My Take: I found “Band of Brothers” to be a deeply frustrating book to read. On the one hand, the story of Easy Company is more than compelling. The company featured prominently in D-Day, Operation Market Garden, The Battle of the Bulge and the famous siege at Bastogne, the liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps and the occupation of Goering’s Palace and Hitler’s Eagles Nest. Further, the fact that the Company was a volunteer unit formed before the war offered “Band of Brothers” a group of characters that readers could get to know and follow throughout Easy Company’s experiences.

However, these strengths are more than off-set by two major, and in my mind related, weaknesses in this book.

First, Ambrose completely over-eggs the dramatic story telling aspect of the book. I’m certainly not against using a dramatic narrative to improve the accessibility of history, in fact there’s clearly a lot of value in this, but at times “Band of Brothers” read like a teenage boy’s G.I. Joe Fan Fiction. I wish I was exaggerating in this regard, but take for example the following, not atypical paragraph:

“Get ‘em?” Winters yelled. Lorraine hit one with his tommy-gun, Winters aimed his M-1, squeezed and shot his man through the back of his head. Guarnere missed the third Jerry, but Winters put a bullet in his back. Guarnere followed that up by pumping the wounded man full of lead from his tommy-gun. The German kept yelling, “Help! Help!” Winters told Malarkey to put one through his head.”

I’m sure I’m not the only non-American who was grimacing while reading the passages like this. What made this even more frustrating was that the substance of Easy Company’s war experiences were more than dramatic enough without the jingoistic, melodramatic flourishes. The “Fan Boy” dramatic passages of the book were both embarrassing and unnecessary.

The second glaring weakness of “Band of Brothers” was the complete lack of perspective and objectivity that Ambrose shows throughout the book. Ambrose doesn’t just describe Easy Company’s exploits with added schlock, he views them through rose coloured glasses tinted with the Stars and Stripes. As described in Band of Brothers, Easy Company were the All-American, pure of heart, defenders of democracy and the Free World. He’s so close to his subject that he is completely unable to position the Company’s actions within any kind of broader context or offer any meaningful insight into the experience of war.

It is clear from even a superficial reading that “Band of Brothers” is heavily dependent on the accounts of members of Easy Company. Even more disturbingly, Ambrose offers little or no critical perspective on these accounts. Jarringly, at one point, after quoting extensively from a Staff Sergeant’s account of a heroic battle field experience, Ambrose goes so far as to add the following post script:

“If that sounds idealised, it can’t be helped; that is the way Lipton and many others in Easy, and many others in the Airborne and through the American Army – and come to that, in the German and Red Armies too – fought the war.”

Forgive me if I become sceptical when historians are defending ‘idealised’ accounts of the experience of war. Ambrose genuinely sounds more like a cheer-leader than a historian at times in this book.

Even worse, Ambrose has been caught out a number of times copying extracts from veteran’s accounts almost verbatim. As Patricia Nelson Limerick, a professor of history at the University of Colorado has observed:

“You can’t get a more striking example of lack of critical distance from your sources than simply typing it into your own word processing program,” said

After reading philosophically substantial war historians like Antony Beevor and Vassily Grossman, “Band of Brothers” feels more akin to reading a comic book account of war – a one-dimensional, triumphalist sketch of something far more complex and nuanced.  I suppose “Band of Brothers” works as a piece of pop non-fiction written for an American audience – it certainly sold enough copies. But for those wanting a bit more substance and perspective and a bit less myth-making and self congratulation, there are far better options.

Highlight:

“Webster (a Harvard English literature graduate and member of Easy Company) went back to the road to get in on the shooting. A German turned to fire back. “What felt like a baseball bat slugged my right leg,” Webster recalled, “spun me around, and knocked me down.” All he could think to say was, “They got me!” which even then seemed to him “an inadequate and unimaginative cliché.”

My Take: “Things Fall Apart”, Chinua Achebe’s first novel, is a seminal work in the modern literary cannon. Released in 1958, it was one of the works of literature written from the African perspective that was widely read in the West. This, combined with Achebe’s outspoken stance on the representation of Africa in the Western cannon, gives “Things Fall Apart” a significance beyond its (not insubstantial) literary merit. In short, there are cultural, literary and historical dividends from reading this book.

