Volume 35, Number 17 · November 10, 1988
The Kennedys in the King Years
By Garry Wills
Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties
by Richard N. Goodwin
Little, Brown, 552 pp., $19.95
Robert Kennedy In His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years
edited by Edwin O. Guthman, edited by Jeffrey Shulman
Bantam, 493 pp., $22.50
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963
by Taylor Branch
Simon and Schuster, 966 pp., $24.95
Theodore Sorensen's collected works make it clear that the gift (a genuine one) for speechwriting does not necessarily make for mastery in other forms of literary composition. Ditto Pat Buchanan. Peggy Noonan will, presumably, be tested in time. But the jury is surely in on Richard Goodwin. He told a Washington Post interviewer, about Remembering America, that 'I've sometimes driven past the entrance to my own house five times, missed it because I'm writing sentences in my head.'[1] He should have driven by a sixth time before committing a sentence like this: 'Nixon, like some infertile bride, had to rely on Eisenhower's teeming allurements to nurture his own fortunes into flower.' He has the orator's proneness to edema:
Review, 4693 words
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