Overview
In this provocative reassessment of one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century American politics, Michael Knox Beran shows how Bobby Kennedy was shaped by values of the aristocratic class to which he had been brought up to belong. He was one of them - until he realized that the welfare state they had helped to create at home and the empire they had helped to found abroad were undermining some of America's most cherished traditions. In denouncing the welfare system as a "second-rate set of social services" and "hand-outs," and in questioning the imperial commitments that the patricians made in places like Vietnam, Bobby Kennedy was a prophet who accurately foresaw the changing direction of American politics. Challenging the work of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Jack Newfield, and others, Beran demonstrates that Bobby was neither a pious liberal martyr nor a would-be revolutionary. He was a man who drew on the wisdom of Emerson, the ancient Greeks, and his own father's ideas about the transformative power of free markets - and used them to create a compelling vision of a better America.
Overview
In this provocative reassessment of one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century American politics, Michael Knox Beran shows how Bobby Kennedy was shaped by values of the aristocratic class to which he had been brought up to belong. He was one of them - until he realized that the welfare state they had helped to create at home and the empire they had helped to found abroad were undermining some of America's most cherished traditions. In denouncing the welfare system as a "second-rate set of social services" and "hand-outs," and in questioning the imperial commitments that the patricians made in places like Vietnam, Bobby Kennedy was a prophet who accurately foresaw the changing direction of American politics. Challenging the work of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Jack Newfield, and others, Beran demonstrates that Bobby was neither a pious liberal martyr nor a would-be revolutionary. He was a man who drew on the wisdom of Emerson, the ancient Greeks, and his own father's ideas about the transformative power of free markets - and used them to create a compelling vision of a better America.
The Last Patrician: Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy
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The Last Patrician: Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy
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Overview
Overview
In this provocative reassessment of one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century American politics, Michael Knox Beran shows how Bobby Kennedy was shaped by values of the aristocratic class to which he had been brought up to belong. He was one of them - until he realized that the welfare state they had helped to create at home and the empire they had helped to found abroad were undermining some of America's most cherished traditions. In denouncing the welfare system as a "second-rate set of social services" and "hand-outs," and in questioning the imperial commitments that the patricians made in places like Vietnam, Bobby Kennedy was a prophet who accurately foresaw the changing direction of American politics. Challenging the work of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Jack Newfield, and others, Beran demonstrates that Bobby was neither a pious liberal martyr nor a would-be revolutionary. He was a man who drew on the wisdom of Emerson, the ancient Greeks, and his own father's ideas about the transformative power of free markets - and used them to create a compelling vision of a better America.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250088017 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Press |
| Publication date: | 06/25/2025 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 330 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Last Patrician
Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy
By Michael Knox Beran
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1998 Michael Knox BeranAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-08801-7
CHAPTER 1
He became a questioner, a doubter, but that is not how he began. It is an old story: before he rebels, the heretic is among the most pious of priests. Only those who have thoroughly understood a system can act decisively to change it. Augustine was a perfect pagan, Paul a perfect Jew, before each became a revolutionary Christian. Luther was a priest before he became a Protestant. It was only because he had embraced the orthodoxies of his age — embraced them with the passion of a believer — that Bobby Kennedy was able to become, at the end of his life, so constructive a critic of those orthodoxies.
He grew up amid contradictions, a confusion of identities, a profusion of faiths. His life was grounded in Yankee realities: prep schools and Ivy League colleges, summers on the Cape. But he did not adjust to them in the ready and easy way his brothers did. He was shyer, quieter, more withdrawn. Vestiges of the old life, the life of his ancestors, so different from the secular Yankee world in which the father sought to envelop the children, perplexed him. Beside his father's worldliness there was his mother's piety, her daily attendance at Mass, her constant resort to prayer and contemplation. Her faith made a deep impression upon the young Bobby, deeper than the impression it made upon his brothers. For a time, it is said, he considered becoming a priest. Who knows? He might have been a good one. But his father had different ideas.
The Meaning of the Malcolm Cottage
THE HOUSE ITSELF tells the story. In 1926 Joseph Kennedy turned thirty-eight. He was a stock speculator and millionaire who four years before had left the investment banking firm of Hayden, Stone & Company to play the bull market of the twenties on his own. More recently he had acquired a controlling interest in a motion picture company with operations in New York and California, and it is probable that he continued to derive profits from the illegal distribution of bootlegged liquor. At all events, Joseph Kennedy had by 1926 become a rich man; in the spring of that year, when he moved from Boston to New York, he hired a private railroad car to take his family south. But Kennedy did not want his children to become New Yorkers, and in the summer of 1926 he returned to Massachusetts, took his family to the Cape, and there rented a house known as the Malcolm cottage at Hyannis Port. Bobby Kennedy, who had been born the previous November, was not yet a year old.