Achebe took the title of “Things Fall Apart” from a Keats poem about the collapse of European societies in the aftermath of World War I titled “The Second Coming”:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

It’s disturbing prose and an ideal allegory for the book’s overarching theme– the wholesale upheaval in the normal order of things in African society brought on by the arrival of European colonisers. Achebe explores his theme through the eyes of Okonwo, an esteemed patriarch in a small tribe in pre-colonial Africa. Okonwo is born of humble origins but rises to a position of high status in his village through many years of hard work and personal, emotional sacrifice. Okonwo is someone who has invested much to progress according to the norms of pre-colonial African society.  Inevitably, the violent change in social norms and the loss of equilibrium brought on by the arrival of European settlers hits Okonwo more than most.

Achebe paints a convincing portrait of how the arrival of Europeans broke down the bonds and structures that held pre-colonial African society together. Interestingly, he dedicates particular attention to examining the impact of European missionaries and the spread of Christianity on tribal society. The animistic religions of tribal Africa were the foundation stone of societal organisation. As these religions were the primary source of power in these societies, the spread of Christianity and its active hostility to these beliefs, did not just cause a spiritual upheaval, but also resulted in a wholesale destabilisation of society.

“Things Fall Apart” is interesting in a cultural sense as Achebe consciously wrote the book in an effort to counter the negative stereotypes of African society perpetuated by turn of the century European authors like Joseph Conrad. However, the book really doesn’t have the feel of a public service announcement. Okonwo is far from a likeable hero – in fact in a lot of respects he really is a stupid and nasty piece of work. However, Achebe skilfully reveals the human drivers for his stupidity and nastiness. Okonwo isn’t nice – but he’s significant from a literary perspective for the mere fact that the story is told from his perspective as a complex human being influenced by the forces around him rather than as an outsiders view of a simple animalistic brute.

Highlight:

“The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”

My Take: Hendrik Hertzberg is like an over-sized red-velvet armchair in the corner of The New Yorker’s metaphorical living room. A relic of a past era now slightly out of fashion, but a comfortable favourite for those who’ve grown up with him.

I enjoy Hertzberg because while he is an unreconstructed 60s lefty (and a Jimmy Carter speechwriter at that!) he treats politics seriously without being self-righteous. He’s a rare breed – a long term left-wing commentator that hasn’t turned bitter and contemptuous as the world has changed around him. As a result, Hertzberg can be wry without being sarcastic and can be critical without being shrill. Equally rarely, he’s a political writer who isn’t so arrogant as to assume that he is always in right and that everyone else is motivated by stupidity or ill will. Combine this with the fact that he’s an extremely talented writer and Hertzberg is one of the most reliably enjoyable political columnists in America.

“Politics” is a collection of the best of Hertzberg’s political writing over the past forty years. It’s worth reading just to luxuriate in an extended dose of Hetrzberg’s writing, but the best part of this book are the tit-bits of trivia and minutia political life from eras past. For instance, it pains my soul that I wasn’t able to experience the unintentional comedy of the Dan Quayle era of US Politcs. While the 1988 Vice-Presidential Debate is infamous for Lloyd Bentson’s vicious take down of Quayle, the real highlight of the debate as recounted by Hertzberg was the eventual Vice-President’s total disconnection from reality:

“Tom Brokaw sadistically asked (Quayle) to describe the last time he had visited a poor family and to tell how he had explained to that family his votes against the school breakfast program, the school lunch program and the expansion of the child immunization program. In a quavering voice Quayle said he had too met with ‘those people’ and that ‘they didn’t ask me those questions on those votes, because they were glad that I took time out of my schedule to go down and talk about how we’re going to get a food bank going..”

….

“Asked to name a ‘work of literature or art’ that had impressed him lately, Quayle cited a book… by Richard Nixon…. One CBS guest commentator said that this answer ‘came across as non-prepared’.”

Also amusing was the coverage of the Gary Hart saga capped by this surreal exchange on Newshour highlighted by Hertzberg:

Lehrer: You don’t think it speaks to the question of judgement as to what a person would do as a candidate for president of the United States?

Hart: Jim, if I may call you Jim, let’s reverse the logic. Does it suggest that because Ronald Reagan used poor judgement on Irangate that therefore he’s unfaithful to his wife?

