Unhappy Warrior: The Life and Death of Robert S. Starobin
by
Linda Rennie Forcey
It
was roughly eight years ago that I read my mother’s Ph.D. dissertation for the
first time, a manuscript completed some thirty-five years earlier, in 1978,
then tucked away in a drawer. Entitled Personality
in Politics: The Commitment of a Suicide, it tells the story of a radical
young historian named Robert Starobin, a man who struggled mightily to
reconcile the different, often oppositional demands of his life as a scholar
and professor and as an activist committed to radical change. For Bob it was a
struggle, coupled with years of depression and self-doubt, that finally
overwhelmed him: in 1971, at the age of thirty-one, he put a bullet in his
head.I was struck at once by his story, inspired—as well as troubled—by his brilliance, his passion, his weakness, his rage. For the story of Robert Starobin is not only the story of a flawed if remarkable man, a promising historian, teacher, and activist haunted by injustice in every form, but also, and significantly, a compelling depiction of life in the U.S. in the years during and immediately following the Vietnam War—a violent, bewildering, still largely unresolved chapter in the history of this nation.
From as early as his student days, Bob Starobin was drawn to the throbbing heart of the times, often taking a leading role in the political affairs of his day. Born and raised in Greenwich Village, New York City, he was exposed early on to the more progressive strains of American life, attending political meetings and participating in the crowded rallies, marches, folk music gatherings, and May Day festivities in Washington Square Park.
(Photo by Weegee, featuring Bob Starobin just behind fiddler)
The son of Joseph Starobin, a professional communist and Foreign Editor for the Daily Worker, Bob, like most “Red Diaper Babies” raised in New York, attended the Little Red School House, Elisabeth Irwin High School, and The Bronx High School of Science, before heading upstate to Cornell, only to complete his graduate work at Berkeley, what was then the epicenter of student unrest. While there, he was active in both the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Free Speech Movement (FSM). He protested everything from university policies and curricula to racial discrimination, nuclear testing, and the war in Vietnam. And that was just the beginning.
The son of Joseph Starobin, a professional communist and Foreign Editor for the Daily Worker, Bob, like most “Red Diaper Babies” raised in New York, attended the Little Red School House, Elisabeth Irwin High School, and The Bronx High School of Science, before heading upstate to Cornell, only to complete his graduate work at Berkeley, what was then the epicenter of student unrest. While there, he was active in both the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Free Speech Movement (FSM). He protested everything from university policies and curricula to racial discrimination, nuclear testing, and the war in Vietnam. And that was just the beginning.
In his first teaching job at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught seminars in Reconstruction and pioneered
the university’s first black studies course, he proved an ardent and outspoken
advocate for the black students there, as well as vociferous critic of the
administration itself, which, in an editorial called “Let It Bleed,” he accused
the University of having been co-opted by corporate and military interests.
Called a “Jew-commie-nigger-lover” by an anonymous caller one night, he was
also openly criticized for his radical politics, in particular for his
participation in the Free Speech Movement and for his support of the Black
Panthers. Yet he was unwilling to compromise his principles, to back down, to
temper his politics for the sake of securing tenure there. He ultimately
resigned his position in 1968.
From
there he moved east to Ithaca, New York, where, as a university fellow, he
taught briefly at Cornell, his alma mater, before accepting a tenured position
in the history department at the State University of New York at Binghamton. It
was there in 1969 in Binghamton that he met and befriended my stepfather,
Charles Forcey, a fellow historian and professor, and my mother, Linda Rennie
Forcey, then a political science student in the doctoral program there. It was
through her friendship with Bob that my mother developed an interest in his
radical politics, in his often-zealous idealism, an interest that was brought
to a head by Bob’s suicide in the winter of 1971. What had happened, she
grieved. What—for all his good intentions—had gone wrong?
Months passed, then years, when, still shaken by his death, my
mother decided to tell his story for her dissertation. Over the coming years
she travelled throughout the country, interviewing everyone she could find who
had known or worked with Bob. Critical to her research, to finding answers to
her own hard questions, was the time, the many days, spent interviewing Bob’s
parents, Joseph and Norma Starobin, in their home in Hancock, Massachusetts.
Her interest in their son proved a consolation to them. As attested to in their
lengthy correspondence with my mother, they believed in her.
So why was her dissertation never
published? The answer is both simple and complex. After years of enjoying the
confidence and encouragement of Bob’s parents, following his suicide and
throughout her completion of the dissertation, she received the following
typewritten letter from Bob’s then-widowed mother, Norma Starobin, dated
September 20, 1978, shortly after her dissertation had been approved:
Dear Linda:
In
relation to your Ph.D. Thesis entitled Personality in Politics: The
Commitment of a Suicide, submitted
to The State University of New York at Binghamton 1978, I must tell you that I
will not permit any publisher to publish this Thesis in its present form, using
real names of persons living and dead.
When
you told me about your desire to write on political commitment, using my late
son, Robert S. Starobin’s experiences as part of your research material, I kept
emphasizing social workers, psychologists, etc. use a case study,
changing names and hiding true identities. This
you have not done and real names are constantly used.
I
find the contents of your thesis an invasion of my right to privacy. You give
details of the life of members of my family that can be an invasion of their
lives too, and some of these members are among the living.
As
the Court appointed Guardian of the Property of Robert S. Starobin’s minor
child, my granddaughter, Rachael, I also object to the publication, should
publication take place of the Thesis in its present form as being against her
interests, and liable to affect her future growth and development adversely and
unnecessarily.
I
regret having to inform you that I will sue in Court any publisher of the
above-named manuscript, unless many changes in the present text are made and
legally approved of by me. These changes would have to protect me, my
relatives, and particularly Rachael S. Starobin-Thompson from invasion of
privacy.
Needless
to say, my mother was surprised by Norma’s reaction, clear, candid, as she felt
she’d been with her in writing the story of her son. Indeed, my mother had and
still has no recollection of Norma ever mentioning the matter of anonymity to
her. Yet what could she do? Saddened and wounded, she put the dissertation
away.
Then one day in 2001, after my
mother and stepfather had retired to Florida, she received a letter
from Oakland, California, from Bob’s daughter, Rachael Starobin MacKay. The
letter begins:
I am Rachael Starobin, daughter of the late
Robert Starobin, who you wrote your Ph.D. dissertation about. My Grandmother,
Norma Starobin, passed away in 1998. I was recently back east in Hancock,
dreading the task of weeding through piles
of letters and files (my grandmother saved everything from shopping lists
to phone bills from 1952) and found, what has proved to be the greatest gift of
my life—your dissertation about my Father.
Spurred by Rachael Starobin’s
response, my
mother reread her dissertation and thought again of trying to find a publisher
for it. She, however, was
unable to do so at the time, preoccupied as she was with the mental and
physical care of her late husband, Charles B. Forcey. It was only after his
death in 2008 that she returned to the dissertation. The question was: how much
should she change? What, if anything, should be updated? After a great deal of
discussion with Rachael, her mom, and me she
decided that, but for some editing to make it
more appealing to a wider audience, to leave
the dissertation as it was when she completed it in 1978.
As a boy I myself knew Bob Starobin. I
often accompanied my mother when she visited him at his little farmhouse in the
hills above Owego, New York. I remember his daughter, Rachael. I remember his
goats, Huey Newton and Ho Chi Minh. And I remember the day he died. I remember
my mother crying.
(Bob
Starobin with daughter Rachael, roughly one month before his suicide)
