Free of politics, speaking her mind (Ernestine Bradley)

[MH1]

I thought this was a nice article that might be of interest to the well-educated folks who inhabit the JK Group - and it does relate to Teresa, somewhat.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/12350252.htm

(use bugmenot or pm me if you need to register and don't want to).

Free of politics, speaking her mind

Professor Bradley publishes her memoirs.

By Carlin Romano

Inquirer Book Critic

MONTCLAIR, N.J. - Before Teresa Heinz Kerry took her lumps for being the outspoken, well-educated, foreign-born, polyglot wife of a presidential candidate, Ernestine Schlant Bradley, who turns 70 today, won applause for being the outspoken, well-educated, foreign-born, polyglot wife of a presidential candidate - former Sen. Bill Bradley in 2000.

Forgive a book critic for dreaming. Oh, to have had a German-born professor of comparative literature as first lady! A scholar of the magisterial novelist Hermann Broch and the "language of silence" practiced by postwar German writers about the Holocaust. A woman who could have made "Just Say Kafka!" a national mantra.

Of course, Bradley didn't get out of the primaries, so that could be why Ernestine didn't have to "take her lumps", too.

About * and Iraq:

There's certainly something nice about sounding off, without minders in sight, on whether Germany in 1945 makes a good model for Iraq in 2005.

"I think the Bush administration is so fanatic that they refuse to think historically," she says. "It is a total misconception of history to believe that you can transplant Germany in '45 to Iraq... . What led up to the democratization of Germany in '45 has not occurred in Iraq."

And...

Her parents are gone. So, mostly, are her heated feelings toward her mother. "What does it say about me," she writes, "about the mask of bravery and can-do postures that I had worn with so much anger, that I needed cancer to be able to let go, to be vulnerable?"

Perhaps that she learned a core lesson. She poignantly begins The Way Home with an epigraph from her husband's memoir: "My wife, above all, was a child of the defeat." She ends it with "the most important message of all: defeat is never permanent, nor triumph everlasting. Only memory seals these moments in unending glory." (emphasis mine)

Interesting stuff. I never knew that much about Bradley, but my parents (NJ residents) thought he was great.