Lehrer: I don’t understand what you mean.

Reading contemporaneously written accounts of past political eras also offers provides the added amusement of allowing judge historical predictions against reality. Given his generally humble approach, Hertzberg comes out of this pretty well, but there are a few clangers. One example that springs readily to mind is an amusingly misguided article pimping Michael Dukakis’s Presidential prospects titled ‘The Tortoise’ and positing that Dukakis’s positive campaigning (“Good jobs at Good wages”) had George Bush on the defensive. The opinion of British journo quoted in the same article summing up Dukakis as ‘a hopeless wanker’ has held up rather better with time.

My Take: The things we do for those we love. When my future wife told me that “Gone With The Wind” was her favourite book, I thought the only appropriate thing to do was to head out and grab a copy as quickly as possible for my own consumption. Usually epics, especially those featuring ‘strong’ heroines, aren’t my style and as a result, I hadn’t even seen the iconic movie before being guided to the book by love. But “Gone With The Wind” did win the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 and has managed to sell more than 30 million copies to date, so I figured it must have something going for it.

And it does. To an extent. I’m glad to have invested the time to read GWTW and not just for reasons of domestic harmony. Margaret Mead has crafted an extraordinarily meticulous portrait of late 19^th Century life in the US South in GWTW based largely on the first hand accounts she heard from relatives as a child. To the extent that you can ever trust accounts like this, I learnt a lot from the sheer volume of detail that Mead packs into GWTW. So I felt like I got something out of the book there.

That being said, you don’t read GWTW for a history lesson. Most readers who are drawn to this book pick it for the grand sweep of its narrative and its iconic characters. It’s here that I part from the consensus (and the views of my better half). Margaret Mead has described the main theme of the book as ‘survival’:

“…what makes some people able to come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don’t. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those who go under…? I only know that the survivors used to call that quality ‘gumption.’ So I wrote about the people who had gumption and the people who didn’t.”

Ok. I can see this. Scarlett is able to survive the societal cataclysm brought on by the war through her determination and stubbornness and Rhett is able to survive through his cunning and pragmatism.

The problem is that I didn’t much like Scarlet O’Hara despite her admirable perseverance and fortitude. While she had spunk, she was also self-centred and ruthless. While her independence and spunk are undoubtedly good examples for young girls, especially in the less enlightened times in which this book was published, frankly Scarlett consistently treated those who cared for her (particularly Melanie and Rhett) appallingly. There’s no truer line in the book that Rhett’s frustrated explanation for why he could never show his love for her:

“You’re so brutal to those who love you, Scarlett. You take their love and hold it over their heads like a whip.”

For a book this long, you’re going to struggle to keep me interested if I don’t particularly like the protagonist. This was partially offset by the strength of Rhett Butler’s character (a rake, a speculator, a blockade-runner and a social pariah – but a romantic at heart) but not enough to save the book to my mind.

I’ll finish by noting that what GWTW needed more than anything else was an editor. There was simply no real reason for this book to be the giant that it was. It would have been a much better read if it was half the length.

Highlight:

Rhett Butler on the imminent war:

“‘All wars are sacred,’ he said. ‘To those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn’t make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight? But, no matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war. And that is money. All wars are in reality money squabbles. But so few people ever realize it. Their ears are too full of bugles and drums and fine words from stay-at-home orators. Sometimes the rallying cry is ‘Save the Tomb of Christ from the Heathen!’ Sometimes it’s ‘Down with Popery!’ and sometimes ‘Liberty!’ and sometimes ‘Cotton, Slavery and States’ Rights!’”

…

“There’s just as much money to be made in the wreck of a civilization as in the upbuilding of one.”

Scarlett O’Hara in the ruins of Twelve Oaks:

“Hunger gnawed at her empty stomach again and she said aloud: ‘As God is my witness, and God is my witness, the Yankees aren’t going to lick me. I’m going to live through this, and when it’s over, I’m never going to be hungry again. No, nor any of my folks. If I have to steal or kill – as God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again.’”

