A Shallow Report on Teddy
HERMAN, GEORGE E.
A Shallow Report on Teddy Edward Kennedy and the Camelot Legacy By James MacGregor Burns Norton. 383 pp. $11.95. Reviewed by George E. Herman CBS News, Washington This trivial biography hardly...
...The Press," without any further identification, is quoted as though it were monolithic in its reaction to the Kennedy family...
...Then, in one brief paragraph, it is psychoanalyzed in terms of "some" and "others" and their "old bias" against the clan...
...But he leaves the distinct impression that Kennedy has been somewhat reckless, adding "Some think this means he subconsciously doesn't want to be President...
...In fact, Edward Kennedy and the Camelot Legacy is so hesitant, so ambivalent and in places even so casually sloppy, one wonders why James MacGregor Burns bothered to write it at all...
...Nothing would be more difficult for a man who time and again, when pressed on long-run plans, has replied that he and his brothers learned in a bitter way the risks of thinking too far ahead...
...Would the youngest Kennedy take the lead in remodeling the party to turn it into an effective instrument, helping Presidents to govern...
...Therefore the man must be examined...
...Could Edward Kennedy be an executive leader in this sense...
...He offers no direct personal feelings, reverting once more to giving us the views of those ubiquitous "reporters" and "friends...
...And while Burns concedes the "derangements of ends and means at the heart of the Kennedy Administration"—certainly an extraordinarily damaging admission—he only does so to help "explain the recent, and often unjust, reassessment of the Kennedy Presidency...
...the results of such missteps as having a classmate take a Spanish exam for him are "ordeals...
...Burns puts himself and his name squarely behind only his perceptive analysis of the weaknesses of the American party system and Kennedy's probable inability to deal with them...
...That brings me back to my first criticism: I instinctively distrust authors who use the passive voice in dealing with important subjects, or who avoid responsibility for the major opinions expressed in their books, like Kennedy's desire not to be President...
...Reviewed by George E. Herman CBS News, Washington This trivial biography hardly seems the work of the same distinguished historian who wrote Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox...
...But he, too, appears "obsessed—fascinated" with the Kennedys, and his examination fails in a curiously disjointed way...
...evidently," "was seen as," "perplexes observers," and so on...
...Concludes Burns: "Everything in Kennedy's political background and instinct would combine to predispose him against such a commitment...
...In Edward Kennedy and the Camelot Legacy...
...For one thing, it gives us very little of James MacGregor Burns...
...He goes on: " the public mind...
...and not one Kennedy decision seems made for coldly calculated political benefit...
...In short, Burns perceived a need, a popular demand, and set out to fill it...
...In other answers to the question of what kind of President the Senator might make, Burns toys with matters of marital infidelity and sexual indiscretion...
...It's hard to say...
...After examining the problems of White House staff and organization, Burns finds that to reach our own pacific and social goals we need the administrative as well as the moral equivalent of wartime concerted action...
...Toward the end of this hodgepodge of favoritism and citations and extracts from newspaper columns, however, we suddenly come upon a genuine James MacGregor Burns contribution to knowledge: a clear and stimulating analysis of the role of political parties in American government...
...The result is, to put it mildly, a nonde-finitive biography of Senator Edward Moore Kennedy...
...It seemed almost obsessed with Kennedy—for or against, but obsessed—fascinated by every move he made...
...Indeed, at times the book reads more like a lengthy newspaper article than a thoughtful history, especially when the language of journalism puts in an unwelcome appearance?allegedly" (what a word for an historian...
...His opponents are "apoplectic...
...The discussion of "Teddy" begins with talk of kings and princes (Camelot again), and a pro-Kennedy bias shines through repeatedly...
...This technique, used to dissociate the author from the judgments he is setting forth and frequently involving anonymous sources, is rightly criticized in reporting and is surely intolerable in any serious work...
...This might seem a virtue in a biographer, yet consider what we get in his place: a host of attributions to other writers or some unnamed Greek chorus of "observers...
...Burns takes a long look at what the parties are not in our nonparliamentary democracy, fits the Presidency into this deficient framework, and considers just what John Kennedy made and what Ted Kennedy might make of the White House...
...It tersely acknowledges some faults in Camelot, but notes that "Later the image was cruelly caricatured as journalists and historians revised the national memory of the Kennedy Regime...
...Yet is this chatty, warm and gossipy book serious, or merely a puff...
...The only answer seems to lie in these lines from Burns' Prologue: the spectre of another Kennedy—the dread or the hope—could not be exorcised...
Vol. 59 • May 1976 • No. 11
