Customer Reviews

A Disturbance of Fate

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Harold Bloom in HOW TO READ AND WHY argues that there are pleasures worth seeking in difficult books. Bloom's argument is an odd, atavistic plea, yet one that challenges a basic premise shared by many. Bloom's appeal is aimed at many modern readers who he perceives to have no patience for any book that interferes with the reading equivalent of the "easy listening" musical experience. Bloom tries to make the case that there are hidden pleasures even for the typical modern reader in the great writers of the past, Shakespeare and Milton for example, that justify the effort needed to wade through archaic language or to make sense of arcane metaphors and symbolism.

I am reminded of Bloom's argument after reading a review of A DISTURBANCE OF FATE that criticized the book because it is not easy enough to read and not sufficiently entertaining to be considered "literature." The truth is A DISTURBANCE OF FATE is not, and is not intended to be, an easy book to read. For those able to read seriously and expansively, and willing to make the effort, however, A DISTURBANCE OF FATE reveals itself to be an extraordinary book that engages readers on many levels. As such, the book is not intended to entertain in the same way we expect books by William Gibson and Stephen King to entertain us. Readers inclined to "easy listening" will find themselves overwhelmed by the breadth of scholarship in the book and impatient and mentally harassed by the book's intricacies and detail. Such readers may get hung up on superficial aspects of the narrative and will vent their frustration at its complexities by trying to dismiss the book in simpleminded ways, by claiming, for example, it is "doctrinaire leftism" or "retro labor radicalism." A DISTURBANCE OF FATE is far too expansive and multifaceted to be reduced to the glib soundbites of chat-group one-upmanship.

On one level, the book is an imaginative "what if" exercise: What might have happened if Bobby Kennedy had not been assassinated in 1968 and had gone on to become President? There are many ways one might explore what America might have looked like after eight years of Kennedy in the White House, as opposed to eight years of Nixon and Ford; in A DISTURBANCE OF FATE the prospect is explored in the broadest manner possible. Some might suggest that this exploration is a liberal fantasy but to do so is a little like accusing an anthropologist of male chauvinism because the anthropologist has done fieldwork in a patriarchal culture. To the contrary, A DISTURBANCE OF FATE raises the intriguing specter that current boundaries of political partisanship may have evolved quite differently under a different political lineage.

On a more interesting level, A DISTURBANCE OF FATE forces us, as American citizens, to confront the historical pessimism that pervades so much current American political discourse on both sides of the political spectrum. Clifford Geertz attributes such pessimism to those who "stoutly insist that nothing ever really changes in human affairs, because nothing ever changes in the human heart..." The book takes seriously the proposition that public policy and intelligently managed social institutions can alter the course of history; and it tries to depict how public policy may be advanced within the divisive meadows of interest-driven politics. This proposition transcends petty political divisions and strikes at the heart of our shared values and principles as American citizens. For this reason, the book is an extremely important and timely book. If this represents only a "leftist fantasy," as some have suggested, and not a "fantasy" that may touch and pique the curiosity of Americans from all political persuasions, then our Republic is indeed in deep trouble.

On another level, A DISTURBANCE OF FATE seeks to develop a vast portrait of American society as an organic whole. This is one of the most interesting and provocative dimensions of the book; it is also one of the most demanding and difficult to grasp in its larger implications. A DISTURBANCE OF FATE presupposes significant connections and interplays between what many of us view as separate spheres of our society and culture; that is, the book builds on a notion of society as a complex web of interrelated and interdependent elements. Those of us accustomed to the narrow "trend-focused" social and cultural analyses of journalists and political commentators will find this dimension of the book challenging; indeed, some readers may conclude that the book is too full of facts and careening speculations. For readers willing to persevere, however, the book depicts a "disturbance" in its most expansive social, political, economic and cultural aspects--as it applies to the nation, and indeed to the globalized world. The full portrait of that "disturbance" is profound and deeply engaging and may provoke some serious readers to re-examine some of their most cherished notions of the nation and world in which they live.

