The most beautifully written, most passionate, and probably the saddest of all the books in the canon. As a reader of most everything released on John and Robert Kennedy and their murders, I certainly never expected to pick up a Kennedy book and find myself thinking on almost every page: "Man, I never knew that." You'll find yourself thinking the same throughout Brothers.
The book rejects all irony, camp, narcissism, deconstructionism, moral relativism, nihilism, sexual prurience and other malignancies of our time. (`Though the word "Bush" is mentioned.) John and Robert Kennedy were heroes. They were murdered by evil men. End of story.
David Talbot takes the top off the cesspool of enemies who brought down the US Government in 1963 and murdered the leading Presidential candidate of 1968. Who were the enemies? Sex haters, race haters, America-Firsters, oil junkies, mob guys, fascist intelligence agents, military dictators, tweed-covered garbage such as Dick Helms and Des FitzGerald, right-wing publishers and editors, drug executioners, psychopathic politicians, Goldwaterites. (Basically the sum and substance of the Bush Reich.) And that's the horror of the book. Forty years later, what is left on a popular or establishment level of the idea that society and government must be judged by the way the weakest and most vulnerable among us are taken care of?
The answer is: nothing. There is nothing left of that. Which is why the sense of doom and sorrow one takes from Brothers will be long lasting. The worst of our history murdered the best and got away with it. Scott free. Not only did they get away with it, but they've created the sort of society diametrically opposed to everything JFK and RFK stood for: a country where the least human and most nakedly aggressive dominate everything. This was the newer world others' sought. Born from the gore of Dealey Plaza, they've achieved it.
For a bracing and deeply moving reminder of what was lost, one cannot do better than David Talbot's magnificent book.
