‘The Last Brother’
by Joe McGinniss
Simon & Schuster, $25
Like Milli Vanilli, the once-popular singing duo disgraced for lip-syncing their songs, Joe McGinniss’ new biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy relies heavily on previously published work.
“The Last Brother” seeks to portray what life “must have been like” for the Massachusetts senator, yet it reveals little new information – a point conceded by McGinniss himself. Rather, he contends that “history is story” and he can more faithfully tell Kennedy’s history by imagining what the senator might have been thinking.
Employing this technique, McGinniss surveys Kennedy’s life from childhood through the end of the 1960s. From Kennedy’s expulsion from Harvard for cheating to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick, McGinniss leaves no flaw, error or tragedy untouched by pseudo-psychoanalysis.
He dwells on the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and portrays a haunted, lonely “last brother” burdened by the loss of his closest friends and the weight of their legacy. McGinniss draws heavily on conspiracy theories that contend JFK, and even RFK, were assassinated by a Mafia angered by their failure to liberate Cuba and return lucrative gambling to the island.
Unfortunately, the book’s fictionalized style destroys whatever utility it might have had. McGinniss relies heavily on other, more scholarly, works about the Kennedys, lending “The Last Brother” the tone of an elaborate anthology. Indeed, it is ironic that McGinniss, who has been roundly criticized for borrowing liberally from such works as William Manchester’s “The Death of a President,” criticizes both Edward and John Kennedy for employing speech writers.
McGinniss’ approach not only adds little new information, but also has the corrosive tendency to distort facts through repetition – like the child’s game of “telephone” in which a statement, whispered from one child to the next, ends up wildly distorted. He relies on the recent, reckless JFK biography by Nigel Hamilton to assert that Joseph Kennedy, father of the Kennedy brothers, sexually abused his disabled daughter Rosemary and then had her lobotomized to keep her quiet. In Hamilton’s book, the shocking allegation is based on speculation in a single anonymous interview, yet McGinniss repeats the slur, describing Hamilton as the author of the most recent “substantial” biography of JFK.
McGinniss writes almost entirely in the passive voice, littering his text with phrases such as “might have” or “could have,” and he swings wildly, with minimal foundation for his suggestions. He argues, for example, that “it would not have been impossible” that Joan Kennedy was pregnant at the time of her marriage to Edward Kennedy – though he concedes there is no evidence of such a pregnancy and no child was born.
It may well be true, as McGinniss suggests in his defensive Author’s Note at the end of the book, that historical “truth” is unknowable. He might as well have quoted Oscar Wilde’s dictum that “history is merely gossip.”
But the limitations of historical knowledge do not provide a biographer free license, and it is far from an adequate defense of this pulp fiction-style account of a tragic life. History, the reading public, even Edward Kennedy himself, deserve better.
Category: Reviews
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Kennedy `Biography’ Reads Like Pulp Fiction
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Girl, Interrupted
‘Girl, Interrupted’
by Susanna Kaysen
Random House, $16.50
In 1967, fiction writer Susanna Kaysen, then 18, was diagnosed as having a “borderline personality disorder” after little more than 20 minutes with a doctor she had never seen before. She was summarily bundled into a taxi to the McLean Hospital outside Boston where she spent two years inside a special ward for teenage girls. There, she watched the late 1960s unfold and contemplated whether she was “crazy or right? In 1967, this was a hard question to answer.”
Now, 25 years after the fact, Kaysen tells her story in a haunting memoir of her stay at McLean. The startling clarity of her writing sharply illuminates her ward and “the shimmering, ever-shifting borderline that like all boundaries beckons and asks to be crossed.” As she notes, it’s easy to dismiss mentally troubled patients as different when they act differently. But someone “who acts `normal’ raises the uncomfortable question, What’s the difference between that person and me?” It’s a question that applies equally to convicts or the homeless or the poor. It’s somehow more comforting if they are “different” and the boundary is clear. But what if they aren’t, and it isn’t? -
Business Books — Story Has Right Elements, Wrong Length
Undue Influence: The Epic Battle for the Johnson & Johnson Fortune
By David Margolick
William Morrow & Co. $23
A general rule of thumb with lawyers is that you should consider yourself lucky if subjected to only one or two boring “war stories” per day. Look interested and you may spend the next hour listening to yet another mind-numbing exposition. Call it an occupational hazard.
