The Last Patrician (26 page)

In October the Senator made a final decision to go ahead with the project.
54
On December 10, 1966, the mighty and the humble gathered together in the auditorium of Public School 305 on Monroe Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
55
Lindsay was there, and so was (an undoubtedly envious) Javits.
56
Bobby began his speech with a quotation and a question: “‘If men do not build,' asks the poet, ‘how shall they live?'”
57
It is difficult today to comprehend the optimism that prevailed during the early days of the Bedford-Stuyvesant project; there was a sense among all involved that they were participants in a “pioneering effort” to remake the ghetto, that they could transform an impoverished slum into what Bobby called a “self-reliant community.”
58

The optimism soon faded. It was not that the program failed; indeed, it can today boast of important achievements. But neither was its success as great as its promoters hoped; Bedford-Stuyvesant did not solve the problem of the ghetto. Would it have been more successful if Bobby had lived? Perhaps. Kennedy aides William vanden Heuvel and Milton Gwirtzman said that the “most important element in Bedford-Stuyvesant's survival was Kennedy's own involvement.”
59
But, of course, the whole point of the project was to demonstrate that the ghetto did
not
need the help of a Kennedy in order to flourish; it was supposed to be able to make progress on its own. It was not Bobby's death that created problems for Bedford-Stuyvesant, it was the project's reliance on the efficacy of a single fundamental idea. The Bedford-Stuyvesant restoration project was premised on the idea of community, and that idea has had a troubled history.

14

The belief that men must revive a sense of community is among the oldest in the intellectual's repertoire of ideas, and has over the centuries been the cause of uncounted elegiac laments and prophetic exhortations. Bobby was not the first statesman to call for the restoration of community; if we are to evaluate his program, we must see it in the context of the larger intellectual tradition to which it belonged.

The roots of the communitarian creed are ultimately Hellenic; the prototypical ideal of its communicants is the Greek polis. Aristotle described the essential philosophy that underlay the cult in a few pregnant passages in the
Politics.
Man, he declared in that treatise, was a
zoon politikon;
he was, that is, a political animal, a creature of a polis. Aristotle was a dispassionate philosopher, an objective student of natural phenomena; in describing man as a political animal, he believed that he was stating a scientific fact. But the attitude of the typical Hellene toward the polis in which he lived was, if the ancient commentators are to be believed, anything but dispassionate. The polis, in Aristotle's words, made possible life on a “plane” that was neither too high nor too low for “the divine element of human nature.” Man was neither a beast nor a god; but he yet possessed an element of divinity within him, and only by participating in the life of the polis—only by offering up “liturgies” in its name, sacrificing to its gods, attending to its public business, and participating in the purifying spectacles of the comic and the tragic drama—only by doing these things could he fully realize the divinity lodged within him. The typical Hellene was, we are told, devoted to his city, and the special quality of his devotion made a lasting impression upon the imagination of the West.

Intellectuals have never succeeded in reconciling themselves to the decline of Athens; and ever since the demise of that splendid city they have never ceased to lament the death of public virtue. Sophisticated Romans living in the age of empire, enamored of the old Hellenic ideal of community, lamented the corruption of their own once-virtuous city, and looked back wistfully to a golden age when citizens supposedly possessed a high purpose in life, lived on friendly terms with their neighbors, and spent their days contributing to the welfare of the res publica. A thousand years after the fall of the Western Empire, European intellectuals rediscovered the city-states of antiquity; they contrasted the virtue of Rome and Sparta with the mean and selfish spirit of their own times. Machiavelli lived in what we all know to have been one of the most brilliant ages man has ever known, and yet he cursed Fortuna for having been born in the midst of the Renaissance. He cursed the “malignity of the time”: in it one came across nothing “but extreme misery, infamy, and contempt”; all was “besmirched by filth of every kind.”
1
It was, of course, an age of genius: Machiavelli himself knew Leonardo. Leonardo's plan to divert the Arno, and deprive Pisa of it, seized Machiavelli's imagination, and he used all of his influence at Florence to get the plan accepted.
2
But if Machiavelli admired the scientific genius of Leonardo, he admired it not as a thing worthy in itself, nor even as a thing instrumental in the discovery of truth. He admired it as a means of realizing those communitarian ideals that he cherished—those ideals of public virtue, civic glory, and republican heroism, which were the central passions of his life.

