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:

My Take: Published in 1990, this collection of Keating quotations comes from the golden era of PJK. The period before he became PM and was forced to moderate (at least to some extent) his more extreme instincts for public, rhetorical bloodshed.

Most of the more well known Keatingisms are collected at the excellent Scumbag Archive, so I’ll refrain from republishing them here. But there are plenty of less well known, but equally amusing Keating sprays that I can’t see anywhere online at presemt so I’ll include a selection of the better ones from this book below:

On the Left:

“What it boils down to is wider nature strips, more trees and we’ll all make wicker baskets in Balmain. Then we’ll all live in renovated terraces in Balmain and we’ll have the arts and crafts shops and everything else is bad and evil.”

“These people are trying to make my party into something other than it is… They’re appendages. That’s why I’ll never abandon ship, and never let those people capture it.”

On the economy:

“If we were providing these policy setting and outcomes in Western Europe, they’d be lighting candles to us in the cathedrals.”

“I guarantee if you walk into any pet shop in Australia what the resident galah will be talking about it micro-economic policy.”

“Stick your head out of the building in any capital city in Australia and it’s a sea of cranes. The economy is so robust that it’s taken a pickaxe to stop it. We’re laying into it with a lump of four-by-two to try and slow it down. In the past, if you hit it with a lump of four-by-two, it would fall to bits. And stay in bits.”

“All these ex-Treasury drop-outs around the place advising me how we ought to best do things – the fact is, look, all these people whould be better off in the Australian Treasury. We’ve lost years of experience. They have dropped out to write a bloody newsletter for some merchant bank. It’s pointless and useless.”

On failing to lodge his tax return:

“My fortunes are tied up with the economy.. I’m still on the big picture, painting the big picture, and I may splash a bit of paint. I did make a mistake, but unlike the Leader of the Opposition, my mistake did not cost half a million people their jobs. My mistake did not retard the economy for twenty years. My mistake did not introduce a massive domestic recession, unlike his mistake which almost destroyed the fabric of the Australian economy.”

On the Aussie battler:

“These people, they live on the ebb and flow of the economy, like kelp on the seashore. They can’t protect, they don’t have the personal wealth to protect themselves from the ups and downs of the economy. We’ve got to protect them.”

On Whitlam:

“It was a contest as to whether the heart on the sleeve outweighed the chip on the shoulder. There was certainly a shortage of cerebral ballast to maintain any equilibrium.”

On the Opposition:

“You were heard in silence, so some of you scumbags on the front bench should just wait a minute until you hear the responses from me.”

“You were in office from 1949 to 1983 bar three years…. And you left everything the way you found it. The place got old and tired and worn out, just like you are… For 30 years all we had was Black Jack McEwen trowelling on the tarrif protection while he was kidding farmers he was representing them. And Liberal Part Treasueres, handed speeches by Treasury officials… they couldn’t even read the speeches, let alone comprehend the stuff. That’s how you ran the Commonwealth. The mandarins ran things… you wouldn’t worry about the detail. Because you NEVER ran the policy. You never RAN the place. We run the departments, we run the policy. We comprehend. We know.”

On journalists:

“At least we’re doing it for the history books – you’re doing it for tomorrow’s fish and chips.”

On politics:

“It’s the great vista of politics that is so appealing. You know, a finger in every pie. You’re always certain of your own motivation even if you’re never quite sure of anybody else’s. So if it’s a case of backing in somebody to do a job you might as well back in yourself.”

“You know me luv, downhill, one ski, no poles.”

“We’re all stressed. The game I’m in is lubricated by stress. Politics is the clearing house of pressures.”

“If you want to wear the belt, you’ve got to have the fights. And if you won’t have the fights, you’ll have the belt taken off you.”

“We are all given the field-marshall’s baton in the knapsack when we get our pre-selection. I got mine then and it is still tucked away” [1988]

From 1986, more prescient than he would have intended:

“I could burn inflation out of the economy with a recession, but I would burn the economy with it.”

On Architecture and Design:

“After art deco there’s only fag packets and bottle tops.”

“Other people play the neddies – I perv on buildings.”

“The Labor Party is the only repository of taste in Australian politics. Most of these Tories, like Fraser, have a knowledge of architecture and design that goes no further than wedding-cake Victoriana and grandfather chairs.”

“If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s mock Chippendale.”

On Modesty in 1987

Keating: This is the great coming of age of Australia. This is the golden age of economic change.

Interviewer: How much credit do you take?

Keating: Oh, a very large part.

And two for our times:

“You don’t have to be a genius – if the private economy is rooted, then we haven’t got much of a chance.”

“Banking is the artery of the economy and we’ve had hardening of the arteries for too long in this country.”

Synopsis:

My Take: Much like Joh himself, there’s nothing fancy to this book, just a collection of The Flying Peanut’s more memorable quotes. It did give me some pleasure transcribing these quotes into the blogosphere. While Google is doing a good job of making everything ever written searchable through Google Books, there’s a bit of an online void at the moment once you go looking for the esoterica of Australian politics beyond about a decade ago. So far as I can see, this is the only place online that many of these quotes currently appear – so enjoy. Especially the non-Queenslanders – you don’t know what you missed:

On Aboriginals:

• “Land rights is a communist plot to set up land bases that could be used for subversive activities by other countries as well as for guerrilla training centres for other countries.”
• “Aborigines are as wealthy as Arab oil sheiks…. They wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the United States of America, together with our people, who fought the Coral Sea battle.”