This appears to be the problem with “Undue Influence,” the interminable account of the battle over the last will of Johnson & Johnson magnate Seward Johnson.
The story has all the necessary elements to be fascinating: lots of money, rich middle-aged children fighting their father’s young widow for his estate, sordid sex, bungled murder plans, arrogant New York lawyers (the worst kind) and an openly biased judge presiding over it all. In fact, this would make a compelling, fast-paced, 200-page book. It would make an exhaustive, complete account of a complex litigation at 400 pages. Unfortunately, it rambles on for 612 pages.
Margolick writes with flair in the book, but he tells this story twice.
First, in narrative, he tells the story of Seward Johnson – his $500 million fortune, his first two wives and his distant relationship with his children and their families. (Each held a trust fund worth millions). The 76-year-old Johnson then encountered and later married Basia Piasecka, his 34-year-old Polish immigrant maid. The two, apparently happy and content, proceeded to spend lavishly, even building a $25 million home, grandly named “Jasna Polana.” When, shortly before his death, he signed his last will, leaving virtually his entire estate to his wife, most readers can see the train wreck approaching.
Then Margolick tells the story again through the testimony at trial.
Both sides hired high-priced, big firm “litigators” who proceeded to bill enormous amounts for overly aggressive and tedious litigation. (One deposition lasted 26 days.) Two of the lawyers even billed the estate for attending the funeral. But none of it stopped Basia’s team of lawyers from dining on catered multicourse lunches with expensive wines at their nearby getaway during trial.
Eventually, just before it went to the jury, the parties settled, providing $350 million to Basia, with a few million each to the children. Basia’s lead lawyer, dubbed a “sack of potatoes” by the ever-caustic Basia, bought a cow after the settlement, symbolically named it “Basia” and had it slaughtered and made into hamburger. The meat, he announced, was “tough and stringy.”
Both before and after the litigation was ultimately settled, it spawned numerous related lawsuits, including one against Basia by her defense firm for her refusal to pay them an additional $5 million beyond their billings. When that case, too, settled (she paid an additional $2.3 million), she sued her other defense firm for malpractice in Florida. They counterclaimed by filing suit in New York. After another year of combative litigation, that case settled, again with Basia paying the lawyers millions.
It’s hard to feel sorry for anyone involved in this mess. But it’s more than a little ironic that this account of this litigation gone wild is itself overwritten. -
Outlawyer — Turow’s Thriller Delivers The Goods
‘Pleading Guilty’
by Scott Turow
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24
Like a diabolical roller coaster, Scott Turow’s “Pleading Guilty” grabs your attention from the beginning, leads you through unimaginably complex intrigue, and leaves you dazzled at the end – but just about where you thought you started. Turow, who dominated bestseller lists with the smashing “Presumed Innocent” and the less spectacular, but more complex, “Burden of Proof,” combines the best of both earlier books in this new legal mystery.
It begins simply enough: Bert Kamin, an eccentric partner in a large law firm, suddenly disappears, apparently with nearly $6 million from an escrow account for one of the firm’s clients, Trans-National Air, to pay off plaintiffs in an airplane-crash settlement. The income-fixated firm, Gage & Griswell, is panic-stricken at the thought of disclosing the loss to the airline, its major institutional client.
It directs McCormack A. (“Mack”) Malloy, a former cop who is a partner in the firm, to locate Bert and recover the money. As you might expect, things go from bad to worse as Malloy begins to probe. —
The novel takes the form of Malloy’s memorandum to Gage & Griswell’s management committee, reporting on the results of his investigation. The device is clever, allowing Turow to manipulate the narration between past and present and to follow Malloy’s investigation and deductive process.
But at times it also is tiresome. Malloy is a troubled alcoholic, divorced from his lesbian spouse, father of a rebellious son, deeply sarcastic and depressed. Although clearly the central character, he is developed in excruciating – almost pointless – detail at the expense of other major characters, who remain something of empty shells, moving through their roles without shedding illumination on their actions or motives.
Yet the tortuous complexity for which Turow is famous carries the novel past these problems. Malloy uncovers, participates in, or is threatened by murder, perjury, grand larceny, breaking and entering, postal theft, tax evasion, gambling, intra-firm back-stabbing, and a wide variety of ethical lapses. There are at least five separate conspiracies or covert trysts, each involving overlapping sets of characters.