Favourite GWTW factoid found while looking for background to this post:

(Margaret Mead) originally called the heroine “Pansy O’Hara”, and Tara was “Fontenoy Hall”. She also considered naming the novel Tote The Weary Load or Tomorrow Is Another Day

My Take: It took me a while to give Gore Vidal a try. As regular readers know, I have a bit of hero worship thing going on with Robert Kennedy. And while Vidal was the step-brother by marriage of Jacqueline Kennedy and therefore technically Bobby’s step-brother-in-law-by-marriage-one-removed, the pair famously did not get along.

As a result, my early exposure to Vidal came consisted entirely of a series of highly unflattering accounts in various Kennedy biographies. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr, court historian to the Kennedys writes in his magisterial “Robert Kennedy and his Times” (extracted from Google Books), their relationship was strained from the start:

Bobby hated Vidal’s pretension (and let’s be frank, his homosexuality) and Vidal hated Bobby’s ruthlessness and impertinence and frequently spoke out against RFK whilst on the campaign trail.

This natural bias against Vidal was further entrenched by the fact that Vidal was similarly estranged from another of my literary favourites, Norman Mailer. Amusingly enough, the feud between this pair of US literary giants culminated in Mailer:

Head-butting him in the green room of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, then telling him, on-air, that he ruined Kerouac by sleeping with him. Six years later, he threw a drink at Vidal—and punched him—at a Lally Weymouth soirée.

All of which I was very familiar with before having read a single word of Vidal’s writing. So you’ll forgive me if I thought Vidal’s critical bite was bigger than his literary bark.

That was however, before I read “Lincoln”. Put simply, it’s a tour de force. Historical fiction is an extremely difficult medium to do well. How do you go about credibly writing dialogue for a figure that has been canonised to the extent of Lincoln? If you want to see how badly it can go wrong, go no further than the television mini-series adaptation of “Lincoln” staring Mary Tyler Moore. Fast forward past the credits until you get to the stilted dialogue and overacting and get ready to cringe – it takes a talented writer indeed to avoid coming across as hackneyed or clichéd with subject matter like this.

In “Lincoln”, Vidal pulls off this difficult task with aplomb. Telling his story from multiple perspectives (the primary narrator being Lincoln’s presidential secretary, and later Secretary of State, John Hay),Vidal vividly recreates the world of Civil War era Washington and the massive figures that inhabited it. Luckily, there’s plenty of action in the period for Vidal to draw on to keep his plot moving forward too. Putting to one side the obvious drama of the Civil War, the constant political machinations of Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals”, principally his Secretary of State William H. Seward and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, is enough to drive the narrative of a political thriller in its own right.

Highlight: Not from the book itself, but from Vidal’s public response to a critical review of “Lincoln” in The New York Times by a historian unhappy with the historical accuracy of the book. Vidal describes his reviewer as “the author of the captions to several picture books on the Civil War era” and “pleasantly scatterbrained” then goes on to state:

Professor Richard N. Current fusses, not irrelevantly, about the propriety of fictionalizing actual political figures. I also fuss about this. But he has fallen prey to the scholar-squirrels’ delusion that there is a final Truth revealed only to the tenured few in their footnote maze; in this he is simply naive. All we have is a mass of more or less agreed-upon facts about the illustrious dead and each generation tends to rearrange those facts according to what the times require. Current’s text seethes with resentment and I can see why. “Indeed, [Vidal] claims to be a better historian than any of the academic writers on Lincoln (’hagiographers,’ he calls them).” Current’s source for my unseemly boasting is, God help us, the Larry King radio show, which lasts several hours from midnight on, and no one is under oath for what he says during—in my case—two hours. On the other hand, Larry King, as a source, is about as primary as you can get.

Now it is true as I said on the King show that I have been amazed that there has never been a first-rate biography of Lincoln, as opposed to many very good and—yes, scholarly—studies of various aspects of his career. I think one reason for this lack is that too often the bureaucrats of Academe have taken over the writing of history and most of them neither write well nor, worse, understand the nature of the men they are required to make saints of. In the past, history was the province of literary masters—of Gibbon, Macaulay, Burke, Locke, Carlyle, and, in our time and nation, Academe’s bête noire, Edmund Wilson.

Quite!

My Take: So I’ve got a bit of a thing about macho writers – the Hemingways, the Mailers, the Updikes and the Roth’s of the literary world. There’s something in me that enjoys seeing their antiquated and uncomplicated visions of masculinity put down on paper. It’s not because I think it’s a realistic view, but more because it makes for some great fiction as conflict inevitably manifests itself between their ideals of manhood and reality.

