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When he was an adolescent, H. Stuart Hughes tells us, he spent time depressively trying to figure out his social status. He lived in the upper middle-class neighborhood of Riverdale, on the northern end of the Bronx; but certainly, his family was not middle class.
The Hugheses were prosperous, yet nowhere in the range of the great American families and fortunes. Grandfather, on the other hand-Charles Evans Hughes-was secretary of state and then chief justice of the United States, and perhaps the most respected Republican of his time.
Surely, that baked Henry Stuart into the upper crust. Perhaps, the bottom of the upper crust, he muses. But then there were the Kennedys; much richer, and beginning to be more powerful. When Joseph P. Kennedy moved from Riverdale to greater things, the Hugheses thriftily bought his house. Yet they-the Hugheses-were received by Hudson River Society; the Kennedys were not.
Go figure.
The figuring begins in the title-"Gentleman Rebel"-and continues, openly or by suggestion, through much of the rest of this memoir. Class is not so much the subject as the pathology.
Hughes was a history professor at Harvard, Stanford and UC San Diego. He was a man of finely-some...