In Love with Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy

Steel does a great job of exploding the Bobby Kennedy myth. Myth has it that Kennedy would have won the 1968 Democratic and General elections. Steel states that wasn't the case. He might not have won the Democractic nomination even. The groups he married together to bring about his election might have fractured even before the general election. Steel also explodes the myth that Kennedy was a compassiote politician. He was a very forceful personality and a good politician, but many of the characteristics people equate with him were simply from people looking back and seeing what they thought they lost. This is reality politics. For those looking for Camelot, look elsewhere. Both JFK and RFK were politicians, and not particularly great politicians. They led the nation into a new era. However, they were not the solution to the many problems the country faced in the sixties. Steel relates the reality of both men, and the time they lived in.

This book may not be a flattering examination of Robert Kennedy, but it is fascinating for its dissection of a personality. Steele is very sure of his ideas, which he stresses again and again, almost to a point of overcooking. It is not captivating, but it is very interesting. It left me wanting to learn more about the Kennedy myth-making process.

I feel the author did a first rate job in presenting the complex personality of Robert Kennedy to the reader. Bobby's father always felt that finishing first was paramount. If you finish second in anything, you might as well finish last. When Brother John was elected president Bobby considered himself to be a deputy president. After John's assassination, Bobby not only felt abandoned, but to think his enemy, Lyndon Johnson, now had the gall to be in his brother's place festered within him. Bobby accepted the Warren Commission's belief of the assassination because he felt Jack's image would be shattered if an investigation dug too deeply which may have uncovered the CIA's efforts to kill Castro and Jack's sharing a mistress with a Mafia leader. Bobby also felt a tremendous amount of guilt because he felt Jack's death to be retribution for his (Bobby's) harrassment of the Mafia. Bobby had a hateful side which he showed to Lyndon Johnson and Senator Eugene McCarthy and a compassionate side which he demonstrated to the downtrowden. As other Kennedys in more recent years Bobby took unnecessary risks, but as he said, "I really don't care about anything happening to me. This really isn't such a happy existence, is it?" The author doesn't believe the 1960's would have been any different had the Kennedys lived. What became Lyndon Johnson's war would have been Jack Kennedy's war. In addition, it was no sure thing that Bobby Kennedy would have been elected president had he lived. Lyndon Johnson accomplished more in the area of civil rights than either of the Kennedys would have pushed for. He, like his brother, had charisma, and we look upon both more highly than if they had lived. As poet A.E. Houseman wrote, in "To An Athlete Dying Young", "Smart lad to slip betimes away from fields where glory does not stay, and early though the laurel grows it withers quicker than the rose...Now you will not swell the rout of lads that wore their honors out. Runners whom renown outran and the name died before the man." Buy the book. It belongs in your bookcase.

As a long-time admirer of Robert Kennedy, I have often posed myself the question offered by author Steel as the central issue of this fascinating new book: what is it about Bobby that makes us cling to him - his image, his loss - so many years after the assasination? Ronald Steel comes as close as any scholar to answering this question and showing why it is an issue at the heart of who we are as Americans at the end of the 20th Century. In this too-brief book Steel reviews through secondary sources the major events of Kennedy's life. We go through once again the anguish of JFK's death and its heart-wrenching impact on Bobby and the searing promise of his last campaign. Steel is balanced, sympathetic, eloquent but candid and not overly emotional. An excellent book all around, one that reveals as much about our needs as Americans as it does about the Bobby that we lost.

The book is one of a few by authors who manage to thoughtfully take a look at the reality of the Kennedys. The journalism community, and to a lesser but significant extent the publishing community, tend to look at the Kennedys through the lens of hagiography. That JFK and RFK inspired intense emotional admiration among a large part of our population is creditworthy. But the speak-no-evil atmosphere that the admirers have perpetrated since the assassinations has prevented a discourse from which we can learn the lessons of history. This book is a courageous step toward breaking the collective trance.