cover image The Last Patrican: Bobby Kennedy and the End of the American Aristocracy

The Last Patrican: Bobby Kennedy and the End of the American Aristocracy

Michael Knox Beran. St. Martin's Press, $23.95 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-312-18625-8

Beran has written what she calls an evolutionary biography of Robert Kennedy that is almost metaphysical in its portrayal of the man. He goes into the well-known family history of Joe Kennedy fighting the establishment for respect and how he projected onto his sons his insatiable desire to succeed and be accepted. We see Bobby at Milton Academy in Mass., a training ground for Stimsonians, who were young gentry who would devote their careers (and could well afford to) to public service for the public good. Beran refers to this as ""the grand tradition of politics that men like [Henry] Stimson and Theodore Roosevelt had recently revived."" RFK followed the public-service road working for his brother and for Senator Joe McCarthy, chasing ""commies,"" crooked union leaders and segregationists. That phase of RFK's career died on November 22, 1963, with his brother. Soon he was evolving away from the Stimsonians. He found in Ralph Waldo Emerson's thesis of self-reliance the alternative to big government as a way to cure poverty. The pain he felt at his brother's assassination bonded him with other people's pain; migrant farmworkers and those in ghettos--urban and rural--became his concern. The book looks at RFK's chauvinistic relationships with women and antagonism towards the Catholic Church, which he found reactionary. Beran, a freelance writer, contends that at the time of his death in 1968, RFK had an almost neo-Reagan outlook on politics and life, and concludes: ""He was an imperfect man, possessed of many grievous faults, but we may number him among the saints."" This is an unorthodox and stimulating work that will force many to reevaluate the Kennedy they thought they knew. Photos not seen by PW. (May)