“The Sun Also Rises”, one of Hemingway’s best books is a great example of this tension. The protagonist of the story, American war veteran Jake Barnes, is a none-to-subtle exploration of what it means to be a man. Barnes physically lost his manhood in a plane crash in WW1, but did not lose his manly desires.  In Hemmingway’s world, this inability to act on the most fundamental aspect of manhood meant that Barnes could never be happy.

It is the basic act of consummation that matters beyond all else. Any other form of non-physical fulfilment never crosses Hemmingway’s mind. Throughout the book, Barnes attempts to salve his wounded manhood through physical labour, heavy drinking, hunting, fishing, bull fighting, through a whole series of actions, but can never bring himself to seek emotional satisfaction.

What I find most interesting about “The Sun Also Rises”, was that Hemingway chose this conflict not to critique this over-emphasis on the physicality of masculinity, but to emphasise it. Hemingway has obviously thought deeply about the subject. As Gary Dexter writes at the excellent ‘How Books Got Their Titles’ blog:

On July 8, 1918, while serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front at the end of the First World War, Hemingway was seriously injured by a trench mortar, receiving over 200 separate shrapnel wounds to his lower body. His scrotum was pierced twice, and had to be laid on a special pillow while it recovered. His testicles were undamaged and his penis intact. He had not lost his penis. But he knew a man who had:

Because of this I got to know other kids who had genito urinary wounds and I wondered what a man’s life would have been like after that if his penis had been lost and his testicles and spermatic cord remained intact. . . . [So I] tried to find out what his problems would be when he was in love with someone who was in love with him and there was nothing that they could do about it.

So Hemingway had considered the central conflict of this book in some depth and the conclusion he reached was that without sex, ‘there was nothing they could do about (their love)’. Seriously, you can’t help but be amused at self-parody as good as this.

“The Sun Also Rises” is a Hemingway at his best. Succinct and direct writing, great dialogue and a pervasive overlay of out of control machismo. Great stuff.

Highlight:

“This was Brett that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing.”

My Take: Philip Gourevitch’s account of the collective insanity of late 20^th century Rwanda is a moving account.

Not simply because it tells a horrific story mainly from first hand accounts, but moreso because it is told unashamedly from a position of moral clarity. Gourevitch doesn’t equivocate in this book. He tells the stories he’s heard directly and with clear moral verdicts. His writing isn’t annoyingly hectoring or self-righteous, but it clearly places blame where it belongs (ie the Belgians, the French, the Hutus, the UN, the French, the Americans, the UNHCR, the French). No where is this approach more clear than in the title of the book, which comes from a letter written by several local pastors to their regional superior, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a Seventh-Day Adventist Pastor who was later convicted in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda with aiding their killing the following day.

In many ways Gourevitch’s approach reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s writing on the holocaust in this regard – more interested in humanity, and what the genocide said about it, than in providing an objective political history. He delves into some detail into Rwanda’s history and culture, but more for philosophical reflection on the absurdities of human nature than to factually enlighten the reader. One particularly interesting section of the book in this regard was its discussion on the absurdly vague distinction drawn within the country between Hutus and Tutsis.

The very nature of the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis is difficult to articulate. Ethanographers and historians agree that they cannot properly be called distinct ethnic groups. Similarly, the difference does not quite fit the description of classes, castes or ranks. What can be said is that the perceptions of difference probably sprung from historical occupational distinctions between Tutsi as herdsman and Hutu as cultivators. Allegedly, the increased value of cattle gave the numerically inferior Tutsis some social and political cache that was entrenched by entrenched in the 19th century when the Mwami Kigeri Rwabugiri, a Tutsi, ascended the throne, and expanded the state to around its present borders.

All of the above is difficult to verify as a result of the ambiguities of oral history and the substantial distrust that now overlays the area. However, what can be confidently said is that it was the Belgians that entrenched and perpetuated these distinctions in order to administer their colonial rule. As Gourevitch tellingly recounts:

“Colonisation is violence, and there are many ways to carry out that violence. In addition to military and administrative chiefs and a veritable army of churchmen, the Belgians dispatched scientists to Rwanda. The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and callipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they had believed all along.  Tutsis had a ‘nobler’, more ‘naturally’ aristocratic dimensions than the ‘coarse’ and ‘bestial’ Hutus. On the ‘nasal index’ for instance, the median Tutsi nose was found to be about two and a half millimetres longer and nearly five millimetres narrower than the median Hutu nose.”