Bert, it turns out, may have vanished with his gay lover, enmeshed in an apparently unrelated basketball-fixing scheme and on the run from the mob, which, as it turn out, is the least of the problems. His lover is the son of the fiercely independent accountant for the firm – herself secretly involved with one of the senior partners.
Looking for clues, Malloy breaks into Bert’s apartment and discovers – what else? – a body in the refrigerator. But it’s not Bert. All of this pales beside the real drama as Malloy discovers where the money went (an off-shore bank) and who sent it there (you’ll find out when you read the book).
Turow devotes particular care to exploring the relationship between big corporations, their general counsel’s office, and their large outside law firms. The political in-fighting, law-firm obsequiousness, and divided loyalties are developed with careful precision, with Gage & Griswell’s managers dancing gingerly between self-protection and outright deception when it becomes apparent that one or more of Trans-National’s officers may be something less than a victim.
But the boundaries between the victim, the criminal, and what is fair and right constantly shift and blur. White-collar crime in a morally ambiguous context can make ethical judgment difficult – a point close to the heart of Turow’s novel. The troubled Malloy quickly becomes more than a mere investigator and when hetakes control, the suspense is in seeing which way he will turn.
As in “Burden of Proof,” Turow manipulates the various relationships: between lawyers, clients, lovers, old friends, even bitter enemies. He delights in twisting each, testing loyalties and revealing weakness and betrayal. —
But the closing pages are what make this a great piece of popular fiction. Like “Presumed Innocent,” the obscure, seemingly disparate strands of plot suddenly converge, and the title takes on an ironic, not apparent meaning.
“Pleading Guilty” is the best sort of potboiler: It presents a plot that is complex and compelling on the surface, yet leaves the reader with deeper, more troubling questions to ponder. -
Spotlight: The World Of Journalism — Big Bio Of Powerful Post Publisher
‘Power, Privilege, and the Post: The Katharine Graham Story’
by Carol Felsenthal
Putnam, $29.95
“There’s one word that brings us all together here tonight,” Art Buchwald announced at Katharine Graham’s 70th birthday party in 1987, “and that word is `fear.’ “
A pithy statement, but an apt salute to the owner and publisher of The Washington Post, Newsweek, and several other newspapers and television stations. Often described as the most powerful woman in America, Graham is the subject of a competent, occasionally compelling, new biography by Carol Felsenthal.
She was the daughter of Wall Street millionaire Eugene Meyer, who ran the Federal Reserve and World Bank and later purchased and ran The Post. Meyer never intended, however, that his daughter run the newspaper: her husband, Philip, was the heir apparent. A former president of the Harvard Law Review and clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Phil Graham was called by some the most outstanding man of his generation.
He also was tortured by manic depression, and when he committed suicide in 1963, Kay Graham replaced him at The Post. Uncertain and lacking self-confidence at first, Graham soon emerged from the shadows of her husband and father and in the next two decades built The Post into a newspaper of international stature.
At the same time, her power has not been limited to the newspaper. Along with good friend Meg Greenfield, The Post’s editorial-page editor, Graham brought an end to a longstanding Washington dinner-party tradition of the men retiring for cigars, brandy and old-boy networking, leaving the women to entertain themselves. After Graham and Greenfield stomped out of one such gathering, the tradition has rarely been repeated in the capital’s circles of power.
The inside story of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, at precisely the same time as The Washington Post’s initial public offering of its stock, reminds the reader of Graham’s guts in pursuing the story. The subsequent exposure of the Nixon administration and its fall during the Watergate investigation confirmed the newspaper’s power.
Although Felsenthal’s biography is well-written and the story she tells is fascinating, it also is incomplete, leaving out some of the more interesting episodes in recent Post history. In the 1980s, for example, the newspaper suffered a million-dollar libel verdict, and although The Post ultimately was vindicated on First Amendment grounds, it took nothing less than Edward Bennett Williams’ last appearance before the U.S. Court of Appeals to overturn the verdict. But you won’t learn that story from this book.
Even with such omissions, the book remains a worthy portrait of a talented woman who has learned how to exercise power and privilege, even fear. -
Biographer Snipes At Kennedy — Massive Detail Fails To Redeem Tasteless Book
‘JFK: Reckless Youth’
by Nigel Hamilton
Random House, $30
“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly,” Dorothy Parker once wrote in a book review, “it should be thrown with great force.”
