Nineteen sixty-eight was the year I discovered the wider world; it was the year I discovered politics. All but oblivious to my father’s battles, barely aware of the turmoil less than a mile from our house, I became obsessed with the history of presidents and the ongoing presidential campaign. This obsession began in the mute stupor of the breakfast table as, spoon in hand, I stared at the backs of my Cheerios boxes, where pictures and biographies of American presidents appeared in sets of four. On the basis of this and other sources, I composed a presidential history heavily biased toward the Democrats and Lincoln.... Blood of the Liberals

A Liberal’s Political Legacy

Rod Kessler
Blood of the Liberals
George Packer 2000
Farrar, Straus and Giroux $26.00
For my son, not quite ten, the 2000 Bush-Gore contest will linger as his earliest presidential campaign memory. My own presidential recollections go dimly back to a 1956 political ditty popular in the P.S. 177 school yard: “Whistle while you work/Nixon is a jerk/Eisenhower’s got no power/ Whistle while you work.” Whether or not Ike fared well back in Flushing I do not know, but his victory could have brought little joy to my father nor for that matter to my grandfather, as both were active enough on the political left to have been of interest to a certain bureau of investigation in Washington—although of these matters I knew nothing at the time.

My kid knows exactly how his mom and dad voted last November. He accompanied us to the polls in Cambridge where, at least locally, our man Gore trounced George Bush. Even Ralph Nader, who fell short of the magic five percent nationally, out-drew the Texan in cowboy boots in our fair city. From a child’s perspective, how liberal is Cambridge? Our neighborhood public school, named for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., houses a bilingual program for learning Chinese. Half a dozen of our son’s schoolmates are being raised by their two mommies, and just as many were adopted as infants from Chile, China, and Guatemala. The teachers decorate their cars with anti-MCAS bumper stickers. Our boy’s best pal is the child of a biracial marriage. Been to Harvard Square lately? If Martin were to pass an aborigine in native Australian dress on Massachusetts Avenue, I’m sure that he would take it in stride.

Yet, he was shocked to discover that his after-school babysitter was, of all things, a Republican—dear, brilliant Hannah, the Harvard freshman from the dorm across the street who studies Russian and who is “comping” for the Crimson. How, he wondered, could she support Bush? Having only left home for college, Hannah, I explained, probably liked Bush because her parents did back in Chicago. And as history has made clear, plenty of other Americans (maybe not a real majority!) liked Bush, too. Don’t all of us, nearly, take our parents’ politics to college, along with their religious coloration and any allergic reactions to the Yankees?

Such thoughts colored my expectations of George Packer’s much publicized, Blood of the Liberals, which was promoted as the memoir of growing up the son of a prominent Kennedy-era liberal and the grandson of a populist congressman. The media buzz pegged the four-hundred-and-two page work as a personal defense of liberalism at a time when the term itself has become so devalued that we’re all but inured to jokes about the “L word.”

I expected Blood of the Liberals to revel in the author’s extended memories retailing the advice and political wisdom (prejudices?) that grandfather and father both had poured into author Packer’s ear as they bounced him on their knees—that and endless anecdotes about the political figures who had graced the family table. Given the extent to which my own father had hidden his politics from me—I’ve never felt secure in my own red diaper, so to speak—I came to the book with a twinge of competitive envy. What about those intimate conversations about Marxism I’d missed out on?

But as it turned out, the book is not what I expected, not entirely.