In Love With Night: The American Romance With Robert Kennedy [Paperback]

Ronald Steel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 11, 2001

More than thirty years after his death, Robert Kennedy remains a potent figure in American mythology, a man equally revered and reviled. In IN LOVE WITH NIGHT, Ronald Steel looks closely at his character, his achievements and his failures, to present a refreshingly balanced portrait. Steel explores Kennedy's drive to fill his slain brother's shoes, to find personal validation through the transformation of politics and of society itself. He delves into the contradictions of Kennedy's public persona- an ardent prosecutor who abused the law, a champion of civil rights who allowed the FBI to torment Martin Luther King, a fervent Cold Warrior who opposed the Vietnam War. He uncovers the private man who calculatingly built his own legend and died before he was truly tested.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

More than 30 years after his death, Robert Kennedy continues to occupy an exalted place in the American psyche as a symbol of unfulfilled promise and shattered expectations. Had he lived, the legend goes, he would have become president and solved the major problems of the age, including the war in Vietnam, racial tension, and social injustice. According to Ronald Steel, he "represented not a rational political alternative, but something more powerful and attractive: an escape from politics." To many, he was the last, best hope for meaningful change. The question at the heart of In Love with Night is why this "strange and enduring phenomenon" remains seductive to so many Americans and what Kennedy's lionization says about the culture that made him a martyr.

"At some point," writes Steel, "without ever quite intending it, American liberals, and even many conservatives, fell in love with Robert Kennedy." The author then shows this romance to be closer to a misguided attempt by the American people to create "a heroic figure to fill our needs" in the wake of the death of John F. Kennedy. Seeing himself as the rightful heir to his brother's legacy, Robert successfully filled the role of political savior by assuming "the identity of the survivor." Imbued with lofty expectations by an adoring segment of the populace, his image came to outweigh by far his modest achievements as a public figure. During his run for the Democratic nomination in 1968, he gathered strong support among minority groups and the underprivileged, while carefully appearing to be all things to all people. Without denying his genuine appeal, Steel debunks Kennedy's image as a champion of the underdog, painting him as a craven opportunist who solicited the support of the more disenfranchised groups not out of altruism but political necessity and self-interest.

Calling his book a "study of character and circumstance" rather than a biography, Steel is primarily interested in the wide gap between the man and the myth, and, on the whole, his deconstruction is not a flattering one. Kennedy admirers will bristle at the book's core message, but Steel makes valid, well-argued, and often compelling points, particularly on the nature and value of cultural myths. In the end, this is all mere conjecture, for it will never be known whether Kennedy would have even been elected, much less what kind of president he would have been. For as Steel writes in one of his kinder moments, "The best of Robert Kennedy was not in what he did, but in what he has inspired in others." And that, perhaps, is the only legacy that matters. --Shawn Carkonen --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (January 11, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684846217
• ISBN-13: 978-0684846217
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,441,126 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #84 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( K ) > Kennedy, Robert

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bobby: Prince of Our Darkest Night, December 20, 1999

By 

Delia C. Pitts - See all my reviews

This review is from: IN LOVE WITH NIGHT: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy (Hardcover)

As a long-time admirer of Robert Kennedy, I have often posed myself the question offered by author Steel as the central issue of this fascinating new book: what is it about Bobby that makes us cling to him - his image, his loss - so many years after the assasination? Ronald Steel comes as close as any scholar to answering this question and showing why it is an issue at the heart of who we are as Americans at the end of the 20th Century. In this too-brief book Steel reviews through secondary sources the major events of Kennedy's life. We go through once again the anguish of JFK's death and its heart-wrenching impact on Bobby and the searing promise of his last campaign. Steel is balanced, sympathetic, eloquent but candid and not overly emotional. An excellent book all around, one that reveals as much about our needs as Americans as it does about the Bobby that we lost.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Important Consideration, December 16, 1999

By 

dcalfine "dcalfine" (Boston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: IN LOVE WITH NIGHT: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy (Hardcover)

The book is one of a few by authors who manage to thoughtfully take a look at the reality of the Kennedys. The journalism community, and to a lesser but significant extent the publishing community, tend to look at the Kennedys through the lens of hagiography. That JFK and RFK inspired intense emotional admiration among a large part of our population is creditworthy. But the speak-no-evil atmosphere that the admirers have perpetrated since the assassinations has prevented a discourse from which we can learn the lessons of history. This book is a courageous step toward breaking the collective trance.

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A Worthless Diatribe, February 29, 2000

By 

"dave in milwaukee" (Milwaukee, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: IN LOVE WITH NIGHT: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy (Hardcover)

This book doesn't even deserve one star. It's nothing more than a forum for the author to vent his apparent personal hostilities toward two great men, JFK and RFK, with whom he obviouly has an ax to grind. No one can realtically say that JFK and RFK were perfect (who among us is?), or that the world would have been a more perfect place had they lived. They, like the rest of us, were human beings, with flaws and weaknesses. However, the discussion in this book is totally one-sided and, even worse, is unsupported by even a modicum of evidence. The author supports his comments mostly through quotations taken out of context. He destroys any credibility he might have had, by making such ludicrous propositions as that JFK's posthumous "image" derived primarily from his widow's decision to pattern his funeral after Lincoln's. I am always interested in an objective, well-balanced and well-researched study of a deceased historical figure. The author of this book missed an opportunity to dod so here. This book--like such other trash as "JFK, Reckless Youth" and "A Question of Character," -- takes the coward's way out by kicking as much dirt as possible on the graves of dead men who can't answer back. Such books are litle more than supermarket tabloids masquerading as "scholarly works." Shameful.