We Band of Brothers

Edwin Guthman met Bob Kennedy during RFK's labor- management corruption investigations. Guthman was a skeptical newsman who had to decide whether RFK, an unknown, was worth trusting with sensitive source information. He later worked closely with Bob Kennedy in the Justice Department, and his memoir gives fascinating insights into this most capable and best-motivated of the WWII Kennedy brothers. Note: the title *does not* refer to those brothers; and note further: the "Band of Brothers" initials form "Bob." (In Arthur Schlesinger's "Robert Kennedy and His Times," near the end of chapter 11 on staffing the DoJ, Schlesinger mentioned Guthman's book with that terrific title. Soon after I'd read that, much publicity emerged about the 2001 TV series of almost the same name, which coincidence was intriguing enough to move me to locate the Guthman book.) Guthman provides a unique and warm, respectful but not worshipful, set of insights into RFK's strengths and struggles as a survivor of the Joe Kennedy household, Senate investigator, and officeholder. He was present with Bob Kennedy for many meetings, plans, and conversations which directly determined the course of powerful events for the US, especially during the almost- unbelievable 1960s. It's high- energy material. We now live in times of school shootings and terrorism, with ordinary people rising to the challenges of extraordinary demands. There has been a remarkable amount of Cuba news as well (Elian Gonzales, Castro's condition). That makes it all the better to see how Guthman shows JFK-RFK leading the nation to deal with labor- management corruption, the Cuba-nukes and Bay of Pigs crises, and attempts to keep civil rights away from much of the population. For many younger US readers now, it will probably be hard to imagine those times, as urgently important as they were to where we are now.