One Radical Son

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.

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)

Here is a link to the book: Unhappy Warrior.

 Peter Nash