A DISTURBANCE OF FATE is, in sum, a very provoking and important book, but one that certain readers who do not read the book with sufficient attentiveness and open-mindedness may not know what to do with.

"A Disturbance of Fate" is a deeply researched and thorough analysis of the political environment of the late 1960's, and the consequences that might likely have happened had Robert F. Kennedy gone on to win the Democratic primary and presidency in 1968. With amazing detail and an entertaining ear for dialect, Freedman introduces us to a wide variety of major personalities during the mid- to late-20th Century and reveals their relevance to our present-day lives and, more particularly, our modern political scene.

Having achieved the Presidency, RFK is faced with fulfilling his first and most important campaign promise - to bring US troops home from Vietnam. This proceeds in a way that is consistent with RFK's personality, both his politically calculating side and his side that spoke to his haunting need to realize his brother's best visions. RFK begins by mobilizing support from Republicans and hawkish Democrats, assuring (and subtly reorganizing) a deeply suspicious and resentful military, and orchestrating diplomatic missions with not only the Vietnamese, but other involved nations. The outcome is never clear, because Freedman does not neglect to deal with the setbacks and inevitable unforeseen consequences of such a complex undertaking. The early de-escalation of Vietnam marks a powerful new direction in US foreign policy, although what follows is anything but appeasement of Communist adventurism. There is, instead, the freedom for the US to pursue global policies that more closely track our democratic principles. In an atmosphere of reduced threat, many of the world's dictators find it more difficult to play the super powers against each other. Within the lively narrative descriptions, Freedman gives us a close and personal picture of the Soviet, Chinese, and other foreign leaders as they cope with and adapt to America's new leadership. Vietnam, in fact, becomes a continuing touchstone throughout those aspects of the book dealing with foreign affairs. What happens in Vietnam after the de-escalation also becomes part of a larger historical thread that makes the book powerfully thought-provoking. In that larger thread, as in Vietnam, very little goes smoothly or as predictable as one might suppose, though the book's achievement is in the historical thread's believability and its "inevitableness" once various events occur.
RFK pursues his domestic agenda with the same systematic, hardball style that got him to the Presidency. But do not expect a left wing utopia, for Freedman's RFK, as in real life, must often compromise or shift gears as he pursues various initiatives. And while the political and cultural consequences are often surprising, they are never unbelievable and almost always enlightening.

"A Disturbance of Fate" is a relevant and an inspiring work that challenges us to consider that politics need not only be a cynical, manipulative process that ends up serving the needs of the most privileged. Instead, it boldly sets forth the meaning of RFK's legacy today within the structure of imagining an alternative past.

