Fire in the Streets/Of Kennedys and Kings
Hassenger, Robert
|IIIIIII Books: KALEIDOSCOPICAFTER-IMAGES HOW do you spell relief?. In 1980, nearing the end of (yet another) marathon, many would seemingly spell it N-O-N-E. Why is our choice so...
...He writes with more verve, if less breathlessly: his low-key style is properly modest, particularly when he was witness to history, as an early ally of Martin King...
...Viorst has a theme of sorts, "the phenomenon of social disorder, which is what made a cohesive decade of the period from Greensboro in 1960 to Kent State in 1970...
...As, I think, would Robert, Martin, and John...
...One need not accept the president's diagnosis (with Lasch et al...
...Yet he identified with Frost's "I have been one acquainted with the night...
...our hopes were so high...
...Her education draws her at first into the world of art and literature, and there are bri+efglimpses of men and women like Mao Dun, Ba Jin, Ding Ling, and others of that brilliant group of leftist writers of the twenties and thirties, who had worked in or on the fringes of the Communist movement, and would now have to come to terms with a victorious Communism in their art...
...Additional support for the metaphor is implicit in his title, with its intentional ambiguity...
...Drawing heavily on his own experience, the 1964 oral history interviews with RFK (which became available only in 1979), and the Congressional investigations of the King and John Kennedy assassinations, Wofford attempts to account for "Bobby's" metamorphosis...
...Wofford's is the more interesting book...
...that his brother had a liaison with mobster Sam Giancana's girl...
...Wofford concludes that JFK's "cool" style was not an act: he really was detached, ironic, somewhat cavalier...
...Or, ideally, who offer both...
...counsel to Theodore Hes-IIIIII FIREIMTHE STREETS l~fi|tonVforst Simonand Schuster,$14.95, 591 pp...
...His pragmatism was that of an FDR, not a George Washington ("I seen my opportunities and took'em") Plunkitt...
...Most who read it will be grateful he did...
...that the FBI, the CIA, and presidents themselves violated the freedoms of American citizens...
...founding member of the Peace Corps...
...And Dallas...
...John's development had been steady, from the "political dilettante" of his Congressional and early Senate years to the "statesman" Wofford sees Kennedy becoming in his last twoyears.Robertgrew"by epiphanies": the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the violence he saw directed against blacks and civil rights workers, the power and corruption he found in the FBI and CIA...
...We have since learned some of the things he knew in 1963, and kept from the Warren Commission and other investigations: that in encouraging FBI infiltration of the KKKandorganizedcrime,he strengthened a monster whose head hated the Kennedys and King...
...Much of Wofford's most insightful reporting and commentary is about the contradictions in the personalities of his key actors, whichIII mirror the conflicting themes of the time: JFK's "inner struggle" between cold warrior and statesman...
...Like John Kennedy...
...In Wofford's final (and best) section, "Conflicting Legacies: An American Tragedy," the essential chapI0 October 1980:569 ter considers the "agony"--again, in the classical dramatic sense--of Robert Kennedy...
...And yet...
...Yet it was this reform of the early fifties that finally did away with the remnants of China's gentry, that "feudal class" (in Marxist parlance) that for more than a millennium had dominated not only life in the Chinese countryside, but the positions of power in the government as well...
...There is an extremely sharp contrast between this modern world of Shanghai, and the world of Longxiang in the northCommonweal:570...
...Or moral leaders...
...the Great Society an ideal incompatible with our Southeast Asian Deerhunt (of...
...Clifford ONE of my colleagues, a scholar of modem Chinese literature, has deplored the capture of that writing by social scientists in the West, scholars who judge it by socio-political rather than literary standards...
...it is rather as if Dickens and Trollope were the province of historians like Kitson Clark, or Hemingway and Faulkner the province of Arthur Schlesinger...
...Yet there is little doubt that most readers who turn to Yuan-tsung Chen's The Dragon'sI Village will do so not so much because of their interest in its literary merits, but rather because they are interested in the subject...
...OFKENNEDYSANDKINGS Harris Wofford Farrar, Straus, Giroux,$17.$0, 483 pp...
...by the end of the decade, the private ownership of land by the peasants had given way to the cooperatives of the mid-fifties and the communes of the Great Leap Forward...
...Wofford's narrative provides the reader an opportunity to "make sense of" the Sixties, less from a systematic organizing perspective than literally: the sense--feel, almost smell and taste--of the ambience that generated what today seems the nalvet6 of Peace Corpsmen and non-violent protesters...
...The term is the right one, for Wofford presents issues in classic dramatic form: his heroes are comic or tragic...
...As we follow the 1960 campaign and Democratic convention, for example, we learn how JFK's phone call to Coretta King--and Robert's to the Georgia judge who had refused bail to Martin--were not the result of Theodore White's "well-oiled machine," nor cynical political maneuvering: each was almost accidental...
...and more...
...Wofford, a narrative unified by themes...
...What happened...
...It was ten years before he could begin this book...
...These did not bother JFK, who believed that " the finest strategies are often the result of accidents...
...past continue to fascinate us...
...and as friend and sometime co-conspirator with some of the book's dramatis personae...
...of a national malaise to feel some nostalgia for the Sixties...
