walinsky’s ms., “Poverty: Through the Looking Glass,” in the Walinsky Papers, file 43.
CHAPTER 13
1. Ross, Apostle of Change, p. 510.
2. Dedication of swimming pool: vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 92.
3. Quoted in Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 315.
4. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 759.
5. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, pp. 346–47.
6. Manchester, Controversy, p. 59.
7. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 372.
8. Ibid., p. 308.
9. Ibid., pp. 368, 373.
10. Manchester, Controversy, pp. 75–76.
11. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 375
.
12. Ibid.
13. Vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 228.
14. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, pp. 376–82.
15. Ibid.; vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, pp. 227–39.
16. Quoted in Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 593.
17. Ibid., p. xi.
18. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 10.
19. Such vestiges of nineteenth-century individualism as could be found in twentieth-century America were cheap and degraded versions of the original creed—or so individualism’s critics maintained. See Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, pp. 9–13.
20. Lewis, The American Adam, passim.
21. Thoreau, Walden, in Thoreau, p. 348.
22. Cf. Burke, Reflections, p. 41.
23. Quoted in Ross, Apostle of Change, p. 32.
24. Memorandum, Robert Burke Johnson to Thomas Johnson, “First Report on Bedford-Stuyvesant Project,” January 10, 1967, in the Walinsky Papers, file 1.
25. Vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 91.
26. Collected Speeches, p. 177.
27. Ribicoff Hearings, p. 28.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. To Seek a Newer World, p. 20.
31. Ribicoff Hearings, p. 28.
32. Address, Day Care Council of New York, May 8, 1967, quoted in Ross, Apostle of Change, p. 112.
33. Ibid., pp. 112, 131. The observation that suburbs do not constitute true communities can also be found in To Seek a Newer World, p. 56.
34. Address, Day Care Council of New York, May 8, 1967, quoted in Ross, Apostle of Change, pp. 112, 131.
35. Ibid., p. 112.
36. Ribicoff Hearings, pp. 33, 37.
37. Speech in Bedford-Stuyvesant, October 10, 1966, quoted in Ross, Apostle of Change, p. 154.
38. Ribicoff Hearings, pp. 33, 37.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. See memorandum, Robert Burke Johnson to Thomas Johnston, “First Report on Bedford-Stuyvesant Project,” January 10, 1967, in the Walinsky Papers, file 1; BSDPO, pp. 5, 15; Ford Foundation Proposal, March 9, 1967, in RFK Senate Papers, file 11.
42. Memorandum entitled “Industrial Development—Job Creation Program: Proposed Minimum Revision,” circa 1967, p. 1, in the Walinsky Papers, file 1. See also The New York Times, June 25, 1967, p. 1 (“Brooklyn Ghetto Given $7 Million”). The “special impact” legislation took the form of amendments to the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. See memorandum entitled “Industrial Development,” op. cit.
43. Memorandum, Walinsky to Thomas Johnston, undated, in the Walinsky Papers, file 11.
44. Draft of letter, Bobby to McGeorge Bundy, p. 2, in the Walinsky Papers, file 1; Ross, Apostle of Change, p. 117. See also memorandum, Herbert S. Channick to Adam Walinsky, undated, in the Walinsky Papers, file 2.
45. See Daniel P. Moynihan, “The Crisis in Welfare: The View from New York,” p. 5, unpublished ms. in RFK Senate Papers, file 118 (“the closed shop has been outlawed by Federal law, but the building-trades unions continue to maintain one de facto”).
46. Memorandum, Thomas Johnston to Bobby, May 3, 1967, p. 3, in RFK Senate Papers, file 11.
47. Handwritten notes (Walinsky’s?) apparently passed to Bobby during the Ribicoff hearings, in RFK Senate Papers, file 18; notes for questions for Walter Reuther, December 5, 1966, in RFK Senate Papers, file 18.
48. Memorandum from Walinsky to Bobby entitled “Program for the Fall,” 1966, in the Walinsky Papers, file 2.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. Ribicoff Hearings, pp. 45–46.
53. Memorandum, Edelman to Bobby, in RFK Senate Papers, file 18.
54. Newfield, A Memoir, pp. 95–96.
55. Collected Speeches, p. 186; Newfield, A Memoir, p. 96.
56. Collected Speeches, p. 186; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 788.
57. Collected Speeches, p. 186.
58. The New York Times, June 25, 1967, p. 1 (“Brooklyn Ghetto Given $7 Million”); Collected Speeches, p. 190.
59. Vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 94.
CHAPTER 14
1. Machiavelli, Discourses, p. 267.
2. Clark’s Leonardo, p. 192.
3. To Seek a Newer World, p. 56.
4. Ibid., p. 57.
5. See Wilson’s essay on John Jay Chapman in The Triple Thinkers (especially pp. 149–50); Wilson’s essays on Lee and Holmes in Patriotic Gore; Wilson, FND, p. 183; and Wilson, The Shores of Light, p. 528.
6. Ross, Apostle of Change, p. 111. See also Mumford, The City in History, and Hamilton, The Greek Way, pp. 72, 136.
7. Quoted in The New York Times, January 21, 1997, p. A14.
8. The more closely we investigate the real history of the classical city-state, as opposed to the ideal history the dreamers have given us, the less likely we are to accept the communitarian thesis. The classical Athenian polis for which Michael Sandel, among others, pines, a city “whose conditions of life afforded [its citizens] the leisure, learning, and commonality to deliberate well about public concerns,” was, even in the glorious fifth century of Pericles and Phidias, very far from being a civic paradise. In Thucydides’ account of the period we discover a political life fully as ugly as our own; we find there the same relentless desire for power and mastery, the same unending clash of interest against interest, the same ceaseless aggrandizement of self and untiring devotion to merely personal felicity, that characterize our own American politics today. The citizens of fifth-century Athens, for all their careful deliberation, for all their exquisite sense of “commonality,” acquired an empire and ruled it tyrannically; acted in reckless disregard of the principles of human decency and their city’s long-term interests; and committed acts whose barbarity was exceeded only by their folly. The Athenians sent the innocent Miltiades, the architect of victory at Marathon, to die a horrible death in a dank dungeon, and forced Socrates, among the greatest of their city’s men, to drink the cup of hemlock. The various treacheries, ostracisms, judicial murders, and mass executions sanctioned by the citizens of Athens in the golden apogee of their power and glory, and the disastrous civil war in which their deliberative politics culminated, ought to give even the most ardent communitarian pause.