Two years later Joseph Kennedy bought the Malcolm cottage outright for some $25,000. It was not such a lot of money to a young millionaire who, like Kennedy, was fond of occasional extravagance. He claimed that he lost $1 million on the movie Queen Kelly, his failed attempt to showcase his sweetheart, Gloria Swanson. And he agreed to put up a horse called Silver King, one of his studio's principal box-office attractions, in a stable that, at $25,000, cost as much as the Malcolm cottage itself. The big spender in Hollywood was, however, curiously reticent when it came to throwing his money around on Cape Cod. Even after he enlarged it, the Malcolm cottage remained a conspicuously modest place, a New England summer house, spacious and comfortable, but not at all grand, a rambling, white-shingled, somewhat ordinary house, the chief distinction of which lay in the great swath of lawn that separated it from Nantucket Sound. It was the house of a successful lawyer, a well-off banker, not an American tycoon.
Later the family would acquire the neighboring houses: Bobby bought the adjacent property, and Jack bought the house next to that, a nondescript residence on Irving Avenue, some distance from the water. Legend has exaggerated the glamour of the place; the very name the press gave the property — the Kennedy "compound," with its air of institutional, of vaguely military, dullness — proclaimed its plainness. Not even the most fanciful commentator could call it an estate. For Joseph Kennedy to have bought — and retained — so modest a property was out of character. It is almost a rule: the successful American — Vanderbilt, Frick, Rockefeller, Hearst, Gates — builds himself a house commensurate with his fortune. And yet Kennedy, though he was no less vain than the constructors of our various American Xanadus, refused to build himself a monument to his plutocratic pluck. Some would doubtless argue that the reason for such unwonted modesty lay in the fact that the Kennedy fortune was never as great as has been supposed, that misapprehensions of the extent of the family's wealth began in 1957 when Fortune magazine estimated the family's net worth at $250 million, roughly double the actual figure. But even allowing for exaggeration, Kennedy's wealth would surely have permitted him to buy a bigger house than the one he did. Not Kykuit, perhaps, the Rockefeller mansion in Pocantico Hills, or Matinecock Point, the Morgan estate on the north shore of Long Island, but something more impressive than the Malcolm cottage. Why, then, did he buy it? Why did he choose Hyannis Port? His business ventures were taking him farther and farther afield, to Hollywood, to Chicago, to London; wouldn't a summer place closer to New York, his base of operations, make more sense? Wasn't Southampton, or Oyster Bay, or Glen Cove a more natural choice? Hyannis wasn't even friendly to the Kennedys when they arrived — or later. Watching the neighbors wave after her brother's election to the presidency, Eunice Shriver commented sourly, "They never showed such interest." The Kennedy "compound," however unglamorous that formulation sounds, was actually an improvement on the original name. For years the Kennedy property was known simply as the "Irish house."
He must initially have hoped for acceptance. He would not repeat the mistakes he had made in the Brahmin resort at Cohasset, where he and Rose had been blackballed at the country club. By taking a modest house at Hyannis, Joseph Kennedy would impress his Protestant neighbors with his restraint, would convince them that he, too, despised vulgarity. Far from resembling the gaudy perfection of a Rockefeller residence, with Picassos and Mirós on the walls, Joseph Kennedy's houses tended toward a distinct shabbiness. Guests were surprised to discover that, despite the expense of their upkeep, the houses were never quite clean. But the ingenious strategies failed; the modest houses, the modest sailboats, the modest cocktail hour (one drink before dinner) failed to convince the Yankees (and the Middle Western WASPs who were becoming increasingly prominent at Hyannis) that Joseph Kennedy was one of them. "It was petty and cruel," one WASP recalled. The women "looked down on the daughter of 'Honey Fitz'; and who was Joe Kennedy but the son of Pat, the barkeeper?"
His money did not impress them, and neither did his genuine successes. Rose Kennedy spoke hopefully of a day when the "nice people" of Boston would accept her husband, but the day never came. When Kennedy did an admirable job as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the "nice people" spoke darkly of his knowledge of the crooked and indirect ways of Wall Street; only a very corrupt man, they said, could have made the stock market honest. When he proved (at first) to be a popular ambassador to the Court of St. James's, the descendants of the Four Hundred (FDR among them) laughed at the spectacle of "a red-haired Irishman" being taken into the camp of the English. "Do you know a better way to meet people like the Saltonstalls?" the young Joseph Kennedy asked, naively, after he had been appointed to the board of directors of the Massachusetts Electric Company. But the Saltonstalls remained aloof; so, too, did the Harvard classmates who booed and jeered him at his twenty-fifth reunion; so, too, did the clubbable people who continued to refuse his applications for membership in their clubs.