….

“In 1933-34, the Belgians conducted a census in order to issue ‘ethnic’ identity cards, which labelled every Rwandan as either Hutu (85%) of Tutsi (14%) or Twa (1%). The identity cards made it virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis, and permitted the Belgians to perfect the administration of an apartheid system rooted in the myth of Tutsi superiority… Whatever Hutu and Tutsi identity may have stood for in the pre-colonial state no longer mattered; the Belgians had made ‘ethnicity’ the defining feature of Rwandan existence.”

Combine this institutionalised societal division with the brutality and repression of the Belgian colonial administration and the die was well and truly set. But again, Gourevitch does not recount this history to offer lessons, but more so to muse on the nature of humanity. It’s an approach that works in literature, if not in conflict studies. No doubt the causes of the genocide were more nuanced and ambiguous than Gourevitch recounts. No doubt it’s also important for subject matter scholars to study and analyse these reasons. But for the broader mass of humanity, the rights and wrongs of genocide are patently clear. Gourevitch’s moral clarity in the face of the victims he has encountered seems appropriate and his reflection on the nature of humanity seems the best thing that anyone from outside of Rwanda can take from the tragedy.

Highlight:

“Like Leontius, the young Athenian in Plato, I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps, in examining this extremity with me, you hope for some understanding, some insight, some flicker of self-knowledge – a moral, or a lesson, or a clue about how to behave in this world: some such information. I don’t discount the possibility, but when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up with for looking closely into Rwanda’s stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it. The horror, the horror, interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand its legacy.”

My Take: Compiled by RFK’s ninth child (!), “Make Gentle The Life of This World” is a delicious combination of extracts from Robert Kennedy’s own speeches and a selection of passages from a daybook collaboratively compiled by both JFK and RFK from their vociferous personal reading. Thematically organised around the subjects that RFK continually returned to throughout his life (eg “The Act of Living”, “An American Spirit”, “Seeking a Better World”, “A Citizen in a Civil Society”), these selections paint an evocative picture of the character of the man.

One is struck while reading the selections from RFK’s daybook at the volume and depth of the man’s reading. RFK was no mere political hack, no “Hollowman”. His daybook drew from sources as diverse as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Goethe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Robert Frost, TS Eliot, Dante, Francis Bacon, Lao-Tzu, the Ramayana, Thomas Jefferson, Herodotus, Ernest Hemmingway, George Orwell, Montesquieu, Lord Acton, Thomas Paine, Pericles, Sophocles, Aeschylus and Shakespeare.  What is even more impressive is that Kennedy clearly read deeply in these authors. The passages he extracts are not the traditional ‘Inspirational Quotes’ one might encounter in Bartlett’s. Instead they are often obscure and united more by their philosophical constancy than their quotability.

In this sense, the selected passages offer genuine insights into Kennedy’s world view. As Maxwell Kennedy notes in the introduction:

“The selections in this book can be read almost like poetry, or as meditations for someone who wants to think about Robert Kennedy and the 1960s and the nature of politics and leadership.”

What I also found striking while reflecting on these passages was the remarkable foresight in Kennedy’s intellectual fixations – especially on issues that were quite controversial in progressive politics 30 years ago. While RFK is remembered best for speaking out on the timeless issues of racial harmony, equality of opportunity and the end of the Vietnam war, Bobby was no progressive populist. Kennedy was constitutionally incapable of biting his tongue in the face of lazy thinking. As such, he continually returned to issues that he thought were being neglected or being led by blind ideology. In this way, he came into conflict with the left wing of his own party just as much as he did with the Republicans (and no doubt fed much of the antipathy towards him during his life). But with the passage of time, Kennedy’s approach to the issues on which he came into conflict with his own party has largely been vindicated. Whether it was speaking out against oppression abroad (principally Communism), the moral import of employment, the deleterious effects of a reliance on welfare, or the central importance of law and order, Kennedy’s views, while unpopular at the time have now become widely accepted as core tenants in progressive politics.

