Michael Kennedy and Ethan Frome?

Bobby and Ethel with their new born son
Michael LeMoyne Kennedy (1958 - 1997

A picture in this morning's paper shows a nine or ten year old Michael Kennedy with his - to me and many others - awesome father, Senator Robert Kennedy, just before his father was assassinated after winning the California primary.

Bobby died a winner, a tough act to follow for his eleven children. They probably had to compete fiercely just for HIS attention while he was alive.

After J.F K's death in Dallas, I understand Robert was seeking answers to the BIG QUESTIONS . He read Albert Camus, the humanist existentialist, whose recurring theme was the ABSURD - to be an infinitely sensitive being in an eternally INDIFFERENT universe. Like Camus' death - he was killed in a car accident not long after he received the Nobel prize for literature- Michael's death was illustrative of the ABSURD.

If the reporting is truthful, Michael Kennedy died a rather foolish death, reckless jock playing on a dangerous ski slope. A family affair?

His father's death was a mournful martyrdom: he was perceived as a powerful friend of hated Israel by a deranged young Arab. When I first heard about Michael's death on the ski slope- colliding with a tree- I was reminded of the Edith Wharton novel, Ethan Frome.

My imagination was racing: Heartbroken and depressed he found his Corbury Hill- the perfect place to end it all. But alone with no Mattie Silver to share his fate.

My imagination was quickly checked by the next news report. Michael, a friend said, had a wonderful sense of humor and could always see the silly side of things.

They both died still quite young, Robert Kennedy and son Michael. In his moving short story "The Dead" James Joyce suggested that it is perhaps better to die in the heat of youthful passions - in full possession of one's faculties - than to merely fade pitifully into impotent and dull old age.

Care-less Carlos and "Ia revolucion"

Terrorist Carlos the Jackal to stand trial for 1975 murders

I know very little about this Carlos, the international terrorist, character. As a member of his generation, it is clear to me that he- pitiful as he now is - was shaped by the late Sixties.

I was warned before going to an anti-war rally in downtown Providence by my "petty bourgeois" newsman brother that it was completely controlled by communists. At the time I was innocent of left wing politics - just anti-war.

The rally -for the time - was peaceful enough. No bomb throwers in sight. In the Sixties you learned that lunacy was relative. There was the lunacy of the RIGHT - completely abhorrent - and the lunacy
of the LEFT- often forgivable.

After the rally a leaflet invited me to a meeting on the bastion of radicalism - the Brown University campus. To be debated: "Leninism vs. Stalinism"

Within a few months I was speaking the language of American Trotskyism myself. Today I am still rather fond of the "Old Man" but it does not seem likely that his theory of Permanent Revolution will be verified.

I am deeply grateful, however, for one of his propaganda pieces : "Against Individual Terrorism".

Leon Trotsky absolutely would have rejected the Carlos delusion that a few well aimed shots - and a few grandiose explosions - can make the world a more just place.

What is the use of POLITICS if dynamite can do the job? I feel sorry for you Carlos - and for your tragic victims !