9. See Machiavelli’s letter to Vettori, December 10, 1513, in Letters of Machiavelli, p. 142. Rousseau’s tendencies toward fantasy and dreaminess are evident in a number of his works, including the Confessions and the Reveries of a Solitary Walker.
10. At the heart of the communitarian idea is the belief that people should extend the same sympathy and affection that they instinctively feel for their families and friends to the larger spheres of the neighborhood and the city. One contemporary advocate of communitarian ideas, Suzanna Sherry, has argued that citizens should “behave toward their country and its citizens as they do toward their families: proud, protective, and willing to make sacrifices.” Suzanna Sherry, “Responsible Republicanism: Educating for Citizenship,” University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 62, p. 162 (1995). But it is not only unrealistic to ask people to love a crowd in the same way that they love those with whom they are intimately connected through blood or friendship, it is also deeply subversive of sound economic order. An observation of Hayek’s is illuminating. Were we, he says, “to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do,” we would “destroy” that wider civilization. Aristotle, the preeminent philosopher of the polis, was unable to see that an extended market order—a “macrocosmos” in which the profit-driven commercial trading he denounced played a critical role in the efficient allocation of resources—had a good deal more to do with the greatness of fifth-centu
ry Athens—a “microcosmos”—than the practice of public virtue that he extolled. See Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, pp. 18–19, 43–47, 80–81.
11. Bobby’s admiration for Tacitus: Newfield, A Memoir, p. 48.
12. For Eichmann and the Freemasons, see Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 32.
CHAPTER 15
1. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 97.
2. Either prostitutes or housewives: Leamer, The Kennedy Women, p. 461.
3. Rose Kennedy, Times to Remember, pp. 102–3.
4. Eunice thought Bobby “anxious for approval and love, and therefore when he got a lot of that, which I think he did when he married Ethel, he blossomed.” Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 89.
5. Ibid., p. 591.
6. Oppenheimer, The Other Mrs. Kennedy, p. 317.
7. Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, p. 601.
8. Details of the February 1962 party: ibid., pp. 601–2; Oppenheimer, The Other Mrs. Kennedy, pp. 311–12. Oppenheimer states that Bobby and Guthman drove Monroe home from the February 1962 party; Spoto states that the drive followed the October 1961 party.
9. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 590.
10. Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, pp. 664–65.
11. See ibid., pp. 600–5.
12. See Oppenheimer, The Other Mrs. Kennedy, pp. 322–23.
13. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 3–4.
14. Kozol, Amazing Grace, p. 6.
15. Ibid.
16. See Lee Schmookler, “Rescuing the Homeless,” The Wall Street Journal, August 13, 1996, p. A12.
17. Ibid.
18. Dana Milbank, “In God’s Name: Michigan Now Relies on Churches to Help People Leave Welfare,” The Wall Street Journal, March 17, 1997, p. A1.
19. Carter, Culture of Disbelief, pp. 109–15, 120–23.
20. Out of an excessive fear that government might create an “established” religion—a state church like the Church of England—the Supreme Court has given us, in the last few decades, a jurisprudence that misreads the First Amendment and effectively prohibits the government from supporting promising means of rescuing people from despair, even when those means would tend neither to establish a church nor to infringe upon the free exercise of religion. (The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free excercise thereof…”) In the Supreme Court’s view, however, even the most indirect support of religion in general—as opposed to particular religions—is a violation of the Establishment Clause. The Court invented this constitutional prohibition out of thin air; the First Amendment itself says nothing about government support for religion in general. If the Establishment Clause requires the government to be scrupulously neutral between faith and faith, it nowhere requires the government to be neutral between religion, agnosticism, and atheism. The constitutional case law of the last few decades is at odds with the country’s shaping traditions; the federal government has never been neutral on the question of the value of religion in general (as opposed to the value of particular religious faiths). American history is full of examples of government “support” for religion, from chaplains and prayers in the legislature and the armed forces to the federal holiday of Christmas. When the other day I went to mail some letters, I could not help but note the irony, perhaps the tragedy, of a constitutional regime in which the post office is permitted to print stamps depicting the Blessed Virgin and play “Silent Night” in public places but in which federal aid to “faith-based” programs that save people’s lives is forbidden. There are, however, indications that this hostility toward religion is beginning to wane. In an influential book, The Culture of Disbelief, constitutional scholar Stephen Carter took issue with those who would make the Establishment Clause a “guarantor of public secularism.” Carter argued that if the Founders’ vision of a “wall” between church and state is to be made “compatible with the structure and needs of modern society,” a “few doors” need to be carved into the wall. Congress, emboldened by the change in public sentiment, recently passed a law guaranteeing “that a church has a right to compete for state contracts to perform welfare services without compromising ‘definition, development, practice and expression of its religious beliefs.’” The state of Michigan has gone so far as to instruct “its welfare officials to start ‘reaching out to … faith-based organizations for help’ in guiding people off public assistance and back into the mainstream.” It’s not clear, however, that this new approach will survive scrutiny in the courts.
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