Why did I find this well-researched and generally well-written fantasy of an alternate history in which Robert F. Kennedy was elected president in 1968 and went on to serve two terms so disappointing? The key is in the introduction to Mitchell J. Freedman's novel, in which he avers that the necessity of inventing an entertaining plot and convincing characters is due to modern readers' infantile demand to be amused.
Well, that tells you all you really need to know about Freedman's writing style. He has a certain gift for irony (turning Tom Hayden into an alderman in Richard J. Daley's Chicago, running Jesse Jackson as a Republican against incumbent President Ralph Yarborough in 1980), but his idea of characterization is putting broad dialect into the mouths of Yarborough, Lyndon Johnson and Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton. It is telling that he has John Lennon "sell out" and die of a heroin overdose in his "RFK Timeline," and that he marginalizes poor Abby Hoffman as too frivolous for this serious Old Left fantasy world. Elsewhere Freedman makes it clear that he disapproves of Motown as too "commercial" (i.e., insufficiently ideological). No fun before the Revolution, and most certainly no fun after! Yet even Howard Fast knew that you had to entertain the masses while trying to ram your ideological point down their throats.
The strongest part of the novel is the entertaining and fairly convincing alternate 1968 presidential campaign. With RFK's inauguration as the thirty-seventh president in January 1969, Freedman triumphantly unveils the entire fantasy cabinet, like the reporter who disclosed all the major officials whom Tom Dewey would appoint to his administration once he had vanquished that loser Harry Truman in 1948.
Unfortunately, it is here that the novel starts to go seriously awry. The author reveals in his introduction that he read more than 200 books in preparing this work, and he is clearly determined to cram in every fact and every speculation he has picked up along the way. The minutiae of the political maneuverings in the alternate 1969 soon become overwhelming even for political junkies (though for the rare reader who can't get enough of this, there are a hundred or so pages of endnotes!), while the larger picture Freedman paints is by turns wildly improbable and strangely unimaginative.
The first crisis Freedman's President Robert Kennedy has to deal with is of course the need to end the Vietnam War. In the real 1968, Nixon notoriously spoke about his secret plan to end the war, a plan so secret it took him four years and the "secret bombing" of Cambodia to figure it out. Freedman's RFK has no such difficulties pulling out U.S. troops and ensuring the peaceful democratic election of the National Liberation Front to rule South Vietnam. Instead of unifying immediately with their communist comrades in the North and sending the boat people on their way ten years early, the Viet Cong keep South Vietnam proudly free and independent long enough for Freedman to lose interest in their country, a seeming indifference to the fate of millions of people that he shares with most of the rest of the peace movement of the Sixties (and our own day; but, as Tom Lehrer once said, I digress.)
Freedman's main agenda is a retro labor radicalism that has him install Walter Reuther as Kennedy's Secretary of Labor and "organize" the South starting in 1969 (both admirable pipe dreams, it must be admitted). Dismissing social liberalism by offloading it on that loser Ronald Reagan, the author has Yarborough (Kennedy's Veep) ascend to the presidency in 1976 to the tune of 100 percent marginal tax rates on those making over $500,000 a year, followed by a backlash under Barry "Ballad of the Green Berets" Sadler, leading to a Wobbly's paranoid fantasy of a new civil war against the American working man in 1986-87, with Colonel David Hackworth leading the resistance and Studs Terkel shouting agitprop over the radio. Of course the proletariat achieves its inevitable victory in the "Great Struggle," as we learn in an epilogue, though at the cost of a few million lives, give or take, which are dismissed in one of those endnotes. Hmm, that's some worker's paradise, Freedman's "RFK timeline."
Why did I find this so annoying? Is it the doctrainaire leftism (including yet another endnote in which we are informed that the wretched of the earth, being so much happier thanks to Saint Bobby Francis, had no need to destroy the Twin Towers in the RFK timeline)?
Let us back up and ask, what does an alternate history novel have to be? To this I would answer, it must be authentic on its own terms. There are two ways to do this, both of which are illustrated by two very different Hitler-victorious scenarios. Robert Harris's Fatherland is closely based on Albert Speer's memoirs of what Hitler planned to do with conquered Europe after the war and is so chillingly plausible I still sometimes wake in the night and have to reassure myself that it didn't happen. On the other hand, Philip K. Dick's immortal The Man in the High Castle conjures up a completely absurd fantasy of an Axis-occupied America in 1962. Nevertheless, it is even more successful than Harris's novel in scaring you to death. But what both these works share in common, despite opposite approaches to alternate-historical plausibility, is that they are peopled by living characters whom you care about. This is a test Freedman fails because, unlike such past masters of alternate history as Harry Turtledove, he doesn't care enough about alternate history as literature.
Martin J. Gidron is author of the alternate history novel The Severed Wing (Livingston Press, 2002), set in a world in which the Holocaust never happened.

The novel is in the form of a political history of the RFK years, and then his Vice-President's term as President.... Mitchell had great fun finding roles for many familiar names from the late 1960s onward. He even has some unexpected events happen. My favorite is the Republicans getting a child care system passed, because it is must of the Republican feminist libertarian wing. While RFK wants child care delayed until the more important things he wants, are passed....

