1968 - Mark Kurlansky [83]
And if the Gross National Product includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials . . . the Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America—except whether we are proud to be Americans.
“Robert Kennedy for President” campaign poster, 1968
(John F. Kennedy Library and Museum)
Could a man who said such revolutionary things actually get to the White House? Yes, it was possible, because this, after all, was a Kennedy. Most McCarthy supporters, at their most optimistic, thought the campaign might stop the war but quietly believed their man was unelectable. But Robert Kennedy had a real chance of becoming president, and though historians since have debated on what kind of president he might have been, he was a man the younger generation could relate to and even believe in, a hero even in a year poisoned by King’s murder.
Kennedy had endless energy for campaigning, and he might catch up to and pass McCarthy, he might even beat Hubert Humphrey, the vice president who would certainly pick up Johnson’s mantle and step into the race. Even with that Nixon nightmare—another contest with a Kennedy—pollsters said Bobby could win. If he could catch up to McCarthy in the spring, he might be unstoppable. But then what weighed on Kennedy and most of his supporters and detractors was the thought that he might be unstoppable—unless someone stopped him with a bullet.
CHAPTER 9
SONS AND DAUGHTERS
OF THE NEW FATHERLAND
How will it be to belong to a nation, to work in the spiritual tradition of a nation that never knew how to become a nation, under whose desperate, megalomaniac efforts to become a nation the world has had to suffer so much! To be a German author—what will that be? Back of every sentence that we construct in our language stands a broken, a spiritually burnt-out people . . . a people that can never show its face again.
—THOMAS MANN, “The Tragedy of Germany,” 1946
IT WILL NEVER BE completely comprehensible to other peoples what it was like to be German and born in the late 1940s, the concentration camps closed, the guilty scattered, the dead vanished. The twenty-first-century public drama of Gerhard Schröder, born in 1944, elected chancellor of Germany in 1998, is a story of his generation. He never knew his father, who died in the war before he was born. How his father died or who he was remained a mystery. While in office as chancellor, Schröder found a faded photograph of his father as a German soldier but could learn little else about him. The possibilities were frightening.
After World War II, when there were not two but four Germanies—the American, British, French, and Russian sectors—the policy in all four sectors was what the Americans called “de-Nazification,” a purge of high and low Nazi officials from all responsible positions and war crime trials for all ranking Nazis.
In 1947 the United States launched its Marshall Plan to rebuild European economies. The Russians declined to participate and soon there were two Germanies and two Europes and the cold war had begun. In 1949