Parker’s witticism comes to mind when reading British writer Nigel Hamilton’s new, laboriously detailed biography of John F. Kennedy, the first of three projected volumes. It is more than 800 pages of nearly unedited behind-the-scenes glimpses of JFK’s childhood and early years through 1947.
In his publisher’s promotional material, Hamilton holds himself up as Kennedy’s first serious biographer, but his book offers almost precisely the opposite of what a serious biography should be. Rather than any attempt to distill his subject and analyze enlightening evidence from JFK’s past, the book instead panders to tabloid-level voyeurism. To Hamilton, every adolescent sexual reference by Kennedy is worthy of reprinting in its immature detail. While this might be fascinating to some, little of it advances Hamilton’s analysis of his subject.
However, the sheer mass of detail accumulated by Hamilton is remarkable, and the book provides a wealth of information not previously disclosed. It traces Kennedy’s childhood and his experience in England while his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was President Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to the Court of St. James. Hamilton details JFK’s frequent illnesses, his years at Princeton and Harvard, and his experiences in World War II, including a fascinating recounting of the sinking of PT-109 and Kennedy’s true heroism in the rescue of the survivors.
But many of the disclosures seem aimed not so much at illuminating as insulting JFK and his family. Indeed, Hamilton appears to revel in denigrating them, using chapter titles such as “Lobotomy,” or “Engaged in Sexual Intercourse.”
In one profoundly tasteless passage, he quotes a letter from JFK recalling a Spanish bullfight and his disgust at the crowd’s enjoyment of a gored horse “running out of the ring with its guts trailing.” Abruptly, astonishingly, Hamilton comments: “That he himself would be shot in front of southerners of his own country, and be driven from the place of his assassination with his own brains trailing, to the applause of many who hated him, was something he could not foresee.”
It is difficult to imagine how Hamilton could think, much less publish, such a jarringly inappropriate comparison. It is even more remarkable that Random House left it intact.
JFK himself fares rather well compared with the remainder of his family. Rose Kennedy is roundly attacked as a heartless and cruel mother, hardened by her husband’s open philandering. Joseph is singled out for the worst of the attack – criticized, in turn, as a Nazi appeaser, coward, draft-dodger, rapist (of actress Gloria Swanson), and Wall Street cheat.
Hamilton appears fixated on Joseph Kennedy’s sexual conduct, even accusing him of abusing Rosemary, JFK’s mentally handicapped sister. The charge is based on a single anonymous interview, hardly the hallmark of responsible biography.
Hamilton’s attack on the parents lays the foundation for his Freudian analysis of JFK. He charts the future president’s intellectual development first as competition with his older brother, Joe Jr., then later as a struggle to break away from his father’s dominating influence.
Of course, the book details the young JFK’s sexual liaisons, including his relationship while a Navy ensign with Danish-born journalist Inga Arvad, who was suspected by J. Edgar Hoover of being a spy. Hoover’s FBI wiretaps documented the relationship, but no espionage.
It must be acknowledged that the Kennedys are hardly as flawless as some might like to believe, and it may well be time to finally confront the myth of Camelot. But serious biography is difficult at such exhaustively close range, and Hamilton’s massive effort, undercut by his hostile and sensationalist approach, demonstrates well the pitfalls of such an effort. While it certainly is an accomplishment of compilation, its antagonism and weak editing limit its usefulness as a tool for understanding JFK.
Dorothy Parker’s analysis certainly applies; this book should not be tossed aside lightly. -
Centerstage: Helen Gahagan Douglas: A Life
‘Centerstage: Helen Gahagan Douglas: A Life’
by Ingrid Winther Scobie Oxford, $24.95
“Centerpiece” spotlights Helen Gahagan Douglas, the so-called “pink lady” Congressional representative smeared as a communist by Richard Nixon in the 1950 Senate race in California. Douglas, who abandoned an acting career to pursue the New Deal in Congress, lost that race to the man she termed “Tricky Dick.”
It’s a great story, though Ingrid Winther Scobie’s retelling is flawed by careless editing and a ham-handed attempt to remake Douglas into a role model for modern women. Though successful professionally, Douglas’ strained relationship with her husband, the actor Melvyn Douglas, and both spouses’ virtual abandonment of their children hardly stand as a model of a balanced life. Nor does “Centerstage” even attempt to contrast Douglas’ flamboyant principled liberalism to that other actor-turned-politician of the same era: Ronald Reagan.
