It's hard not to notice that we're suddenly in the grip of what might be called "Kennedy chic," triggered in part by the enthusiasm for Sen. Barack Obama's presidential candidacy.
Just this month, major books on John and Robert Kennedy have hit the stores: "Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History" by Ted Sorensen, who advised and wrote speeches for both men; "The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America" by Thurston Clarke; and Bill Eppridge's collection of photos, "A Time It Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties."
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, May 13, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 17 Editorial pages Desk 0 inches; 20 words Type of Material: Correction
Kennedy legacy: In Tim Rutten's May 10 column, poet Arthur Hugh Clough was identified as an American. He was British.
Vanity Fair, the glossy arbiter of hip chic, has combined excerpts from the latter two into a stunningly handsome cover story in its current issue with a headline: "Bobby Kennedy: The Hope, the Tragedy, and Why He Still Matters."
Meanwhile, on the fashion front, Bergdorf Goodman's men's fashion director told a journalist this week that the Kennedys' 1960s preppy dress was "totally the look for spring. ... A striped oxford shirt worn with a polka-dot tie and a khaki suit -- you can't get more John F. Kennedy than that."
What's Obama have to do with all this? Aside from the fact that Sorensen and Ted and Caroline Kennedy have endorsed him, some of it reflects the hunger for change, particularly generational change, that Obama's campaign, like the campaigns of John and Robert Kennedy, has tapped. As British commentator William Rees-Mogg wrote a few months ago in the Times of London, the Illinois senator "has built up an excitement such as no candidate has created since President Kennedy in 1960. He is, in my view, a better speaker than Kennedy. Like Kennedy, he combines personal magnetism with a strong appeal to American idealism."
Some of the connection does stem from a deep desire -- particularly among the young -- for an elevated and inspiring political rhetoric after the verbal and intellectual aridity of the Bush years. Sorensen has spoken of this, and about how people who attack Obama for being all talk miss the importance and power of political speech as a force unto itself.
There is at least one other important rhetorical trait that Obama seems to share with the Kennedys -- especially Bobby -- an instinctual refusal to talk down to his audiences, to re-cut the reach of his own intellect to accommodate the presumed limitations of his listeners. His Philadelphia address on race, for example, remains the most thoughtfully sophisticated speech on the issue delivered by a candidate for national office.
