AMERICAN JOURNEY: The Times of Robert Kennedy

by George -- Ed. Plimpton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 25, 1970

A cleverly wrought congeries of interview snatches with some 200 people: celebrities from Milton Berle to James Baldwin, political associates from Cesar Chavez to Douglas Dillon, cronies like Walinsky, Edelman, Galbraith, with Robert Lowell and Robert Sheer providing a needed astringent accent. . . presented as if they were all talking aboard the RFK funeral train from New York to Washington. The trip comes across in detail: drinking and unreal vivacity and coffin arrangements and impressions of the trackside crowds, with intermittent quotations from the Little People out there, like the Delaware daughter of a train engineer who critically appraised the train and wrote a poem. The trip framework produces a sort of trans-scrapbook suspense, and the interviews (by the wife of campaign aide William vanden Heuvel) have a conversational immediacy for the most part. The verbal snapshots of ""Bobby"" -- calling his father Henry IV, teasing Teddy on the Senate floor, discussing LSD and Voznesensky with Allen Ginsberg, flustered by Lowell's following him to the bathroom while reading Henry Adams aloud -- are more memorable than the reconstructions of political watersheds (relations with Martin Luther King, non-role in Bay of Pigs, decision to enter the 1968 primaries); there is a lot of talk about his empathy with the downtrodden, and many references to the doom awaiting seekers after change, interspersed with deliberately banal accounts of the funeral and funeral planning (""I said I had to draw the tine at Andy Williams,"" recalls Leonard Bernstein). Something for the mawkish and the truly mournful: it should attract the readers of both Jim Bishop and Tom Wolfe.

Pub Date: Nov. 25, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1970

Categories: NONFICTION