On Morals:

• “Queensland will not be dragged into the condom culture”
• “There is no animal, no beast on this earth that resorts to the sort of tactics that these characters [homosexuals] do. And I think that it is disgusting that they offer to give their blood and cause the death of so many people.”
• “The day care concept, boiled down, means leaving you child with someone else to bring up while you do what you like – go to work, learn pottery etc.”
• “No Goannas, No Gays”

On Queensland:

• “We are a federation and I support a federation but we would operate much more effectively and efficiently and really surge ahead if we were on our own.”
• “We will work with [Bob Hawke] provided he is working in Queensland’s interests. If he attempts to interfere in any shape or form, then it’s on his head. And if he’s so unsure of himself and so far committed to the communists around his shoulders and breathing down his neck, then God help Australia.”
• “What is good for Queensland is good for Australia.”
• “I don’t mind being called the Flying Peanut. I think this is unique: in each of the three Government aircraft, we’ve gone more than the distance from here to the moon.”
• “I really worry about Queensland. I lose a lot of sleep because I don’t know what will happen when I go.”

On Policy:

• “The Great Barrier Reef is really big. The people who say it’s being ruined don’t know how big it is.”
• “We won’t be able to sit on uranium. Firstly because it would not be right and secondly because it would be wrong.”
• “I oppose tobacco tax on principle. It is a new tax and Queensland does not have new taxes.”
• “If I had been building the dam and they had ordered me to stop the dam, do you think I would have stopped it, just because some guy in Canberra or somewhere else said it was unconstitutional?”

On other cultures:

• “Just because a few migrants want their spicy tucker, I fail to see what the Australian community as a whole should suffer the possibility of foot-and-mouth disease.”

Dealing with the Press:

• “I’d love to tell you but I can’t. Just look at me. Don’t you worry about that until tomorrow, goodness me.”
• “I’m not talking to you on what you want to talk… Well I’m not interested in anything you say. You’re always so wide of the mark and generally so critical so I won’t even bother answering what you’ve got to say. Anybody else?”
• “Don’t you worry about it, we are looking after it”
• On being asked a question on condoms by a reporter: “Let’s come clean, Elizabeth. I thought you looked a decent sort of girl. You don’t mean to tell me that you are in that category also? What’s your lifestyle Elizabeth? What do you really think? Do you really think this is the way for the nation to go? We are being asked to say ‘you go ahead and play around, the Government will help you’?!
• “I’m not interested in that, or in anything anyone else says”
• “The greatest thin that could happen to the State and the nation is when we can get rid of the media. Then we can live in peace and tranquillity and no one would know anything.”
• “You don’t tell the frogs anything before you drain the swamp.”

My Take: Safire is a member of that class of US conservatives whose ranks have been purged to the point of extinction under the ascendency of the Bushist crony/evangelical brand of Republicanism: the conservative intellectual. Today, Safire is a relic from another time. A dinosaur from a period during which conservative intellectuals like William F Buckley, Milton Freidman, Freidrich Hayek (and even Gore Vidal in many respects) roamed the terrain of the public discourse injecting rigour and principle and even glamour into conservative thinking. Today we’re left with Anne Coulter, Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin and a well past his prime PJ O’Rourke to weild the conservative cudgels. It must be deeply depressing to be a young conservative today.

At any rate, this 1968 edition that I found in a second-hand book shop while studying in the US comes from a lost period during which conservatives could be unashamedly, in fact luxuriously, elistist intellectuals. While not quite Johnsonian in its breadth or erudition, Safire produces a hefty body of political/cultural/historical research on the etymology of political language (it pains me to think how much work this would have involved pre-internet) and presents it in a deliciously drull manner.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of this Dictionary is that it is old enough that it includes theorigins of phrases that are now well and truly lost to obscurity. Similarly, the text offers many unintended insights into the political debate of the times for the modern reader. An interesting example in this regard is the origins of the phrase “better dead than red”. Safire traces the phrase to a quote from Bertrand Russell quote in 1958 providing that if :

“no alternative remains except communist domination or the extinction of the human race, the former alternative is the lesser of two evils”

This quote was then chrystalised by the anti-war movement into the phrase ‘Better red than dead’, which was subsequently inverted by anti-communist campaigners to become ‘Better dead than red’ (in fact this was the title of a book calling for a world crusade against the communists). I found it quite interesting that with the passage of time, this phrase became better remembered as an example of the extremism of anti-communists than its original, anti-war iteration. As I say, not an insight that Safire would have predicted at the time.

The book is full of little gems like this – if you can track down a copy snap it up straight away.

Highlights:

From the introduction:

“The new, old, and constantly changing language of politics is a lexicon of conflict and drama, of ridicule and reproach, of pleading and persuasion. Colour and bite permeate a language designed to rally many men, to destroy some, and to change the minds of others… This is a dictionary of the words and phrases that have misled millions, blackened reputations, held out false hopes, oversimplified ideas to appeal to the lowest common denominator, shouted down inquiry, and replaced searching debate with stereotypes that trigger approval or hatred.”

Another great tid-bit:

“(The word ‘candidate’) comes from the latin candidatus, wearer of the white toga, which the Roman office-seekers always wore as a symbol of their purity. The same root gave the language ‘candor’ and ‘incandescence,’ qualities that candidates occasionally have.”