Why then did he stay? Why did he not retire from the scene of his disgrace, flee from the memory of his humiliation? It is true that he moved out of Boston and took houses in New York, in Riverdale and Bronxville (as well as in Palm Beach). But he continued to maintain his principal residence at Hyannis, and he encouraged his children to think of Massachusetts as home. His decision to stay was, to say the least, out of character. Joseph Kennedy's inclination, when confronted with the possibility of failure or rejection, was to cut his losses and get out: thus the ignominious retreats from Hollywood in the thirties and from England and national politics in the forties. Failure of any kind reduced him to almost pathological despair. Gloria Swanson recalled how Kennedy, when he realized the full magnitude of the Queen Kelly disaster, slumped in a chair and "held his head in his hands": "Little, high-pitched sounds escaped from his rigid body, like those of a wounded animal whimpering in a trap." And yet, in spite of the proportions of his social failure in Massachusetts, Kennedy determined to stay. Stubbornness may have played a part in that decision, but it is not the whole explanation. There was an element of calculation as well, a hope of gratification generationally deferred. The establishment oligarchs may have determined that he was unable to live up to the standards of their civilization; it would be different with Bobby and his brothers. It was for their sakes that he refused to give up, refused to surrender his little toehold in New England, refused to become an expatriate and join rich Europeans in a life of polo and purchased titles. Massachusetts would be more than a political base for his boys; it would enable them to become something he himself could never hope to be. Joseph Kennedy could not have been elected to the Board of Overseers at Harvard, but his son Jack could — and ultimately did — obtain that high Brahmin honor. "If an Irish Catholic can get elected an Overseer at Harvard," Joseph Kennedy said, "he can get elected to anything." The elder Kennedy knew what it was like to have the patent-leather jack-boot of class thrust in his face; but not Bobby and his brothers. They would escape his fate.
Mastering the Mores of the Establishment
IT IS EASY to parody the more naive attempts of critics to describe the vast and secret powers of what used to be called the Protestant establishment in America, that shadowy preserve of old boys and DAR matrons that, according to E. Digby Baltzell, amounted to an indigenous aristocratic caste. In 1962 Richard Rovere published an essay that was perhaps just such a parody — a parody of the mixed sensation of delight and despair the paranoid prole feels when he thinks he has proved beyond all shadow of a doubt the existence of an elaborate conspiracy superintended by men like David Rockefeller and John J. McCloy with the assistance of the Council on Foreign Relations, Skull and Bones, J. P. Morgan & Co., and the Racquet Club. Joseph Alsop, for his part, stated for the record that "there is no such thing" as an "American aristocrat," and that "anyone using that phrase" would have been "dismissed as 'common'" by those uncommon people who, although they might have acted like aristocrats (by, among other things, dismissing their fellow citizens as "common"), really weren't.
Scoffers like Rovere might scoff, and covert snobs like Alsop might deny, but Joseph Kennedy never for a moment doubted the existence of an American aristocracy. He long remembered every snub, every rebuke, every cut he received from those who, he fancied, belonged to it. And how could he, the wunderkind of the Street, have forgotten the humiliation of sitting in the reception room at 23 Wall, waiting to see Mr. J. P. Morgan, Jr., and being informed that Mr. J. P. Morgan, Jr., was too busy to receive him? Whether Kennedy ever admired the socalled "Protestant" or "Eastern" establishment will always be a question, but there can be no doubt that he had considerable respect for what he perceived to be its power. A mastery of its mores was, he was convinced, essential to anyone who wished to hold power in the republic beyond the next election or two. He had, in his own career, fatally misjudged the strength, the toughness, and the ruthlessness not only of such grandees as FDR and Averell Harriman but of their implacable capos, men like Hopkins, Frankfurter, and Ickes. His belief was not an unreasonable one: after the failure of his English embassy, the patricians turned on Kennedy savagely, turned on him in a way they never would have turned on one of their own.
His mistake might in other circumstances have seemed a venial one: he had, in an unguarded moment, offered a gloomy assessment of the future of democracy in England. That was all, but that was enough. Kennedy had only to contrast the way the preppy oligarchs treated him with the way they treated Alger Hiss to see a genteel hypocrisy at work. Kennedy offered a gloomy prophecy of England's future; Hiss betrayed his country and engaged in treason. Hiss, however, was an insider, one who had distinguished himself at the Harvard Law School, clerked for Mr. Justice Holmes, and impressed Secretary Acheson. At the time of Hiss's indictment for perjury in 1948, David Rockefeller attempted to persuade his fellow trustees of the Carnegie Endowment to give the estimable but penurious young man a paid leave of absence (Hiss himself had offered to resign as president of the Endowment). Adlai Stevenson and Felix Frankfurter testified to Hiss's good character at the trial, and so, too, did John W. Davis, the West Virginia lawyer whose service as Solicitor General, Ambassador to England, Democratic presidential candidate, founding member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and lawyer for the House of Morgan had made him into a pillar of the Eastern ascendancy. The establishment that vilified Joseph Kennedy, and never forgave him, took pity on Alger Hiss and never forgave his accusers.
