Houghton Mifflin Company 1,000 pages, 25 photographs, $19.95
In 1965 when Arthur Schlesinger wrote about John F. Kennedy in A Thousand Days, he called his book a memoir. This book he calls a biography, and he strives to keep a historian’s distance from his subject. But Robert Kennedy was a beloved friend, and there are sections here in which Schlesinger the biographer merges with Schlesinger the participant, the advocate.
The differences between the two Kennedy brothers were more striking than their similarities. Schlesinger characterizes JFK as a Brahmin, and Robert as a puritan; John as a happy, often merry man, and Robert as a sad one who used a grim, self-mocking humor to hide pain. Both men fought hard against social injustices—John because “he found them irrational,” Robert “because he found them unbearable.” And Schlesinger feels that the President was much the tougher of the two, in spite of Bobby’s reputation for ruthlessness.
Many people—and not only Republicans—distrusted and disliked RFK. Lyndon Johnson was one of them, and in this case the feeling was mutual. The two men simply “could not abide each other.” J. Edgar Hoover was also a Bobby hater, a singularly implacable one. The story of Hoover’s persecution of Martin Luther King, carried on mostly behind the back of his boss, Attorney General Kennedy, is one of the most chilling in this book.
To read the story of Robert Kennedy and his times, as told by a distinguished historian, is to see from a new and revealing angle all the public issues we read about, argued about, guessed at, and grieved over in the fifties and sixties. The book is powerful—and sad.
The Great American Baseball Scrapbook
By Barbara Klaw
by A. D. Suehsdorf
Random House
160 pages, approximately 250 photographs, 120 in color, $14.95
Mostly a lively nostalgic picture book of players and assorted baseball memorabilia, this scrapbook also includes a quick run-through of baseball history from 1876 to 1969, including some enchanting trivia. For instance, did you know that early baseball players had to double as pregame ticket takers? That at one time it took nine balls to walk a batter? That for one year (1882) ballplayers were color-coded—pitchers light blue, catchers scarlet, and so forth? Only their socks showed what team they were on.
American Caesar:
Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964
By Barbara Klaw
by William Manchester
Little, Brown & Company
816 pages, 100 photographs and an 8-page map insert, $15.00
Douglas MacArthur was a man of staggering contradictions, and in this scrupulously researched and apparently fair biography, William Manchester doesn’t pretend that he can make all the conflicting pieces fit together. MacArthur’s bravery was legendary, sometimes carried to the point of foolhardiness: he would never wear a helmet in combat, he refused to have a bodyguard in postwar Japan, he wouldn’t even buckle his seat belt on a plane. Yet during the long, desperate fighting on Bataan, he only once made the fiveminute trip from his headquarters to the battlefront to bolster the morale of his discouraged, starving troops. Bitterly, they called him “Dugout Doug.”
He was, flamboyantly, a man of action, but as commander of the Army forces in the Far East he was so stunned at the news of Pearl Harbor that when the Japanese planes appeared over Clark airfield in the Philippines nine hours later, his entire force of bombers was still just sitting there, unprotected, wing tip to wing tip. “He was a gifted leader,” Manchester writes, “and his failure in this emergency is bewildering.”
Nor was he any more consistent politically. After Truman removed him from command in Korea, MacArthur appealed his case in stridently reactionary speeches all over the United States, until all but his most devoted supporters began to shy away from him. And this was the same man who had virtually transformed Japan—with tact, forbearance, and his standard quotient of theatrics—from a militaristic, emperor-worshiping despotism into a liberal democracy. An astonishing man and an absorbing book.