If you have an interest in progressive politics, this book is like a full body massage for your inner idealist. You can’t help but come away from this book feeling reinvigorated about the potential of the political process. For those of you employed in the day to day business of politics, regular mental escapes into high-minded philosophy of public service are an essential reminder of why you are in this business in the first place.

Highlights: Again, I haven’t sought to replicate Bobby’s most famous quotes below, instead I’ve selected some of the less well known, but equally insightful passages included in this book:

The Responsibilities of Privilege

[During One of RFK’s speeches at a university medical school, a student in the crowd at a speech at a University asked “Where are you going to get all the money for these federally subsidized programs you’re talking about?”]

From You. Let me say something about the tenor of that question and some of the other questions. There are people in this country who suffer. I look around this room and I don’t see many black faces who are going to be doctors. You talk about where the money will come from… Part of civilised society is to let people go to medical school who come from ghettos. You don’t see many people coming out of the gehetytos or off the Indian reservations to medical school. You are the privledged ones here. It’s easy to sit back and say it’s the fault of the federal government, but it’s our responsibility too. It’s our society, not just our government, that spends twice as much on pets as on the poverty program. It’s the poor who carry the major burden of the struggle in Vietnam. You sit here as white medical students while black people carry the burden of the fighting in Vietnam.”

On America’s Moral Leadership

John Adams once said that he considered the founding of America part of “A divine plan for the liberation of the slavish part of mankind all over the globe.” This faith did not spring from grandiose schemes of empires abroad. It grew instead from confidence that the example set by our nation – the example of individual liberty fused with common effort – would spark the spirit of liberty around the planet; and that once unleashed, no despot could suppress it, no prison could restrain it, no army could withstand it.”

In Africa, I tried to answer those who asked, “If the United States is fighting for self-determination in Vietnam, then how can it not support the independence struggle of Angola and Mozambique?” I answered unsatisfactorily, for there is no real answer. Yet to the questioners, it is less our intention than our pretension that is objectionable. Thus does false principle destroy the credibility of our wisdom and purpose that is the true foundation of influence as a world power.

On the Metrics of a Nation’s Success

Our gross national product … if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

On Freedom

Our liberty can grow only when the liberties of all our fellow men are secure; and he who would enslave others ends only by chaining himself, for chains have two ends, and he who holds the chain is as securely bound as he whom it holds.

It is not enough to allow dissent. We must demand it. For there is much to dissent from.

President Kennedy then went on to point out that “Law is the strongest link between man and freedom”. I wonder in how many countries of the world people think of law as the “link between man and freedom.” We know that in many, law is the instrument of tyranny, and people think of law as little more than the will of the state, or the party – not of the people.

In a democratic society law is the form which free men give to justice. The glory of justice and the majesty of law are created not just by the Constitution – no by the Courts – nor by the officers of the law – nor by the lawyers – but by the men and women who constitute our society – who are the protectors of the law as they are themselves protected by the law.”

On Unemployment

The root problem is in the fact of dependency and uselessness itself. Unemployment means having nothing to do – which means nothing to do with the rest of us. To be without work, to be without use to one’s fellow citizens, is to be in truth the Invisible Man of whom Ralph Ellison wrote.

The answer to the welfare crisis is work, jobs, self-sufficiency, and family integrity; not a massive new extension of welfare; not a great new outpouring of guidance counsellors to give the poor more advice. We need jobs… that lets a man say to his community, to his family, to his country, and most important, to himself, “I helped to build this country. I am a participant in its great public ventures. I am a man.”

On the Importance of Politics

The time is important for us to rise in defense of politics. There is no greater need than for educated men and women to point their careers toward public service as the finest and most rewarding type of life.

“We differ from other states in that we regard the individual who holds himself aloof from public affairs as being useless. Yet we yield to non one in our independence of spirit and complete self-reliance. – Pericles

“Our word idiot comes from the Greek name for the man who took no share in public matters” Edith Hamilton.

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Synopsis: Photo-journalist Paul Fusco presents a collection of his photographs from the carriage of Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral train.

