Political Myth and Reality

...692 pp...

...Ted did well, but Harvard lost...

...A veteran New York Times reporter, Clymer is a sober and extremely diligent inquirer after facts...

...He cites Republican Senate leader Trent Lott's complaint that "nobody can run the Senate, but Kennedy often looks as if he's running it...

...Later, during his presidential campaign, I personally never found him to be the inspirational orator speaking out for the poor and the underprivileged whom so many praised...

...So he quotes Democratic Senator Robert C. Byrd celebrating Kennedy's 35 years in the Senate in 1997: "Ted Kennedy would have been a leader, an outstanding Senator, in any period of the nation's history...

...He speaks highly of "his almost unnoticed role in foreign affairs...

...1 have since talked with numerous hard-nosed reporters who covered that fatal campaign and are firmly convinced RFK's character changed completely after his brother's assassination...

...It will, I believe, be a major source for historians of the era...

...The much overlooked Senator from Massachusetts was forced by Chappaquiddick to abandon any thoughts of the White House and turn all his skill and energy to the Senate...

...There he developed a reputation not for personal brilliance, but rather for hiring the very best staff on the Hill and listening attentively to its guidance...

...Daddy, to have such a great big monument at Arlington...

...Ever the cautious reporter, Clymer finds it impossible, as an outsider, to rate Kennedy definitively himself...

...Clymer carefully documents case after case where the third Kennedy brother fought quietly and effectively for the legislation he supported—sometimes even going so far as to take his name off a bill so it would not be handicapped by his reputation for being "too liberal...

...And his one-paragraph Preface declares that this is not a biography but a study "of character and circumstance, and beyond that of political mythology...

...Adam Clymer's Edward M. Kennedy suggests that at least in terms of the family charisma the answer is No...

...In his closing pages, Clymer tries to assess Ted Kennedy's place in history...

...Steel's book is a pleasing read: filled with sparkling good humor, wittily turned figures of speech, and flights of theory as well as imagination...

...Just achievement...

...Steel maintains, I think accurately, that the country needed a hero at the time of Robert Kennedy's shooting, that in the midst of assassinations, an unpopular war, street demonstrations, and the like, Americans craving a man who believed in the causes they thought noble somehow made Bobby precisely that...

...What little direct contact I had with Bobby Kennedy came early on in his Washington career and was unpleasant, because he was still in his harsh antiliberal bullyboy phase...

...Reviewed by George E. Herman Former CBS News White House correspondent These two books about members of the Kennedy clan, the closest thing America has to a Royal Family, bear no resemblance to each other...

...Indeed, his 600-odd pages of text are so jammed with names and dates, statements made at closed meetings and on the Senate floor, and maneuvers to smooth the successful passage of bills, that I had to put the book down from time to time and let my brain catch up...

...I remain bemused, however, by the legend of him as a crusader for everything that is good...

...It is an effort "to understand why, after all these years [Robert Kennedy] retains a place in our political rhetoric and even in our imagination"—a "strange and enduring phenomenon" in his view...

...27.50...

...Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography By Adam Clymer Morrow...

...from Vietnam to the Soviet Union, from Bangladesh to Chile, from Biafra to China, from South Africa to Ireland...

...I had no answer, except that the New York Senator, like his brother President John F. Kennedy, had been publicly assassinated...

...Perhaps the most one can say is that the terrible deaths of these two bright, handsome, articulate, wealthy, cultured young leaders, and the rise to power of a seasoned, shrewd, crude, down-country pol, had a psychological impact on the upwardlymobile young people of America which has yet to be entirely appreciated...

...But in his final chapter, "The Bobby Myth," he cautions that this "is not a healthy thing in a people.' It is fair to guess that Jack and Bobby might have proven themselves great leaders in a time of troubles, had they lived...

...This is the Kennedy brother who lived long enough to actually make the dreams of his supporters come true, to prove his dedication to the causes he and they believe in even when losing seems inevitable...

...Unhappily, there is no clear evidence to that effect, it is pure supposition...

...Not very much mythology here...

...Adam Clymer, by contrast, baldly takes as the title for his fulsome volume the name of his subject, whom he first covered when the youngest Kennedy brother started at left end for Harvard against Yale in 1955...

...He never quits, but sails against the wind," concludes Clymer...

...He says Kennedy's legislative accomplishments outshine those of such Senate luminaries as Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey and Republican Robert A. Taft...

...It reminded me of the day, many years ago, when one of my sons returned from a school field trip to Arlington National Cemetery and asked me a tough question: "What did Senator Kennedy do...

...The list of legislation he got passed is long and varied, and Clymer is a faithful guide to it...

...Ronald Steel's title for his slim volume about Robert F. Kennedy comes, with a bit of sarcasm, from Romeo and Juliet: "When he shall die/Take him and cut him out in little stars,/And he will make the face of Heaven so fine/That all the world will be in love with night...

...Is the Kennedy myth still alive today...

...Reading his speeches then prompted me to largely dismiss them as campaign oratory...

...Steel also believes the legend of RFK continues to have a major effect on American politics and thought...