The Last Patrician

Home > Other > The Last Patrician > Page 30
The Last Patrician Page 30

by Michael Knox Beran


  21. Cf. the character of Mark Winsome in Melville, The Confidence-Man, pp. 223–44 (chapters 36–39).

  22. Vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 23.

  23. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 619.

  24. Vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 23.

  25. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 25.

  26. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 781.

  27. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 25.

  28. Vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, pp. 23–24.

  29. Memorandum, Walinsky to Bobby, “Tasks Immediately Ahead in Bedford-Stuyvesant,” 1966, p. 3, in the Walinsky Papers, file 2.

  30. On solipsistic, “emotionally distant” Rose, see Leamer, The Kennedy Women, pp. 134, 136, 191, 375.

  31. Ibid., pp. 113–14.

  32. Quoted in Blake, Disraeli, pp. 201, 208.

  CHAPTER 16

    1. The meeting with Etienne Manac’h is described in Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 766–69, and vanden Huevel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, pp. 236–39.

    2. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 768; vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 238.

    3. Time exaggerated: Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 768.

    4. Ibid.

    5. See ibid., p. 769.

    6. Ibid., p. 774.

    7. See the 1968 World Book Year Book, p. 266.

    8. See Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 846. Bobby changed his mind after the Kerner Commission issued a first-rate report.

    9. Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, p. 78.

  10. Greene, The Quiet American, p. 25.

  11. Conrad, Lord Jim, pp. 12–13.

  12. Forster, A Passage to India, p. 27.

  13. On JFK’s skeptical attitude toward an American presence on the Asian mainland, see Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 701.

  14. Sorensen, Kennedy, pp. 17–18.

  15. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 124.

  16. Crowley, Nixon off the Record, p. 173.

  17. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 775.

  18. Isaacson and Thomas, The Wise Men, pp. 422, 446.

  19. Ibid., p. 648.

  20. Ibid., p. 647.

  21. Ibid., p. 671.

  22. Ibid., pp. 670–71.

  23. Ibid., pp. 652, 693–95, 702.

  24. Ibid., p. 687.

  25. One must make an exception for Joseph Alsop, who continued to support the Vietnam War even after it became unpopular in Georgetown; he refused to abandon his principles in the name of changing political fashions.

  CHAPTER 17

    1. Lippmann and the Fabians: Steel, Walter Lippmann, pp. 23–49; “drunk with power”: ibid., p. 319. Lippmann as a perceptive critic of the New Deal: ibid., pp. 318, 322–26. See also Lippmann’s book The Good Society.

    2. Steel, Walter Lippmann, pp. 433–49. Lippmann was also an early and astute critic of America’s policies in Vietnam; in 1964 he wrote that the military outlook there was “dismal beyond words.” Newfield, A Memoir, p. 119.

    3. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 196.

    4. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 836; Newfield, A Memoir, pp. 195–96.

    5. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 832.

    6. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 191.

    7. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 836.

    8. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 202.

    9. Ibid., p. 203.

  10. Ibid., p. 204.

  11. See Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 848–49; Newfield, A Memoir, p. 218.

  12. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 854; Newfield, A Memoir, p. 211.

  13. Schlesinger wrote that although to many “it looked as if [Bobby] were deciding to enter only after McCarthy had shown the way in New Hampshire,” the reality was that “he had reached that decision a week or more earlier.” Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 854. Schlesinger’s eagerness to demonstrate that Bobby had decided to run even before the results of New Hampshire were known is understandable; by coming late to the race, Bobby appeared to be an opportunist and a coward, a politician who had been unwilling to act until another man had revealed the extent of the danger, a weakling who, in Murray Kempton’s words, came “down from the hills to shoot the wounded.” See Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 861. It is true that Bobby had, before New Hampshire voted, sent his brother Ted to tell McCarthy that he was going to run; but this doesn’t demonstrate that Bobby had irrevocably made up his mind. If Johnson had trounced McCarthy in New Hampshire, Bobby would have been perfectly free to walk away from the contest. It is telling that Bobby himself said that he decided to run for President only after the New Hampshire primary, when he learned that Johnson had rejected the idea of a Vietnam commission and was commited to achieving a military victory in Indochina. See Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 854.

  14. Newfield, A Memoir, pp. 216–17.

  15. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 855.

  16. Newfield, A Memoir, pp. 231–41.

  17. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 863.

