Volume 13, Number 3 · August 21, 1969
Bobby
By John Phillips
The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy
by David Halberstam
Random House, 224 pp., $4.95
Robert Kennedy: A Memoir
by Jack Newfield
Dutton, 318 pp., $6.95
85 Days: The Last Campaign of Robert Kennedy
by Jules Witcover
Putnam's, 352 pp., $6,95
Each of these mournful books is written deep in Bobby's thrall, and that is as it has to be. Two of them present Eugene McCarthy as pretty much the thoroughgoing baddy Bobby thought he was. All three are sentimental memoirs. David Halberstam often appears to be striving for a stiff-upperlip poignancy that has been suggested in a Yeatsian jacket blurb awarded him by Daniel Patrick Moynihan.[1] Jack Newfield, writing as a hard guy with a broken heart and some third-hand vogue of Bobby as an 'existential' hero, indulges himself in his last chapter to a degree reminiscent of William Manchester and concludes with an expropriation of Albert Camus that curls the toes. [2] Clearly it is too soon to expect an 'authoritative' study of this passionately enigmatic career. It is too soon to know what parts conviction and what revenge went into the conversion in 1966—or was it an apostasy?—of an innately conservative, power-ridden young man to the godhead of a coalition which was supported by many of the left-liberal intelligentsia he intuitively detested and which ranged from the Princess Radziwill to Cesar Chavez.
Review, 7438 words
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