Editorial/Worst Book of the Year
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial Worst Book of the Year R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. I once sat with Arthur Krock in his twilight. He was by then the retired Washington correspondent of the New York Times, three times...
...His early Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Age ofJackson, was undistinguished...
...The old head shook in resignation...
...Can you see the learned Arthur solemnly rolling it out to her...
...Perhaps an opportunity to elucidate some fragment of the Bill of Rights, or to stomp down hard on one of the little pests' chubby paws...
...No man has more raveningly pursued and produced untruth for Camelot than Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr...
...Davidson suffered untimely curtailment while on exhibition in his cageone of the beasts simply devoured him...
...There is Arthur's version of Bobby...
...Which tenders us more drivel...
...It is boring, and with its gloomy dimension of finality, it enervates...
...Certainly the boys themselves never passed up an opportunity to stomp down hard...
...He has grown, not just as an intellect, but as a person...
...Arthur has composed one of the longest pornographic novels ever...
...Arthur, now confidential, now authoritative, speaking of the inscrutable Bobby...
...Betty retails her exploits with surgeons, shrinks, and counselors and at meetings of various Women's Republican Clubs...
...The boys played it "tough," as they were wont to say, and looking back over their careers it is hard for me to see that they benefited the country any more than they benefited their battered opponents...
...As so many of the intellectuals of our time, Arthur has discovered that reality is oppressive...
...and forget not that this was the year in which Betty Ford hurled all her soap-opera sophistication into a turgid volume of facetiae...
...Ahh, what a superb pair: Betty, her hands clasped between her knees, her mouth agape...
...There could be no more amusing party than a joint authors' party for Betty and Arthur...
...By the end of the 1960s he was a humbug of the first water, and now, with the publication of Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur has emerged as the premier fabulist of his generation, a fabulist capable of tapping out a thousand-page tome of pure fantasy...
...Had he missed an opportunity to sober them down and to smarten them up...
...Let me hear of it...
...It enlivens his best work...
...Madison and Jefferson are their only intellectual equals, de Gaulle fused to Malraux their only modern equivalent...
...I remember them playing at my feet while their father and I would sit together on his lawn...
...He was reminiscing, and his mind turned to the sons of his old pal, Joe Kennedy...
...I gave John the title for his first book, Why England Slept...
...In his every book, Arthur has struggled to shake the coils of reality...
...Certainly our public discourse took a terrible thumping, our constitutional arrangements were abused, and the stress their grandiloquent pothering exacted has left the Republic weaker at home and abroad...
...The Kennedys and their courtiers transformed American politics, moving us from banality to an absorption with fantasy that has rendered most of the nation's practicing politicians mere quacks...
...A rthur's career puts one in mind of that 1930s English cleric, the Rev...
...I have always taken it as the practical joke of a jovial divinity that when it came to planting little Arthur on this orb, the stork swooped earthward and dropped the pudgy rascal into the manse of a certified historian, the scholarly Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., who for years inflicted upon his pink progeny lectures about the historian's duty to objective scholarship and the truth...
...Since throwing in with the Kennedy clan Arthur has followed a similar course, and now with publication of this nauseating biography he has produced his own cage...
...Parents and children have been mismatched in the past, but was there ever a more flagrant mismatch than young Arthur squalling in the nursery of Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., the author of A Political and Social History of the United States...
...He was by then the retired Washington correspondent of the New York Times, three times a Pulitzer Prize-winner, a venerable Jeffersonian Democrat who had lived to see his old column handed over to the oaf Wicker...
...The old elegance adorning his hagiographic por(continued on page 36...
...Indulgent and bathetic, sophistic and trashy, it is the worst book of 1978...
...Arthur tries to make all these vacuous rogues out to be the saintliest Americans since the Puritan Commonwealth...
...Can you imagine how that revelation would have gone over with Betty...
...In Robert Kennedy and His Times there roam many beasts...
...Yet Arthur has an experiencing nature...
...This is irony...
...How his personal biography will end is still in doubt, but after reading the transcript of a recent debate in which he propounded the Camelot buncombe before an unreceptive-in fact hostile-Irving Kristol, itmay be helpful to recall that the poor Rev...
...Bobby once divulged that had he not been born a Kennedy he probably would have become a juvenile delinquent or a revolutionary...
...Harold Davidson, Rector of Stiffkey (pronounced Stuckey), who, upon being defrocked for liaisons with women of easy virtue, was then put on display all over England, at first naked in a barrel, then caged with wild beasts...
...Yet Robert Kennedy and His Times is not merely the fantasy of a fabulist, it is the fantasy of a drunken courtier...
...Evidence of Kennedy boorishness and flim-flam accumulates with every passing year, yet the legend of Camelot holds its ground, a gorgeous testimonial to mankind's lust for the palpably untrue...
...They were such shallow boys...
...I have dutifully perused both these masterpieces-oohing over the saucy lady's bouts with pills and the jug, hyperventilating over the adolescent reveries that crept upon New York's junior senator during the juvenescence of the 1960s-and I have a vision...
...There is Teddy, and there is a JFK that legitimate historians will find unrecognizable...
...the whole narrative groans and sweats under a caparison of facts and logical deductions...
...Moreover, the truth inhibits creativity...
...Who doubts that Betty, with all her indomitable girlishness, would find ecstasy in Arthur's tales of RFK's "experiencing nature," of his "psychic violence" which, according to the testimony of Miss Shirley MacLaine, produced "tenderness," and of his occult complexity...
...Arthur's repugnance for the truth has been long and liberating...
...Such poignant experiences can be edifying for the young...
...In the history of this great and democratic union, few families have ever brought down more violence on their opponents and received more violence in return...
...Arthur retails sheer fantasy...
Vol. 12 • January 1979 • No. 1
