David Brooks wrote a wonderful column last week (unfortunately restricted to Times Select) about the influence of the Ancient Greeks on Robert F. Kennedy. Reading The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton helped Kennedy overcome his grief at his brother’s assassination. Edith Hamilton wrote, “When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.'' Brooks ends with a restatement of the value of the classics. The story of Kennedy's grief is the story of a man stepping out of his time and fetching from the past a sturdier ethic. He developed a bit of that quality, which greater leaders like Churchill possessed in abundance, of seeming to step from another age. Kennedy became a figure in the 1960s, but was never really of the '60s. He promoted many liberal policies but was never a member of a team since he drew strength from somewhere else. And the lesson, of course, is about the need to step outside your own immediate experience into the past, to learn about the problems that never change, and bring back some of that inheritance. The leaders who founded the country were steeped in the classics, Kennedy found them in crisis, and today's students are lucky if they stumble on them by happenstance.

 

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