  18. Ibid., p. 877. Cf. Bobby’s statement that “the welfare system itself has created many of [America’s] fatherless families.” Press release, May 19, 1968, in Collected Speeches, p. 385.

  19. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 405. The Lincoln Trail: vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 344.

  20. Can’t have the federal government telling people what’s good for them: Newfield, A Memoir, p. 36, quoting Warren Weaver, Jr., “Kennedy: Meet the Conservative,” The New York Times, April 28, 1968, The Week in Review, Section 4, p. 1.

  21. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 405; Gladwin Hill, “Reagan Derides Kennedy Stands,” The New York Times, May 21, 1968, p. 29.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 883.

  24. Ibid., p. 889.

  25. Ibid., p. 872.

  26. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 81.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Meany “would barely speak” to Bobby: ibid. On big labor siding with Humphrey, see Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 884.

  29. Irrational regulations (such as those that used to govern the airline industry): See Bork, The Antitrust Paradox; pp. 183–84. The biggest businesses were also better able to bear the costs of regulatory overkill in areas like the environment than their smaller competitors, were better able to withstand the onslaught of litigation that various product liability laws created, and found it easier to raise money in heavily regulated capital markets.

  30. The individual does matter: Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 872.

  31. Vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, pp. 376–77.

  32. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 911.

  33. On this point I follow Newfield’s analysis; see Newfield, A Memoir, p. 282.

  34. Bobby after the debate: details are from Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 912.

  35. Sunday, June 2, 1968: Newfield, A Memoir, pp. 283–84.

  36. Details of Monday, June 3, 1968, and Tuesday, June 4, 1968, are drawn primarily from Newfield, A Memoir, pp. 282 et seq. and Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 900 et seq.

  37. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 913.

  38. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 290.

  39. Collected Speeches, pp. 401–2.

  40. American Journey, p. 60.

  CONCLUSION

    1. Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, pioneered the idea of “Tory Democracy,” a democratic political order in which aristocrats and patrician “experts” would play the largest part. David Cannadine observed that Winston’s own early efforts “on behalf of the poor—regulating wages and conditions in the mines and the sweated trades, and setting up labour exchanges and unemployment insurance—were essentially authoritarian and paternalistic in their benevolence.” Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy, p. 156. As late as 1930 Churchill advocated the creatio
n of the very type of regulatory and administrative state that Roosevelt himself set about constructing during his presidency; speaking at Oxford in 1930 Churchill called for the establishment of a new “economic sub-parliament” composed of persons “possessing special qualifications in economic matters.” Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy, p. 158. Churchill’s desperate capitulations to the welfare state mentality in the 1945 general election must not be permitted to obscure his belief that those who thought like Mr. Attlee and the other architects of Britain’s postwar welfare state committed themselves to an equal distribution of miseries, while those who championed a system of free enterprise, as he did, favored an unequal distribution of blessings.

    2. Bobby supported welfare state programs even as he criticized the welfare state. See Lasky, The Myth and the Man, pp. 284–85, 323, 324, 340.

    3. Adam Walinsky, “America Is Under Siege: The Crisis of Public Order,” The Greensboro News & Record, August 27, 1995; Lars-Erik Nelsonn, “Domestic War Shortchanged by Congress,” The Star-Ledger (Newark, N.J.), June 22, 1995. See also Walinsky’s essay in the July 1995 number of The Atlantic Monthly.

    4. Nelsonn, op. cit.

    5. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 805.

  Index

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  Abernathy, Ralph

  Acheson, Dean

  Vietnam and

  Ackerman, Bruce

  Adams, Brooks

  Adams, Henry

  Administrative state

  Aeschylus

  Age of Jackson, The (Schlesinger)

  Age of Roosevelt, The (Schlesinger)

  Agricultural Adjustment Administration

  Alcibiades

  Aldrich, Nelson

  Alphand, Hervé and Nicole

  Alsop, Joseph

  on American aristocrats

  as columnist

  conversion to Kennedy fold

  the East and

  on Franklin Roosevelt

  Alsop, Stewart

  Alsop, Susan Mary

  Amazing Grace (Kozol)

  “American Scholar, The”

  Angleton, James Jesus

  Anti-Semitism

  Antonioni, Michelangelo

  Appleton, Ann

  Aristotle

  Arnold, Dr.

  Astor Foundation

  Athens

  Attlee, Clement

  Ayer, A. J.