...A small, human part of a large movement I THE DBAWN'S VILLAGE Yuan-Tsung Chen Pantheon, $10.00 (285 pp...
...We see how the reform was carded out in one particular comer of China, the Dragon's Village (Longxiang) of Gansu province, a desperately poor region of the northwest, which had been a border outpost under the Han and Tang dynasties, and which remains a cultural and economic backwater today...
...He is right, of course...
...In the cabinet search, we see how important were intelligence, skepticism, pragmatism, toughness and wit, for the Kennedys, who valued such qualities highly, in themselves and others...
...that his support for the drive to topple Castro helped generate the unholy alliance between the CIA and the mob, resulting in at least eight attempts to kill Castro--who knew it...
...IIIIIII Books: KALEIDOSCOPICAFTER-IMAGES HOW do you spell relief...
...His Epilogue begins to suggest some similarities and differences between John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, to speculate on how post-Camelot antipolitics has made the presidency more demanding, and to muse about the fate of "the last Kennedy," as the primaries and caucuses were about to begin...
...We see her first in Shanghai, helping a friend from her American convent school distribute radical literature before the entry of the Red Army, making the decision to stay on while her fianc~ and family prepare to leave for Hongkong or Taiwan...
...As, for some, did Robert Kennedy...
...Robert Hmsenger burgh on the Civil Rights Commission...
...Wofford believes Kennedy felt responsible for his brother's death...
...chance and misunderstanding were also at work in Johnson being asked on, then off, then back on the ticket...
...The reforms that were set in motion by the Land Law of June 1950, sought to bring a new order (already established in those parts of China where the Communists had earlier won control) to the eighty percent of the population made up of peasants...
...it is commonly estimated that several millions of the Chinese people~lost their lives in the terror of the early fifties, a terror heightened by the emergency following the outbreak of the Korean war...
...Wofford does not suggest which, if any, of these demons with whom RFK trafficked (as Mailer put it) might have been responsible for John Kennedy's death, or what Robert thought he should have done...
...Something died in him--as in many of us--in 1968, in April in Memphis, June in Los Angeles, Chicago in August, and with the election in November...
...NicholasR...
...Viorst and Wofford attempt to sort out the kaleidoscopic after-images, as their subtitles--"America in the 1960's" and "Making Sense of the Sixties," respectively--promise...
...but he cared more deeply than he let many people see...
...Viorst provides a collection of vignettes...
...White House staffer for civil rights...
...His focus is on some central figures--e.g., Allen Ginsberg, Bayard Rustin, Tom Hayden, Clark Kerr, Allard Lowenstein, Jerry Rubin--whose actions captured and reflected the decade's climate and concerns...
...RFK's growth from " the narrow-minded moralist of the 1950s...
...that John Kennedy's withdrawal of air IIIIIcover at the Bay of Pigs bitterly disappointed the anti-Castro forces we had armed and trained, who blamed him for the fiasco...
...But his heart isn't in it...
...This fatalism may have been influenced by his knowledge, according to the recent biography of his early years by H. S. Parmet, that a blood disease might kill him before fifty...
...The revisionist historians monopolize the conventional wisdom today, and we share much of their cynicism"andanti-politics...
...We know that Camelot was in large part hype...
...It deals with the first stages of land reform under the Chinese Communists, one of the most momentous acts of the new regime and one which, it seems safe to say, marks a genuinely secular change in what many used to imagine to be the endlessly cyclical pattern of history in China...
...Martin King's triumphs and failures are recounted, as is his victimization by the FBI's Hoover-inspired vendetta-Wofford considers this "probably the single most disturbing story of the 1960s, or perhaps of any decade in American history," and presents the particulars in some detail, concluding that a climate was deliberately created that "invited King's assassination"--providing some fascinating insights not only into Hoover and his relationship with the Kennedys, particularly the Attorney General, with whom he shared a cordial dislike, but also into the character of Martin King, and his attraction to and fear, of messianism, "the last temptation...
...campaign worker, speechwriter, and talent searcher for John Kennedy...
...Later, of course, it would become clear that "land to the tiller" was only the first stage of the reform...
...Some of the people and events of a generation (sic...
...Such as Martin Luther King...
...So much seemed to be happening...
...Perhaps even better acquainted was Robert Kennedy...
...But few would deny he was a changed person after Dallas, however unwilling they might be to share Wofford's judgment that Robert Kennedy was, by 1968, "one of the most appealing and promising men in the history of American politics...
...It was a movement thatbrought new hope to China's millions, for the first time trying to fulfill Sun Yat-sen's old promise of "land to the tiller," and yet a movement at the same time bloody and destructive...
...to the broad-visioned and strangely transfigured candidate forPresident in 1968...
...Why is our choice so limited...
...There is much more to Wofford's book...
...Chen's narrator is Guan Ling-ling, a young girl who -- like Chen -- was born to wealth and privilege in Shanghai, and who -- like .Chert -- threw in her lot with the new regime after the Communist victory...
...Where are politicians who are passionate, idealistic, committed...
...But at center stage is our own royal family: "Reviewing and reconsidering the events of that decade, I found, to my surprise, that the character of John and Robert Kennedy, and the character of their family and its role in American life, seem as significant as the political causes they championed...
...Mailer, Cimono, Coppola...
Vol. 107 • October 1980 • No. 18
