Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew

Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer by Nancy C. Unger University of North Carolina. 393 pages. $39.95.

It is said that biographers come either to love or hate their subjects, and I'm afraid that Nancy C. Unger became contemptuous of old Fighting Bob, the Wisconsin Senator and governor, who ran for President in 1924 and just happened to be the founder of this magazine.

Unger depicts La Follette as egomaniacal and hypochondriacal, an exaggerator who was stubborn, self-destructive, and often counterproductive politically. On the personal side, she shows him as weakly dependent on his wife, Belle Case La Follette, and as overbearing toward his children. She even implicates him in the suicide of his son, Bob Jr., who succeeded his dad as a U.S. Senator after Fighting Bob died, and who did himself in three decades later.

I rise to defend La Follette not to engage in an act of necrophilia nor to stake out some proprietary interest in his good name. I'm prepared to accept that La Follette had his fair share of foibles and fragilities, and there's no need to hide them. But Unger reminds me of the H.L. Mencken character in Inherit the Wind who was making fun of the William Jennings Bryan guy (played by Kirk Douglas). Finally, the Clarence Darrow character (Spencer Tracy) has had enough and says of Bryan: "There was greatness in that man."

Most troubling, Unger seems to appreciate neither the value of La Follette's stick-your-neck-out approach nor the radical politics that necessitated it. Only in the epilogue does she bring in the trumpets.

She spends a lot of time simplistically psychoanalyzing La Follette. His dad, an abolitionist and the town clerk of Primrose, Wisconsin, died when Bob was only eight months old. "His mother," writes Unger, "insisted that Bob worship his father's memory and emulate his life as much as possible. Above all, she stressed her late husband's integrity, his devotion to doing `right.' At a very early age, Bob was saddled with a great and unending responsibility: He must never do anything to dishonor his father's name." The impact of this commandment "cannot be overestimated," Unger writes. "Bob spent his lifetime seeking the approval and acceptance of his phantom father.... La Follette's image of his father as a totally righteous man was never tarnished by the words or actions of the real man, human and, therefore, flawed. Righteous perfection is a mighty daunting aspiration, no matter how urgently one is...