  Baby boomers

  Bagehot, Walter

  Bailyn, Bernard

  Baldwin, James

  Baltzell, E. Digby

  Barnes, Tracy

  Barnett, Ross

  Barry, Bill

  Bay of Pigs crisis

  Beaverbrook, Lord

  Bedford-Stuyvesant restoration project

  community control of

  political purpose of

  Belafonte, Harry

  Bennett, William

  Bergen, Candice

  Berlin, Sir Isaiah

  Berlin Wall

  Bernstein, Leonard

  Bernstein, Mrs. Leonard

  Berry, Edwin C.

  Best and the Brightest, The (Halberstam)

  Bevel, James

  Biddle, Francis

  Billings, Lem

  Bissell, Richard

  Blowup

  Bohlen, Chip

  Bolingbroke, Henry St. John Viscount

  Bolshakov, Georgei

  Borgia, Cesare

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Boston Brahmins

  Boston Latin School

  Bouvier, Jacqueline, see Kennedy, Jacqueline Bouvier

  Bowles, Chester

  Bradlee, Benjamin

  Brandt, Willy

  Breslin, Jimmy

  Brideshead Revisited

  Brown, Pat

  Bruce, David

  Brumus (RFK dog)

  Buchwald, Art

  Buckley, Charles

  Bundy, Bill

  Bundy, McGeorge

  Bundy family

  Bunker, Ellsworth

  Burden, Carter

  Bureaucracy

  Bobby’s criticism of

  Burke, Edmund

  Burton, Richard

  Bush, George

  Byron, Lord

  Caesar, Julius

  Camus, Albert

  Cannadine, David

  Canterbury prep school

  Capell, Frank

  Capote, Truman

  Cardin, Pierre

  Carey, Hugh

  Carlyle, Thomas

  Carnegie Endowment

  Carter, Jimmy

  Casals, Pablo

  Castro, Fidel

  CBS

  Cecil, David

  Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

  Chamberlain, Neville

  Chapman, John Jay

  Chappaquiddick

  Chavez, Cesar

  Cheyfitz, Eddie

  Chiang, Mme.

  Choate

  Churchill, Randolph

  Churchill, Winston

  Cicognani, Cardinal

  Cincinnati, Ohio

  City-states, ancient

  see also Athens; Greek polis; Sparta

  Civil rights

  Clark, Kenneth B.

  Cleaver, Eldridge

  Clifford, Clark

  Clinton, Bill

  Clinton, Hillary Rodham

  Clougherty, Peter “Leather Lungs”

  Cohn, Roy

  Cold War

  Coles, Robert

  Collier, Peter

  Columbia Law School

  Common man

  Community

  antagonism between family and

  as idealistic notion

  self-confidence and sense of

  Community development corporations

  Compassion

  Bobby’s, see Kennedy, Robert F. “Bobby,” suffering and pain, compassion for

  self-confidence and

  Confidential Agent, The (Greene)

  Conrad, Joseph

  Containment theory

  Cooper, Duff and Diana

  Cooper, James Fennimore

  Corbin, Paul

  Corcoran, Tommy

  Council on Foreign Relations

  Cox, Archibald

  Cravath, Paul Drennan

  Crespi, Contessa

  Crotty, Peter

  Daley, Richard

  Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR)

  Davis, Judge David

  Davis, John W.

  Dean, John Gunther

  Death of a President, The (Manchester)

  Defense Department, U.S.

  de Gaulle, Charles

  Deneuve, Catherine

  Detroit, Michigan

  Devonshire, Duke of

  Diana, Princess

  Didion, Joan

  Dien Bien Phu

  Dillon, Douglas

  Disraeli, Benjamin

  Dole, Bob

  Douglas, John

  Douglas, Paul

  Douglas, William O.

  Drew, Daniel

  Dulles, Allen

  Dutton, Fred

  Edelman, Marian Wright

  Edelman, Peter

  Edgartown Regatta

  Education (Adams)

  Eichmann, Adolf

  Eisenhower, Dwight D.

  Eliot, T. S.

  Emerson, Ralph Waldo

  Essays

  English, John

  English Traits (Emerson)

  Enlightenment

  Entrepreneurial tradition

  Bobby’s embrace of

  hero of

  Essays (Emerson)

  Establishment theory

  Etzioni, Amitai

  Evers, Charles

  Fabians


  Fabian socialism

  Faith-based rescue programs

  “Fame”

  Family

  Bobby’s devotion to, see Kennedy, Robert F. “Bobby,” family and

  the Greeks and

  religion and

 

‹ Prev