Word: steeled
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...York Times reporter Adam Clymer (William Morrow; 692 pages; $27.50) is a painstaking reconstruction of the Senator's life that winds up placing him alongside such other Senate giants as Hubert Humphrey and Robert Taft. In Love with Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy by Ronald Steel (Simon & Schuster; 220 pages; $23) is a hard-eyed rumination on the difference between the real (and of course flawed) Robert Kennedy and the popular memory of his greatness...
...Steel calls his book a "meditation" on Robert Kennedy's life. Relieved of the burden of having to tell the whole story, Steel's book is brisk and analytical. He paints this Kennedy as haunted by all sorts of demons, not the least of which was his important role in urging his brother John to commit American forces in Vietnam. This made R.F.K. reluctant to step forward as the candidate of the anti-war movement in 1968 until the bolder Eugene McCarthy had demonstrated President Lyndon Johnson's unpopularity in his own party...
...Steel also argues that Robert Kennedy's nomination was still far from a sure thing, even after he won the California primary. Thus the popular notion that assassination prevented another Kennedy presidency is seen as largely false. Steel paints Robert as much more conservative than the liberal, even radical movement he sought to lead. But his huge appeal is rooted in the fact that he was a troubled man in a troubled time. "The Bobby Myth," he concludes, "is our creation, not his." Steel makes Robert seem less than we remember; Clymer makes Teddy more important than we may have...
...front. But trade policy has its low side as well--a battle of narrow interests posturing as national or even international interests. The AFL-CIO is keen to keep out manufactured goods that developing countries can successfully export to the U.S., whether textiles from very low-wage countries or steel from Korea, Brazil and Russia. It marches in Seattle under the hypocritical (or to be more generous, simply erroneous) claim that it represents the interests of the world's workers, when it is in fact mostly representing its own members at the direct cost of much poorer workers...
...youthful heroism accounts for his mature heroism. Had Churchill not faced down death as a young man, would he have had the courage to face down Hitler in 1940? Had Churchill not learned from and become one of history's great authors, would he have had the eloquence to steel the British people in 1940 against the most ferocious force ever to walk the earth? Churchill never flinched when he and Britain stood alone in June 1940. "Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. [I]f we fail, then the whole...