THE NATION / THE CULTURE WARS : No Man a Hero to a Valet, Today We’re All Valets

So Mickey Mantle was a drunk who ignored his family, Hannah Arendt was enamored of a Nazi sympathizer and Mother Teresa took money from questionable sources. What are we to think of these disillusionments, only the latest in our say-it-isn’t-so era of expose? Our celebrated heroes and heroines in the worlds of politics, sports, entertainment and business are regularly scorned in the scandal sheets and battered in the law courts. Is there any standard beside the double? Any leader uncompromised?

In a time when gossip governs and the omnipresent media relentlessly pursue scandal, when we revel in exposes about a spiritual leader’s love affairs and rummage through every public person’s dirty laundry, is it possible to have a lasting hero? Is it necessary? How important is it if Franklin D. Roosevelt--and perhaps Eleanor, too--had a secret love, that Albert Einstein was a cruel husband, that Sigmund Freud used cocaine? One critic, commenting about Frank Sinatra’s life--so extraordinary a musical talent, so seamy a life in other regards--asked whether, in assessing our heroes’ lives, “conventional notions of honor play no part.” Can we divide the lives of our heroes? Hold them to different standards?

What is a hero? Is it a perfect person, pure in all he does? By such a standard, few would qualify. Were Oskar Schindler’s heroic acts diminished by his less than exemplary personal morality? Are there any real people who can accomplish heroic acts and never transgress in the rest of their lives?

Robert F. Kennedy provided a spark, set a tone and heightened the spirits of those of us who worked for him at the Justice Department. His deputy, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, recently reminisced: “He inspired in us a high form of public service.” Later, in his Senate years, Kennedy became a hero to an increasingly large and avid public who responded to his unique persona--grudgingly, in some quarters.

Kennedy was not always a politician with the magnetic popularity he engenders today. During the 1960s, I was often attacked by my liberal friends, who ridiculed Kennedy. In the early 1960s, for many black leaders and progressive activists, he was too slow in coming to grips with the emerging civil rights struggle. Liberal politicians resented his aggressive role in his brother’s campaign that defeated Adlai E. Stevenson and Hubert H. Humphrey. And most liberals insisted his Justice Department’s organized-crime drive violated civil liberties and offered further evidence of his demagogic nature.

Now, of course, he is remembered for his brave commitment to civil rights; for his opposition to the war in Vietnam, and for his extreme empathy with the downtrodden--he became the ally of farm workers and the denizens of Bedford-Stuyvesant, and a reliable supporter of just causes around the world. Yet today, there are those who question his current heroic image. Is it because we live in an era of skepticism that permits no heroes?

Joseph Campbell--himself admired for his scholarship, but criticized for his anti-Semitism--said “a hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself,” who inspires others to act beyond their ordinary experiences, to reach farther. Heroes portrayed in ancient and contemporary myths, from all cultures, courageously oppose chaotic forces that threaten the civilized order.

Campbell noted that the traditional hero is endowed with extraordinary powers from birth, and is someone whose central adventure is his life’s culmination. The dragon he seeks to slay is the status quo. “The moral objective is that of saving a people or supporting an idea. The hero sacrifices himself for something--that’s the morality of it.”

The hero is fearless of the terror of death and reconciled with the grave. Death adds to the magic of their legends, especially when it comes in the course of their causes, because they have made the ultimate sacrifice. “Show me a hero,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “and I will write you a tragedy.” We kill our heroes and make them martyrs.

People invest their heroes with their personal visions of virtue and sin, and thus are able to cope with their own needs and inability to deal appropriately with them. Where heroes succeed, they provide hope to ordinary man. The Indologist Heinrich Zimmer said myths about heroes reveal our unconscious selves and provide “a sort of map for exploring and ascertaining contents of our own inner being to which we consciously feel only scantily related.”

There is a fundamental difference between the heroes of ancient myths and modern news. Contemporary observers have so much information that they become disillusioned with their heroes. In modern times, the heroic acts of public personalities are widely observed and they have exalted positions in society. When their personal weaknesses are revealed, the public grows disillusioned, and can quickly turn.

When Robert Kennedy grieved over the death of his brother, John F. Kennedy, his sister-in-law, Jacqueline, gave him a book to read, “The Greek Way,” by Edith Hamilton. He kept it with him, marked many pages and often drew from its words. Hamilton wrote that she thought Herodotus was the greatest historian because of his humanity: His heroes were never perfectly heroic nor his villains perfectly villainous.

The literature of heroes refers to quests, risks, turning points, transformations and ultimately to the finding of grace--all themes familiar to Robert Kennedy’s life. He was neither a bad nor a pure man; he was a real one. He was not Saint Bobby, as idolaters suggest; nor was he the constitutional devil his deprecators predicted and some still insist he was.

Simone Weil wrote that, in the 20th Century, one must be a genius and a saint, as well. We cannot expect our real-life heroes to be perfect--to perform heroic acts is rare enough. After all, heroes are hard enough to find; we should leave the saints to the clergy.*