Seen from the perspective of his struggles with the grandees, Joseph Kennedy's choice of the unpretentious Malcolm cottage makes perfect sense. It is no wonder that he should have been anxious to ensure that Bobby and his brothers develop, through their experience of the Cape, New England manners, New England accents, a New England sensibility. It is no wonder that he should have desired them to attend not the Catholic prep schools (Canterbury, Portsmouth Priory) that Rose favored, but such quintessentially Protestant institutions as St. Paul's, Milton, and Choate. Joseph Kennedy had himself been educated at the Boston Latin School, but although this venerable institution had once graduated the cream of the Brahmin crop, by the time Kennedy entered it in 1901, it had lost much of its social cachet. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the sons of Boston's Brahmin and New York's Four Hundred families were sent in greater numbers than ever before to be educated in the "English" fashion at boarding schools modeled on the great English public schools; it was to these schools that Kennedy sent his own sons to be educated. There Bobby and his brothers would learn the secret language of the better sort of people, the code of the "nice people" of Boston, would learn about the things that the rest of the world didn't: "tennis, table manners, foreign and ancient languages, good pictures, fine music, French wines, the little harbors of Penobscot Bay" (so runs Nelson Aldrich's catalog of patrician esoterica in his book Old Money). Their memories would be indistinguishable from those of their patrician peers, memories that together form a kind of collective unconscious of the preppy race: memories of "stumbling recitations of the Anabasis, the feel of grass tennis courts under bare feet, an embarrassing performance in the Tavern Club play, a coming-out party at Hammersmith Farm (everybody was there), the steamed mirrors at the Racquet Club ..."
The sons would gain more than memories at these Etons manqué; they would learn to compete with a grace, a humor, a nonchalance, that quite eluded the father. Joseph Kennedy impressed upon his sons the importance of excelling not only at tennis, but also at sailing and (mindful of Dink Stover, the hero of Owen Johnson's Stover at Yale) football. (Kennedy drew the line at polo; when Teddy expressed an interest in the sport, his father informed him that Kennedys did not play polo.) The waters of Nantucket Sound and the playing fields of Milton and Choate would work their Anglo-Saxon magic and transform Bobby and his brothers into something Joseph Kennedy himself had never been able to become — competitors who not only won races, but who also won over the very opponents they bested. Christopher Matthews, in his study of the two men, has shown that even Richard Nixon, Jack's great rival, could not help but love and admire his adversary: Nixon burst into tears when it appeared likely that Kennedy would die in 1954 following back surgery, and he became "euphoric" when he learned that Kennedy wanted to visit him in Florida a few days after his defeat in the 1960 election. The Kennedy siblings, George Plimpton observed, played touch football stylishly, with good humor and a ready wit, in contrast to the plodding Secret Service agents who sometimes joined in their games. Nice people played football one way, Secret Service agents — and the rest of the world — another. When "touch" was played on the lawns in front of the Ambassador's house at Hyannis Port, Plimpton recalled, "you had them" — the Secret Service men — "along with the dogs and the children and the sisters and the house guests ... quite a mob of people." The numbers, however, were "cut down quite quickly," mostly, it seemed to Plimpton, "because of the hard-nosed play of the Secret Service people." "They'd been shut up in their sentry boxes or lurking about, whatever it is they do, and the touch football games gave them a chance to star, to perform." The agents played the game in a manner Plimpton thought "brutal and humorless":
In the huddle they'd talk about running "post patterns," and they'd scrabble plays in the grass. The slightly hysterical and charming play of Jackie, say, which was full of little yells and darting, unpredictable runs in the wrong direction, wasn't quite suitable. So, by and by, people would drift away from the game — ostensibly, to get ready for dinner or ... meet Uncle Ted coming in from his afternoon yacht race ... and finally, in the dusk, there'd be four or five adults left, furious and panting, rushing quickly across the lawn and most of them were Secret Service people.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Last Patrician by Michael Knox Beran. Copyright © 1998 Michael Knox Beran. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Note,
Epigraph,
Introduction: A Patrician in Pain,
Part I: The Making of an Aristocrat,
Part II: The Portrait of a Rebel,
Conclusion: The End of Aristocracy,
Sources,
Notes,
Index,
About the Author,
Praise for The Last Patrician,
Copyright,
What People are Saying About This
A remarkable achievement…It offers new insights into the character of Robert Kennedy, perhaps the most enigmatic public figure of our time.