Robert Kennedy and His Times, Vol. 1. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Robert Kennedy and His Times, Vol. 1.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978.

Why read it? Schlesinger divides the topics in the book among RFK’s growing up; his shyness and feelings of inferiority to his brothers; his physical exertions; his mixed achievement in school; his work in Congressional investigations, including those concerned with corrupt unions; his work in organizing his brother’s Senatorial and Presidential campaigns; his work as Attorney General and his battle with institutional inertia, particularly the FBI and J Edgar Hoover; his work with his brother on Civil Rights; his trips to foreign, unfriendly counties in which he confronted aggressive criticism of the United States, especially from the young; and his work with his brother in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Some sample ideas from the book: Schlesinger emphasizes RFK’s ability to organize, his ability to focus on goals and methods for achieving those goals, his leadership ability, and his dedication to action as the consequence of whatever issues were discussed. RFK’s principles mirrored his brother’s: negotiation before force, peaceful solutions to intransigent problems, a combination of planning and improvisation and, above all, listening and learning.

Joseph P. Kennedy, the father, comes off as a complex individual whose shrewd analysis of issues, his relationship to his sons, his method of insisting that his sons disagree with him on issues when they were young, his unwavering support for them when they were older and made decisions with which he disagreed. I was particularly interested in Schlesinger’s explanation for Joseph Kennedy’s fear of going to war with Hitler: he felt that the result could only mean the destruction of democracy and the triumph of Communism. He believed that dictatorships and democracies had to learn to live together, to agree to disagree, to emphasize their similarities, to make the world safe for diversity. These convictions probably influenced JFK’s belief that America could not solve everyone else’s problems and his words in the American University speech that urged America and Russia to emphasize their similarities rather than their differences.

I am sure that Schlesinger was criticized for whitewashing the faults of the Kennedys. But my impression is also very strong that in losing RFK, we lost a man willing to confront the complexities of the real world with idealism, hard work, a moral conviction that what was right was right and a practical understanding of what it took to deal with that real world and its problems.

Quote: “The next ten years, he [RFK] told Bud Schulberg, might mark a turning point in American history—either an America infected with corruption or the rebirth of the idealism with which the nation had begun.”