Word: fathering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When Kennedy worked on the staff of Senator Joe McCarthy's Red-baiting committee--a job arranged by Kennedy's father--he was not, Schlesinger quickly points out, one who loudly accused and named traitors. Kennedy prepared a report calling for the cessation of all trade with mainland China, but says Schlesinger, "it was an able job, its facts well marshalled, its argument well organized, its tone cool." Schlesinger even manages to turn instances in which Bobby defended McCarthy around to Kennedy's advantage, saying the defense came from a "fondness" for McCarthy and an understanding of the old commie...
...book opens after Isabel, the heroine, has spent thirty years of her life in a small Irish Catholic community near Manhattan. We see the orthodox funeral of her invalid father, to whom the devoted her past eleven years as her mind records...
...stood behind Father Mulcahy and concentrated on the way his pink skull showed through his white hair... I stood near my father's grave, my black heels cutting holes in the grass. I kissed and was kissed; I answered people's expressions of grief with coos and cluckings, animal noises, which seemed at the time the only appropriate response. They had buried my father; I would never see him again. That I continued to breathe air surprised me. Walking past the statues of St. Michael and St. Gabriel, the archangels, I felt light...
Right from the start, Isabel admits the "murderous" influence of her father as readily as she acknowledges the importance of her upbringing in an oppressive Catholic subculture. In the course of Final Payments, Isabel, always tempted by sweets, lipstick, and high heels, reacts ambivalently to both influences. She is simultaneously sarcastic and sympathetic, resentful and grateful...
...father the refusal of anyone in the twentieth century to become part of the Catholic Church was not pitiable; it was malicious and willful. Culpable ignorance, he called it. He loved the sense of his own orthodoxy, of holding out for the purest and the finest and the most refined sense of truth against the slick hucksters who promised happiness on earth and the supremacy of human reason...