The same communitarian ideal that inspired the Renaissance sages inspired their counterparts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Men as different as Milton, Bolingbroke, Rousseau, and Jefferson were each seduced by the idea of community. Jefferson's ideas about community were of particular importance to Bobby. In his book
To Seek a Newer World
Bobby noted Jefferson's belief that “the salvation of the Republic” lay in “the regeneration and spread of the principles of the New England townships,” communal structures that were in Jefferson's time already beginning to be “overshadowed by growing state governments.”
3
To meet the problem, Bobby observed, Jefferson “urged the division of the nation” into a “‘republic of wards'—areas perhaps a fourth the size of a (nineteenth century) county—that would provide for their own elementary schools, a company of militia, their own lower courts, police, and welfare services.” Bobby noted with approval Jefferson's assertion that each “ward would thus be a small republic within itself and every man in the State would thus become an acting member of the common government, transacting in person a great portion of its rights and duties, subordinate indeed, yet important, and entirely within his competence.”
4

In recent decades the idea of community has continued to provoke enthusiasm. Critics like Edmund Wilson studied the influence of old-fashioned civic ideas on Robert E. Lee, Justice Holmes, John Jay Chapman, and Woodrow Wilson.
5
Scholars like Lewis Mumford and Edith Hamilton drew from their study of the Greek polis conclusions about the importance of community in modern life. (Mumford testified at the Ribicoff hearings; following Aristotle, he declared that “democracy, in any active sense, begins and ends in communities small enough for their members to meet face to face”).
6
During the 1960s a younger generation of scholars that included J. G. A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, and Gordon Wood demonstrated the extent to which classical notions of citizenship and community influenced the founders of the American republic. Their researches inspired a number of contemporary theorists of community, among them Amitai Etzioni, Michael Sandel, and Bruce Ackerman. In his second inaugural address President Clinton himself paid homage to the communitarian tradition, declaring that Americans' “greatest responsibility” was to “embrace a new spirit of community.”
7
Hillary Clinton's book, the title of which derives from the saying “It takes a village to raise a child,” would have made perfect sense to an Athenian, who would have understood it to mean “It takes a polis to make a citizen.”

The idea of community is for intellectuals what snake oil used to be for traveling salesmen; there has scarcely been a time, since the dawn of the Renaissance, when a skillful academic or literary charlatan could not earn his bread by peddling the notion of public-spiritedness and palming it off on naive takers. The very complexity of our modern Enlightened world has made men peculiarly susceptible to the appeal of a golden age of small villages and pristine republican virtue. But the attractiveness of the communitarian ideal does not make it an intellectually compelling one, and at a distance of thirty years even his most devoted admirers may wonder whether Bobby, in making the communitarian ideal central to his attempts to reinvigorate the ghetto, did not stumble into a blind alley.

It's easy to understand why Bobby should have been attracted to the communitarian tradition. When Aristotle said that men fully become men—that they become indeed partly divine—when they participate actively in the life of their city, when Pericles said that those men who did not participate in the public affairs of Athens were idiots, ciphers, savages, both men were saying, in the idiom of old Greece, that citizenship gives men self-confidence; that it makes them vital, capable, fully developed human beings; that it permits them to realize their highest potential. And this, of course, is precisely what Bobby hoped the restoration of the communitarian idea would accomplish in places like Bedford-Stuyvesant—that it would transform underconfident, underperforming, underdeveloped men and women into self-reliant citizens. But if it was ingenious of Bobby to have made the connection between the communitarian tradition of old Hellas and America's own late-twentieth-century problems, he failed to perceive the extent to which the tradition in which he placed such great faith was a chimerical one.

