cover image In Love with Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy

In Love with Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy

Ronald Steel. Simon & Schuster, $23 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-684-80829-1

That so many people pinned such fervent hope on Robert Kennedy is at least as interesting as Kennedy himself. But Steel (Walter Lippmann and the American Century) doesn't really explore the longing that Kennedy provoked. Instead, he offers a sporadically insightful biographical essay that argues that Kennedy's assassination has prevented people from taking a hard, candid look at the man. Much of the book is dedicated to retrieving the real Kennedy from the myth of a liberal knight in shining armor. The result is a portrait that is somewhat admiring but mostly critical. Steel shows Kennedy to have been ruthless and dogmatic, uncharitable and saturnine in his moods. He reminds readers that Kennedy worked enthusiastically for Joseph McCarthy and that, despite his later criticism of Lyndon Johnson, he had been one of JFK's most hawkish advisers on Vietnam. Most interestingly, Steel argues that Kennedy's domestic proposals were much closer to those of Richard Nixon than to those of the other Democratic presidential contenders in 1968. His appraisal of how Kennedy came late but authentically to the cause of civil rights and to the plight of minorities is the most subtle part of the book. Above all, he shows Kennedy to have been more committed to the legend of his family than to his party or his country. Though Steel's picture is persuasive, he goes about his task repetitively and with too much Monday-morning psychologizing. There is too much simplistic summation of how Kennedy's Catholicism gave him an inflexible moral worldview, too much emphasis on how Kennedy relentlessly toughened himself physically and mentally (Steel makes Kennedy sound almost as pathologically disciplined as G. Gordon Liddy). For all that, the book is absorbing because of the intensity of Kennedy himself--and for the intensity of the feelings that many Americans still have for what they thought he represented. (Jan.)