remembering Bobby Kennedy

Bobby Kennedy was one of the tragic heroes of my youth: along with many others, I invested a lot of hope in him. I’m old enough, though, to have outgrown the idea that, magically, he would have spared us the agonies of Vietnam had he not been murdered in 1968.

The Kennedy myth no longer holds its power over me, but David Brooks ($$) reminded me of something I’d forgotten—Bobby Kennedy’s love of the Greek classics, developed after Jackie Kennedy gave him Edith Hamilton’s book The Greek Way to read in March 1964.

“The Greek Way” contains essays on the great figures of Athenian history and literature, and Kennedy found a worldview that helped him explain and recover from the tragedy that had befallen him. “When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view,” Hamilton writes, “then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.”

Classical scholars often scorn Hamilton because she wrote in a breathless “all the glory that was Greece” mode, but her book changed Robert Kennedy’s life. He carried his beaten, underlined and annotated copy around with him for years, pulling it from his pocket, reading sections aloud to audiences in what Thomas calls “a flat, unrhythmic voice with a mournful edge.”

Kennedy found in the Greeks a sensibility similar to his own — heroic and battle-scarred but also mystical. He shared the awful sense of foreboding that pervades the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and that distinctly Greek awareness of the invisible patterns that connect events to one another, how the arrogance men and women show at one moment will twist back and bring agony later on.

I don’t know if there’s any connection here, but, well, lately I’ve been thinking that our adversaries and opponents in the Middle East have been acting as if democracy were some kind of Trojan Horse and they’re saying: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.” ***
In a manner of speaking, of course.

—-

***see also this post