More of the excellent reviews have trouble with the ending. To me Mitchell goes into this, because he wants to explore some important truths:
1. All the political reforms never touched on how the political system actually worked, like the short cuts to get things done that bend the laws, or are unfair. Some of the things that are done are mostly for the benefit of the office holder.
2. The rise of the no holders barred political attack system, which turns politics into battles of good vs evil.
3. That there will always be people unhappy with conditions, no matter what is going on. And, these people are quite willing to hurt large numbers of people to get what they want, because it is for the greater good.
4. No matter how great reforms make life, there will be those that will never stop trying to undo those reforms.
5. There will never be " an end to history ", or to unintended consequences that pop up, creating new problems that have to be dealt with.

National Health Insurance, minimal poverty, a non- belligerent foreign policy, computers in most homes in the 1970's, no cable TV or CD's, racial harmony, Ronald Reagan and The GOP the leaders on abortion and gay rights, all these and more surpises await in the gripping, progressive "what if" novel, DISTURBANCE OF FATE.

WHAT IF Robert Kennedy is not killed after the California primary. Mitchell Freedman weaves an exciting and bold tale of a timeline without a President Nixon, wihtout 30,000 more Americans killed in Vietnam, without dependence on foreign oil, and with a much more humane FBI and CIA.

From Fidel Catro campaigning for president of Cuba, to Jesse jackson running for Vp as a Republican, Freedman takes actual kernels of truths and develops a farflung alternate reality.

Painting Robert Kennedy realistically and often as the moderate slowing down the forces of progress, Freedman effectively demonstrates that the course taken in the world and our lives these last four decades could have been quite different.

The two central issues in the Kennedy timeline are worker's rights and foreign policy. Using the power of the federal government to expand racially integrated unions in the South and throughout the country, Kennedy embarks on a new civil rights movement. A movement which makes workers more affluent and in a trickle up economy substantially eradicates poverty.

One recalls the Nafta Debate between Ross Perot and Al Gore, which seems like the last time globalization in the name of multinational corporations was debated. What now is ingrained in our daily lives through Chinese imports, dollar stores and Nike sneakers stitched together by a 10 year old for a penny a day was at one time debated in this country. Supported by Kennedy and federal troops the US labor unions become so powerful there is no outsourcing of jobs, rather worker's rights are supported throughout the world especially in Latin and South America.

Foreign policy changes are just as stark. Allende is not assasinated. The Shah of Iran is not allowed to rule his country with an iron fist of US support, South America moves to the left in the 1970's not in opposition to the US but in conjuction with the US. The CIA and right wing corporations are stopped from imposing their will on foreign nations. Faced with a progressive capitalist US, Cuba the Soviet Union and China all move in varying degrees to a more open democratic society in the 1970's.

The 2011 report which closes the book, recounts a bizarre alternate history of the 1980's that is less grounded in facts than the rest of the book, but remains fascinating.

For those of us who saw Obama as a Kennedy-like progressive, Disturbance of Fate illustrates the lost opportunity for qualitative change may be upon us again not due to a killing, but due to the timidity and conservative appointees and policies of the Obama administration to date. Hopefully this lost opportunity for fundamental change, the mantra of the Obama campaign may still come to fruition.

Mitchell J. Freedman's "A Disturbance of Fate," which tells the tale of a world in which Robert Kennedy was not assassintated in June of 1968, but went on to serve two terms in the presidency, is a different sort of alternate history book. The standard formula, as typified by Robert Harris' "Fatherland," or Harry Turtledove's works, highlights the stories of fictional characters, usually minor players in the sweep of history, but whose lives are shaped by the changed circumstances of their worlds.

Freedman's book reads more like a scholar's history of the RFK administration. He goes into impressive depth to describe the changed politics and culture of a world in which RFK had lived. The breadth and depth of his study is quite impressive, as he lays out a very different United States and a radically changed world. The changes turn out mostly, but not exclusively, to be for the better.

In these pages, you will find out how a President RFK quickly disentangled the nation from the Vietnam conflict; how his administration nurtured a renewal of the labor movement; how young radicals who fought the war in the real-life timeline instead channeled their energies into labor organizing and national service in what the author calls the "RFK timeline." There are more than a few surprises...such as the Republican party's emergence as the champion of legal abortion and gay rights while the Democrats become more conservative on social issues.