If community is the snake oil of the intellectuals, it is the opium of disgraced politicians and idealistic dreamers. At no time in history does the ideal res publica of which the communitarian philosophers dreamed seem ever actually to have existed; the extant literature is almost exclusively nostalgic, it is almost exclusively elegiac.
8
The great civic philosophers never celebrate the
existence
of community; they always lament the lack of it. We are shown not virtue, but the memory of it. Neither Sallust, nor Machiavelli, nor Rousseau ever saw, with his own eyes, the ideal communities each of them celebrated in his writings; they could do no more than claim to have discovered, in the uncertain and fragmentary record of the past, dim evidences of a civic felicity that had long since vanished from the earth. Rousseau's description of classical Sparta and Machiavelli's description of early republican Rome belong to the realm of myth and fiction, not of history and fact; they are civic mirages, fantasies that comforted their troubled creators in the midst of difficult lives. Rousseau dwelt, throughout his life, in a world of solipsistic dreams, and after the return of the Medicis to Florence, so, too, did Machiavelli. They escaped a sordid reality and lost themselves in the pages of Livy and Plutarch.
9
Their writings on the idea of community are best regarded as a form of personal therapy, and as such must be treated with the utmost wariness by statesmen who, like Bobby, would resurrect their ideas and put them to a practical use. The community that is at once wholly loved and wholly loving: it doesn't exist and never has existed. (Friedrich von Hayek went so far as to say that it
shouldn't
exist; classical republican politics, he argued, is bad policy.
10
) Bobby, in emphasizing the importance of human dialogue and political participation in the ghetto, accepted the communitarian fiction that these activities necessarily improve and elevate the soul. They don't. Jack Newfield tells us that Bobby admired Tacitus more than any other Roman writer. But he seems to have overlooked the great lesson of Tacitus—that the virtuous republic is a beautiful but impossible thing.
11

He was concerned with the problem of the unself-confident man and the pain a lack of self-confidence causes. The Enlightenment, so adept at mitigating physical pain, could not alleviate this crippling spiritual or psychological pain. And so Bobby looked beyond the Enlightenment, looked to the creed of the city, the cult of the polis: in the City of Man the unself-confident man lost sight of his own inferiority in the dazzling brightness of his city's reflected glory; he gained a confidence in his public self that he could never have enjoyed in a merely private station. But the transformation of private loser into public winner, however wonderful it might seem, is not always a happy one; we have only to remember the example of Adolf Eichmann to know that this is so. And even if we discount the sinister civic impulses that produced men like Eichmann, the colorless loser who, casting about for a cause or a creed, was on the point of joining a Freemasons' lodge when he decided to join the Nazi Party instead—even if we disregard the darker side of the civic tradition, and forget about Robespierre and Saint-Just—it's not clear that the self-confidence of the wholly civic man, the wholly public man, is a desirable thing.
12
Machiavelli and Rousseau were themselves fascinating, somewhat introverted, highly imaginative men; but the ideal public citizen whom they sketched in their works, a citizen who committed his body and soul to the republic, is an unappealing and curiously rigid figure, a block of marble, a sort of Coriolanus without the psychological scars and aristocratic pride that make Coriolanus interesting. Civic boosterism doesn't give people the kind of self-confidence that's worth having; it gives them instead the banal self-confidence of the bureaucrat and the martinet.

Of Bolingbroke, Alcibiades, and the Jefferson Airplane

F
OR THE EPIGRAPH
of his book
The Kennedy Imprisonment,
Garry Wills selected Walter Bagehot's précis of the character of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, the great eighteenth-century celebrator of community and civic virtue. Bagehot reveals how that notorious statesman combined an acute but superficial brilliance with an inner moral hollowness. Bolingbroke, in Bagehot's view, was a splendid fraud, a dazzling impostor—just like the Kennedys themselves, or so Wills implied. Was Wills right?
Was
Bobby a fraud, an impostor? Did he flirt with the rhetoric of community in the same flippant way he flirted with the radical left, sipped cocktails with Staughton Lynd and Tom Hayden, praised Che Guevara to gullible journalists, and affected to enjoy the music of the Jefferson Airplane? Perhaps. Perhaps his rhetoric of community was simply one more attempt to demonstrate that he was an “authentic” man, that he was capable of “growth,” that he had read McLuhan and mastered the philosophy of Camus. Perhaps his motives
were
bad—as bad as Bolingbroke's, whom Wills thinks the Kennedys so greatly resembled; as bad as Alcibiades', whom Bagehot thought Bolingbroke so greatly resembled.