In Love with Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

In Love with Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy Book

More than 30 years after his death, Robert Kennedy continues to occupy an exalted place in the American psyche as a symbol of unfulfilled promise and shattered expectations. Had he lived, the legend goes, he would have become president and solved the major problems of the age, including the war in Vietnam, racial tension, and social injustice. According to Ronald Steel, he "represented not a rational political alternative, but something more powerful and attractive: an escape from politics." To many, he was the last, best hope for meaningful change. The question at the heart of In Love with Night is why this "strange and enduring phenomenon" remains seductive to so many Americans and what Kennedy's lionization says about the culture that made him a martyr. "At some point," writes Steel, "without ever quite intending it, American liberals, and even many conservatives, fell in love with Robert Kennedy." The author then shows this romance to be closer to a misguided attempt by the American people to create "a heroic figure to fill our needs" in the wake of the death of John F. Kennedy. Seeing himself as the rightful heir to his brother's legacy, Robert successfully filled the role of political savior by assuming "the identity of the survivor." Imbued with lofty expectations by an adoring segment of the populace, his image came to outweigh by far his modest achievements as a public figure. During his run for the Democratic nomination in 1968, he gathered strong support among minority groups and the underprivileged, while carefully appearing to be all things to all people. Without denying his genuine appeal, Steel debunks Kennedy's image as a champion of the underdog, painting him as a craven opportunist who solicited the support of the more disenfranchised groups not out of altruism but political necessity and self-interest. Calling his book a "study of character and circumstance" rather than a biography, Steel is primarily interested in the wide gap between the man and the myth, and, on the whole, his deconstruction is not a flattering one. Kennedy admirers will bristle at the book's core message, but Steel makes valid, well-argued, and often compelling points, particularly on the nature and value of cultural myths. In the end, this is all mere conjecture, for it will never be known whether Kennedy would have even been elected, much less what kind of president he would have been. For as Steel writes in one of his kinder moments, "The best of Robert Kennedy was not in what he did, but in what he has inspired in others." And that, perhaps, is the only legacy that matters. --Shawn CarkonenRead More

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  • Product Description

    More than three decades have passed since Robert Kennedy was assassinated seeking the Democratic nomination for the presidency. During that time a powerful legend has grown around him. It decrees that he would have quickly ended the Vietnam War, violence in the cities, and racial and social injustice across the land. Millions of Americans continue to believe that legend. For them the yearning for Kennedy is an unhealed wound.

    But would he have done what so many wanted from him? Is the Robert Kennedy legend just that -- a legend based more on hope and longing than on reality? This is the question that continues to haunt American politics.

    Drawing on his striking interpretation of Kennedy's character, award-winning historian Ronald Steel examines the life against the legend. It is that legend -- one that Kennedy consciously helped create -- that has made him the vessel of the nation's frustrated dreams. Those dreams have created the enduring myth of "what might have been."

    Why was a man who began his career as a dark enforcer of his family's ambition ultimately mourned as a secular saint who could have transformed America? How did he build a mythology that made him the heir apparent to his brother's unfulfilled presidency? Were there, in fact, two Bobbys: an early and a late one, a good and a bad one?

    With empathy, yet with skepticism, Steel holds up to scrutiny the three central elements of the Kennedy legend: the faith in a golden kingdom of Camelot that could be restored, the belief that he would have achieved the goals that liberals sought, and the hope that he would have united blacks and whites in common endeavor.

    What we mourn, Steel concludes, is not so much what Kennedy would have done, or "what might have been," but our own hopes for political deliverance. That is the power, and also the problem, of the Bobby Myth. Yet "myths can inspire, or they can imprison," Steel writes. "The Bobby Myth," he shows in this penetrating study of personality and politics, "is our creation, not his."

  • 0684808293
  • 9780684808291
  • Ronald Steel
  • 29 November 1999
  • Simon & Schuster
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 224
  • illustrated edition
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