I did have one quarrel with this otherwise excellent book. In an attempt, no doubt, to give the dialogue a more realistic feel, Freedman has President Johnson and RFK Vice President Ralph Yarbrough speaking in pronounced southern drawls; Chicago's Mayor Daley is a classic "dese and dose" sort of guy. Yet President Kennedy never once refers to "Cuber" or pursuing policies with "vigah." Hmmm....

But that's a minor annoyance in what is an exhaustively researched, deeply felt story. Anyone with an interest in the politics of the sixties, and especially those who admired RFK and continue to feel a sense of loss at his senseless murder, should find this to be a thought-provoking read.--William C. Hall

This was a good read except for the fact that I doubt that Robert Kennedy or anybody who was President during the 1969-1977 timeframe would have been able to perform the miracles that are attributed to RFK during that time.
Not only that. It has Robert Kennedy effortlessly solving problems that didn't even appear on the radar until well after he would have left office.
How can this be?

I have read through the first third of this book. I find it to be not only amazingly realistic, but also highly relevant to our present time. With the 35th anniversary of the RFK assassination coming this week, I highly recommend this book.

Rather than taking just my word for it, here are a few of the quotes from the book's back cover (I hope the book's cover gets up on the site soon; the cover includes one of the more famous photos of Robert and Ethel standing with others on the dais in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom on the night of the shooting).

1. Dan Moldea, one of the nation's leading investigative journalists, whose books include The Hoffa Wars, Dark Victory: Reagan, MCA and the Mob, and The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy, writes:

"I am simply blown away by the imagination and scholarship that has gone into Mitchell Freedman's fabulous novel...Incredibly, Freedman pulls off this historical fantasy and tells a truly fascinating, though very controversial, tale."

2. Peter Edelman, a top legislative aide to Robert F. Kennedy during his time as a Senator, and author of Searching for America's Heart: RFK and the Renewal of Hope, writes:

"A Disturbance of Fate is fun and imaginative. It presents a fascinating extrapolation from what we know about our history and reaffirms the importance of Robert F. Kennedy's legacy and vision."

3. Dr. Kevin Starr, State Librarian of California, and award winning author of the series, Americans and the California Dream, writes:

"A Distrubance of Fate is a powerful and creative work of social realism."

As the Publishers Weekly review says, this is really a daring and compulsively page turning book!

This book is excellent alternate history until the last few chapters when, in my opinion, it goes a little too far in its speculation.

What I absolutely love about this book is its thoroughness.
It literally reads like a textbook study of a Fictional RFK presidency written by Arthur Schlesinger. It could have been called "RFK and his times part 2: The Presidential Years".

It doesn't have minor characters in this alternate world as the main characters like too many alternate history novels. The main character is RFK himself! It covers every action and policy of his campaign and presidency. It also actually places living people (Henry Kissinger, Tom Hayden, Jesse Jackson) in this alternate timeline, not only mentioning them but having them have actual opinions, choices, and alternate actions in this new scenario.( I don't know how the author wasn't sued)

It all goes great until around 1980 or so (I won't give it away). What happens after that, I believe, is just too farfetched. My advice- stop at the end of the RFK presidency in 1976- it is uniformly excellent until then.

In fact, it is so good you'll mourn this great man all over again because he never had the chance to change America as stunningly as he did in this novel (like I believe he could have.)

One critical comment for fans of Ronald Reagan (like me). The author was a little too harsh on him. Otherwise, it was surprisingly balanced and even handed. It is by no means, as other reviewers have said, a "liberal fantasy."

Note to Mr Freedman - How about, in about 5 years or so, doing the same approach to a novel about if Al Gore had won in 2000? Now that would be interesting :)

For anyone who either lived through the 60's or are fascinated
by this era as I am, this book "A Disturbance of Fate" is a
must read. Mr. Freedman subtley blends the fiction of "what if"
with the hard facts as they actually happened.

The end result is a thoroughly provocative book that is
difficult to put down. The author's imagination and flare are
astounding.

Also reccomended for political junkies and anyone who just
enjoys a good story.