Culture -- 5 days ago
Shortly after his brother, John F. Kennedy, came off second best in a Dallas tête-à-tête with a hollow-point rifle round, Robert F. Kennedy began working his way through the ancient Greek tragedies in search of some cut-price therapy. In one copy of Aeschylus, the politician had underlined a single sentence, according to his biographer, Evan Thomas: ‘All arrogance will reap a harvest rich in tears. God calls men to a heavy reckoning for overweening pride.’ From then on, Bobby was convinced ‘the Kennedys were the House of Atreus, noble and doomed,’ writes Thomas. ‘And RFK began to see himself as Agamemnon.’ When, a year after that, his youngest brother Teddy was involved in a gruesome plane crash from which only he emerged intact, Bobby took the opportunity to point out that ‘someone up there doesn’t like us.’ But it wasn’t until five years later – when Bobby himself was shot dead in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles – that anyone paid attention to the elephant in the room. ‘There was now a pattern that could not be ignored.’ Bobby’s son Michael later wrote; ‘It was as if fate had turned against us.’
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