My Take: Bobby is a bit of a political hero of mine. He was pilloried as a ruthless political operative in life and is revered as an inspirational idealist in death.  He combined compassion and pragmatism in equal measure and was a model for centrist, progressive policy. He felt the honour and public duty of political participation acutely, but never let higher ends impede political means.

Given that I’m an avid reader and an RFK obsessive, I have close to a dozen different RFK biographies, collections of essays, photo books, and manuscripts. I’m not sure how I’m going to blog them yet as there’s a fair bit of overlap between them, but I thought that I might as well start with my favourite. A limited edition, signed hardcover of The RFK Funeral Train given to me as a brilliantly perceptive birthday present by JJ (especially given that the journey took place on my birthday, June 8). It’s twee, but it’s true: The people who love me buy me books.

The RFK Funeral Train is a gorgeous, elegant and moving collection of photographs of the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans who turned out to line the route of RFK’s funeral train from the body’s original viewing in St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York to its final resting place in Arlington Memorial Cemetery, Washington DC (retracing the journey that Abraham Lincoln’s train had made 103 years before).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG4vJxi9Kis]

Fusco was a professional photo-journalist at the time and had been commissioned to cover the funeral train’s journey. It was an extraordinary opportunity for a photographer to capture the American polis at its rawest and most emotional moment.

The pictures show Americans from all walks of life – rich, poor, black, white, young and old – standing in the summer heat waiting for the opportunity to farewell a man who had come to embody their hope of a better quality of leadership and a better quality life. People who had already endured the despair of the deaths of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King and the disillusionment of the Vietnam War and saw in Bobby, the potential for the country to move in a new, more positive direction.  People who for their troubles, a few short months, would be subjected to the first term of the Nixon administration.

Fusco’s moving photos are preceded by a foreword by Norman Mailer and are interspersed with extracts from Kennedy’s most famous speeches. It finishes with a quote from Senator Edward Kennedy’s eulogy for RFK that states:

“My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”

Highlights: A sample of the dozens of photos included in this book are attached below:

An excellent Interactive feature on the funeral train from the New York Times is available here.

My Take: Ordinarily I steer clear of political biographies (diaries in particular!) but beore I moved to the UK I thought I needed a bit of a crash course in the who’s who of the Party in the UK so I picked this up at the hot new political book of the time. The fact that I’d be spending a year at the LSE learning from Mr Campbell may also have played a part in the decision

AC has been demonised as being the death knell of liberal democracy personified because of his alleged practice of the dark arts of political ’spin’. Far be it from me to have any public comment on the professionalism of contemporary journalists or their role in a functioning democracy, but AC really lines them up in this book (keep in mind he was a senior journalist for many years before moving into politics):

“For all its faults, our political process is a good one, and the means by which much meaningful change is made. That is not a very fashionable view to hold, but as someone who has operated at senior levels in journalism and politics, around a decade in each, it is my respect for the media that has shrunk, and my respect for politics that has grown.”

and

“I have no idea what people will make of this book. I am probably too close to it all, both the events and the process of publishing. I know some newspapers and commentators will come to it with minds made up, and look to find those parts that help confirm their prejudices. It is what is wrong with some of them in the first place, and why I have next to no respect for them, and no real interest in their views. Amid the enormous cuts I have made are many which relate to my dealings with a 24 hour media that has in my view changed for the worse not only political debate but politics itself, as the politicians have to devote so much time and energy to dealing with people who believe their role is not to impart information and fuel healthy debate, but to undermine where possible the actions, decisions and motives of politicians. It is a sad irony that we have more media coverage than ever, but less understanding or real debate.”

Say what you want about him, but AC has a way with words and an ability to zing those who get in his way (currently being perpetuated on his excellent blog). The book itself is a real tome (1000+ pages from memory) so is probably only worthwhile for real political obsessives, but is certainly an engaging account of a fantastically interesting period for UK labour politics.

“Some twat with a Trot poster came up to me on the way in and yelled ‘Butcher!’ Traitor!’ at me. I stopped and mustered as much visual contempt as I could, then assured him that if we win the general election then don’t worry, thanks to wankers like him, there will always be another Tory government along afterwards. These people make me vomit.

And on the left wing of the party in general:

“It is all about how the party sees them as they strut around the conference, and got fuck all to do with whether we ever actually get the power needed to do anything for the country.”

Quite!