Monday, May 12, 2008
John Leonard on the life and legacy of Robert F. Kennedy, as depicted in 'The Last Patrician' by Michael Knox Beran, 'Mutual Contempt' by Jeff Shesol, 'Make Gentle the Life of this World: The Vision of Bobby Kennedy' by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, and 'Robert F. Kennedy: A Memoir' a television special by Jack Newfield, to be aired on the Discovery Channel
May 30, 1998 | In the spring of the revolutionary year of 1968, on the Hudson River side of Manhattan, at a party fizzed and finger-fed by Esquire magazine Whiffenpoofs, in front of one of those high-rise blue aquarium windows looking down on Grant's Tomb, the white liberals were disdaining black folks for liking Bobby Kennedy too much and Eugene McCarthy not at all. It was no more than the usual condescending twitter until suddenly a big cat, an African panther, scattered these pouter pigeons and the room was thick with ruffled feathers. She was our worst fear -- black, beautiful, laughing at us in our very own Shakespeare, but with a lilting lash. She had seen some streets, as well as the library. In fact, before coming to New York to edit textbooks for Random House, she had taught the likes of Stokely Carmichael and Claude Brown in the nation's capital. There, she had seen a car stop on a SW side street, and the attorney general of the United States leave his jacket on the back seat, loosen his tie, roll up his sleeves and shoot some baskets on a cement court with black schoolchildren, who liked him quite a lot. In her own opinion, maybe black folks, having had so much practice on the problem, knew who their friends were better than white liberals full of theory. My, but she could scourge.
This was my first glimpse of Toni Morrison, like your first glimpse of the cloud chamber of a cyclotron. Who knew she'd later write some novels? She gave me permission to be partisan, entirely subjective, perhaps ferocious. Later that same summer, two months after Bobby Kennedy had been shot dead, at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, after the chartered bus behind a squad-car escort, past checkpoints into the barbed-wire ring around the slaughterhouse, wearing an embossed "PRESS" ID tag like a fetish, surrendering my briefcase for inspection against guns and bombs, allowed into a gallery already preempted by municipal serfs from Mayor Daley's Department of Sanitation and Counterterrorism, watching Hubert's whips trash the peace plank, fleeing the scene on foot in the middle of a transportation strike, finding myself safer on the very black South Side than I'd later be in front of the Hilton, where I saw everybody I'd ever known in the antiwar movement -- and many I wish I hadn't -- get the crap kicked out of them, it seemed to me the system and the world were rotten.
Twenty years later, William Kennedy would write a novel, "Quinn's Book," that imagined a young Irish-American newspaper reporter come back from the Civil War to a class war; to labor riots and the forced relocation of lullaby-singing, poor white Irish from Dutch-Nativist Albany in boxcars, like the Indians before them and the Jews after; to the lynching of an underground railroad conductor; to fire, flood, demented pigs and the fantasy of a revolutionary alliance between the have-not Irish and have-not blacks, an army of "paddyniggers"; and to a treasure buried in the bottom of a bird cage -- an ancient magical Celtic disk, a divine riddle, a bloody coin -- that turned this journalist into warrior, dreaming "a savage dream of a new order: faces as old as the dead Celts, forces in the shape of a severed head and a severed tongue ..." So be warned.
Like El Cid, who's said to have been so indispensable in driving the Moors out of Spain and back to Africa -- for the greater glory of a whiter God in the 11th century -- that his own men propped up his Charlton Heston corpse in a silver saddle on a black horse and sent him holy-warrior trotting off to battle yet again, so the old soldiers, epic poets and court historians of our sorrier century peddle a Robert F. Kennedy who's just as dead. Bobby has been very dead for 30 years this week, and the anniversary of the assassination of the second son of Camelot, the nation's younger brother, is an occasion for body snatching, an abduction by sperm-sucking aliens.
Michael Knox Beran -- who was 2 years old when Sirhan Sirhan killed Bobby in a hotel kitchen moments after he won the California Democratic primary -- tells us in "The Last Patrician" that this "revolutionary priest" was really a closet conservative. That tragedy had taught him to suspect the "foggy platitudes" and "feudal sentimentality" of an "effete" elite and the siren song of the Enlightenment. That he was on his existential way to rejecting not only big government and the paternalism of the old money Ivy League mandarinate that had bossed the rest of us ever since it got a monkey-gland transplant from Teddy Roosevelt, but to rejecting as well the whole idea of the welfare and national security states. That instead of Adlai Stevenson or Henry Stimson he was Ralph Waldo Emerson and Natty Bumppo. Beran writes so gracefully, with apposite citation here of Evelyn Waugh and there of T.S. Eliot, it takes awhile to realize he is making it up as he skinny-dips along, out of muddled vehemence, class animus and maybe even an itchy resentment of some of the aristocratic spas where he himself did time (Gorton, Columbia, Yale).
I'm in favor of class animus. I think the trouble with this country is that the peasants have money. I'd like to see the homeless slash the tires and strangle the chauffeurs of every stretch limo that dares to pause at a traffic light. But it's odd that someone as alert as Beran to striations of status, to the tree rings, ice caps, peat bogs and fossil beds of buried class distinction in the great American massif, should so scant the Irishness and clannishness of the Kennedys, so much that was blood-feud tribal about them, especially when he seems to be trying to Pat Buchananize Bobby.
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