Moreover, while Steel illustrates the need for more careful thought about liberalism as an ideology, and the Kennedys' relationship to it, this book treats liberalism in a rather superficial way. While his book explains where all these myths originated, Steel disproves and rejects them. And Steel claims that in the 1968 campaign, Robert Kennedy not only had failed to forge any kind of rainbow coalition, he was probably headed for defeat when Sirhan Sirhan gunned him down in California. Steel, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, made his reputation with a brilliant biography of the great American progressive rationalist, the journalist Walter Lippmann. Like his hero, Steel scorns this whole myth-making enterprise, this quest for redemption.
Steel is only half-right.
Sure, the act of governing, as the cliche goes, is as bloody and messy as the act of making sausage. But myths have been one of the secrets to America's success, one of the ways a teeming, chaotic, dizzying, disparate polyglot, united simply by a bunch of ideas and a constitutional framework, has been able to thrive as a focused, functional, patriotic nation.