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Aeschylus, American Government, American Politics, Arthur Schlesinger, Bobby Kennedy, campaigns, Camus, Corridors of Grief, existentialism, future, Government, Greek, Greek tragedy, history, JFK, John F. Kennedy, Kennedys, plans, politicians, politics, President, RFK, Rita Dallas, Robert Francis Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and His Times, stoicism
“With all he had striven for smashed in a single afternoon, [Robert] had an overwhelming sense of the fragility and contingency of life. He had never taken plans very seriously in the past. He could not believe in them at all now…
Robert Kennedy at last traveled in that speculative area where doubt lived. He returned from the dangerous journey, his faith intact, but deepened, enriched. From Aeschylus and Camus he drew a sort of Christian stoicism and fatalism: a conviction that man could not escape his destiny, but that this did not relieve him of the responsibility of fulfilling his own best self. He supplemented the Greek image of man against fate with the existentialist proposition that man, defining himself by his choices, remakes himself each day and therefore can never rest. Life was a sequence of risks. To fail to meet them was to destroy a part of oneself.
He made his way through the haze of pain—and in doing so brought other sufferers insight and relief. ‘For the next two and a half years,’ wrote Rita Dallas, his father’s nurse, ‘Robert Kennedy became the central focus of strength and hope for the family…. Despite his own grief and loneliness, he radiated an inner strength that I have never seen before in any other man…. Bobby was the one who welded the pieces back together.’ As his father had said so long before, he would keep the Kennedys together, you could bet.
He was now the head of the family. With his father stricken, his older brothers dead, he was accountable to himself. The qualities he had so long subordinated in the interest of others—the concern under the combativeness, the gentleness under the carapace, the idealism, at once wistful and passionate, under the toughness—could rise freely to the surface. He could be himself at last.”
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A passage pulled from Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger.
I promise this is the last section from Schlesinger or Dallek that I’ll post — at least for awhile.
rcab said:
Your taste in choosing appropriate and tasteful photographs to accompany your always interesting provocative comments is remarkable.
Truly artistic.
sheafferhistorian said:
I often feel our remembrance has confused the two brothers. Bobby was much more Liberal than Jack, yet we hail JFK as the great Liberal icon.
jrbenjamin said:
More liberal in some ways, definitely. He was more progressive on civil rights, I think partly because of how far legislation moved in the years following Jack’s death.
The term obfuscates some, but JFK wasn’t that liberal in reality. His position on civil rights was far from progressive (though it looked softer than Nixon’s in ’60), and his stance towards Cuba and Vietnam was hawkish.
Compare with Nixon a decade later: a Republican who instituted the EPA, eased relations with China, and admitted to being a Keynesian.
sheafferhistorian said:
Makes you wonder if the GOP would have Nixon today…
Rosaliene Bacchus said:
I’m not complaining. Great posts, all of them. The loss of a loved one is a universal experience. Thank you.
Sharon K. said:
I have thoroughly enjoyed this series, and the accompanying images were lovely.
Thank you.