Expense of mythmaking

...There are any number of other contemporary accounts...

...Their well-being, their security, and their future is linked to his...

...It seems graceless even to try...

...The docu-drama reduces the McCarthy campaign of 1968 to a "testing of the waters...

...He embodied all of them, and he did it in a manner suitable to imaginations of the first TV-formed generation...

...It is because the Kennedy story embodies so many of the cultural ideas of a generation and because it gives expression to an emotion deeply held that it is difficult, even reckless, to point out facts which contradict any one of its elaborations such as the recent CBS "docu-drama" on Robert Kennedy...

...Those in the political process group themselves around men not so much because of a philosophy as because they hitch their star to that of the emerging or already emerged leader...

...Men and women are handicapped by the complexity of modern life, by the increasingly difficult character of social problems, and by the absence of any generally accepted body of opinion...

...stigmatizing the candidate as "a spoiler" apparently in that, after Eugene McCarthy had announced for the presidency four months before Kennedy saw a 1968 campaign as viable, after his supporters had won him first place on the California ballot by petition, after he had won a significant number of delegates in Minnesota, after he had shown the incumbent president vulnerable by his campaign in New Hampshire, after all the polls showed him winning the Wisconsin primary, after he had brought dissent over the escalation in Vietnam out of the streets and into the political process, he did not yield to the inevitability of a Kennedy candidacy...

...In short, we are back to the politics of the clan and a feudal political order...

...Those men who shaped America — those who organized the uprising against George III and framed the marvelous compromise of the Constitution, who, around Hamilton, gave the new nation financial stability, and, around Jefferson, facilitated the rapid expansion to the West — those men, we are reminded, 8 March 1985:135 shared a framework of ideas, a common practical political philosophy (although they differed in its expression...

...Classicist Edith Hamilton makes it clear that the great Greek myths were not primitive efforts to explain reality but the conscious creation of literary artists...

...Their own recognition is " a matter of complete personal devotion" (Weber...

...It was no wonder that those who had found fulfillment in his rise longed for, even demanded, a restoration in the person of his brother...

...And that hope was again cut off, in turn, by the killing of Robert Kennedy...

...The Times writers cite famed sociologist Max Weber's dictum: charisma does not recognize any legitimacy other than one which flows from personal strength proven time and time again...

...Journalistic histories of 1968, notably that by London Times writers Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page, American Melodrama (Viking, 1969) and Newhouse political writer Jules Witcover's 85 Days were written by men who were eyewitnesses to the events and privy to much of the discussion of the principals in that year...

...Heroes and myths are necessarily part of the half-truths and semi-fictions which become the received ideology of a society...

...Brogan, reminds us, this saying conceals an important truth — America was made by men, and those men were politicians...

...Nowhere is this more apparent than in a consideration of the Kennedy reality and the Kennedy myth in American politics...

...But in reality as European interpreter of American life, D.W...

...We like to say that ours is a government of laws, not of men...

...Abigail McCarthy Commonweal: 136...

...Add to this the implication that he did not accept the offer of a vaguely described Kennedy deal only because his wife was against it...

...Thus the members of the clan surrounding Robert Kennedy — staff, writers, singers, stars, athletes, executives, academics, other politicians — looking again to restoration, and motivated by the imperative of charismatic leadership, must assent to the rearrangement of history no matter what the cost to others...

...To understand this, however, does not mean that one should accept as part of the folk-myth a rewriting of the history of 1968, especially since such a rewriting will further contribute to the disarray of the Democratic party whose present plight is largely owing to its failure to absorb the lessons of that election year...

...Nor should such a rewriting be condoned by historians — Arthur Schlesinger among them...

...As to the last, and to me puzzling, allegation — originally attributed to Senator Edward Kennedy — it was dealt with in detail in my own account of the 1968 election in Private Faces/Public Places (Doubleday...

...The followers of a charismatic leader consider it the duty of others to recognize their leader — hence, heaven help the one who challenges him...

...The myth is an attractive one...

...It conforms almost exactly to the American Heritage Dictionary definition of the word:' 'Any real or fictional story, recurring theme, or character type that appeals to the consciousness of a people by embodying its cultural ideas or by giving expression to a deep, commonly held emotion...

...It is important to put this discussion in the perspective of American political reality...

...Charisma, as they point out, is easily endangered...

...Today, because we lack any unifying and what historian Richard Hofstadter calls any "plausible" body of belief, as we have in his view ever since Franklin Roosevelt, we have become increasingly receptive to personal leadership as a substitute...

...The fact that our leroes today are often the creations of public relations image-making and that our historical myths owe as much to the media as they do to serious historians does not diminish their importance...

...Historians, after all, have always had a selective view of history...

...The writers of a docu-drama interested in a true picture might well have consulted it...

...All this was cut short by a wanton killer...

...In the second half of the twentieth century the conditions of political life are very different...

...They faithfully document Robert Kennedy's tragic misreading of the time, and the less-than-heroic reasoning which made him reluctant to run until someone else had shown the way...

...Yet, when a distortion of verifiablefhistory has the effect of robbing one's children of a rightful pride in their heritage and presents the world with a false picture of their father and mother, one must try to set the record straight...

...John Kennedy became the symbolic embodiment of the World War II generation too long held out of power by aging world leaders...

...Unfortunately, a charismatic leader is not allowed even understandable vacillation...

...He was also the symbol of outsiders no longer merely tolerated, no longer just admitted to the process but, at long last, in command — a symbol to the descendants of immigrants, to ethnic groups (very specially to Irish-Catholics and, by extension, all other Catholics), to ' 'the best and the brightest'' of academia and the intelligentsia...

...To hesitate to risk, to lose even one election (as Kennedy did in Oregon), is to damage that legitimacy — so it can not be admitted to...

...it is also intolerant...

...He and the glistening coterie of family, friends, and cohorts surrounding him were the dream become the reality...