Volume 25, Number 15 · October 12, 1978
The Transformation of Bobby Kennedy
By Marshall Frady
Robert Kennedy and His Times
by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Houghton Mifflin, 1,066 pp., $19.95
They were, to be sure, spectacularly flawed—of an ore much mixed with brazen, base elements. But if nothing else, it can be said that the Kennedys afforded this society of the common man and the commonplace with something very close to its first national mythic saga—a line of jaunty and audacious, but strangely star-crossed princes in an American house of Atreus. 'I guess the only reason we've survived,' the third dryly quipped, with his two older brothers already gone and his younger brother having just capsized in a small plane, 'is that there are more of us than there is trouble.' Talking about them in romantic terms is finally inescapable because they constituted, whatever else, a singularly romantic event in this nation's experience. They became part of the dream life of America in the mid-century: it seems peculiarly appropriate that, toward the close of the Democratic convention in Los Angeles in 1960, the old briny Irish-Borgian patriarch of the line, Joe Kennedy, would have emerged from the front portal of Marion Davies's Beverly Hills palace and stood there in a lambent Hollywood sundown to receive his son Jack just after his nomination for president.
Review, 7723 words
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