“Centerstage” represents an opportunity lost in this political Year of the Woman: with more objective writing and careful editing, this could have been a great book. -
Schwarzkopf Book Lacks Substance About Gulf War
‘It Doesn’t Take a Hero’
by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf and Peter Petre Bantam, $25
Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, in his eagerly awaited autobiography “It Doesn’t Take a Hero,” writes the way you would expect a career military man would: straightforward, more than a little corny in places and chock full of the “can-do” spirit that pervades the general’s public image. The story, though, is almost as fascinating for what it leaves out as for what it includes.
The 500-page book, for which the charismatic commander of the Gulf War received a multimillion dollar contract, is a cradle-to-retirement overview of Schwarzkopf’s life. He describes a childhood shattered by an alcoholic mother and an absent military father. Like many children of alcoholics, Schwarzkopf took refuge in withdrawal and, in the sixth grade, a military boarding school. He later joined his father, then stationed in the Middle East, and recalls meeting kings and princes in the area in which he would later lead many of the world’s armies.
After graduating from West Point, his military career began in earnest. At least 200 pages of the book are devoted to a description of each of his various assignments. At each, it seems, he arrived to find the situation in disarray and, one or two years later, departed with things firmly in control.
Schwarzkopf served two tours in Vietnam – one early in the war and another toward the end. He describes well the frustration of those in the military who felt scorned for serving their country, even though politicians, not officers, had “chosen the enemy and written the orders.”
But he reserves his harshest criticism for pompous or incompetent officers. His description of surreal poetry recitals held in colonial mansions by officers who were being served by drafted soldiers highlights many of the war’s absurdities. At the same time, his compassion for his troops and commitment to equality shines through. He routinely required his officers to dine with their troops and, in one poignant passage, describes waiting for dinner in the rain with his troops rather than eating in an officers’ mess hall.
Schwarzkopf was also present during the Grenada invasion. He describes in some detail the awkward conduct of the invasion. In one remarkable instance a Marine colonel refused to fly Army troops in Marine helicopters until forcefully ordered to do so – all because of interbranch jealousy.
By the time of the Gulf War, Schwarzkopf had been promoted to the top ranks of the military. Despite his obvious familiarity with the Middle East and its politics, Schwarzkopf’s discussion of the war is remarkably incomplete. Not a word in the book is devoted to the recurrent allegations that the Bush administration had been supplying military hardware and components even after it became aware of Iraq’s hostile intent and determination.
Schwarzkopf includes at the end of the book a short and rather defensive section posing and then answering the four questions he is most commonly asked. It is astonishing that not one of them is: Couldn’t this war have been avoided entirely by a more competent foreign policy?
(In answering one of the four questions, he says the allied forces did not continue on to Baghdad in search of Saddam Hussein because it was not authorized by the United Nations, nor was it an objective.)
Schwarzkopf does devote a large portion of the book to the war. His description of the behind-the-scenes action is fascinating. At one point a high-ranking British official took notes of a detailed briefing on ground war strategy on a laptop computer. The officer gave the computer to his assistant, who left it in his car while shopping and it was stolen. It was only two days later that the contents of the hard drive were reconstructed and the loss was determined to be not as significant as feared.
Perhaps most significant, Schwarzkopf notes the pressure from Washington to launch the ground war prematurely. The passage from the book, reported widely when it was leaked last week, describes a heated discussion between Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Schwarzkopf. Powell, informed by Schwarzkopf that a two-day delay may be necessary because of weather conditions, responded by arguing, “I’ve already told the President the twenty-fourth. How am I supposed to go back now and tell him the twenty-sixth? You don’t appreciate the pressure I’m under . . . . My President wants to get on with this thing. My secretary wants to get on with it. We need to get on with this.”
Schwarzkopf responded: “What if we attack on the twenty-fourth and the Iraqis counterattack and we take a lot of casualties because we don’t have adequate air support? And you’re telling me that for political reasons you don’t want to go in and tell the President that he shouldn’t do something that’s militarily unsound?” Fortunately, the weather cleared before the confrontation had to be resolved.
The book is entertaining and does succeed in describing events from Schwarzkopf’s perspective. But his failure to include a more complete and balanced description of the Gulf War, its context and its aftermath, distort the book.
It was certainly not Schwarzkopf’s task in the military to question policy judgments. But it is precisely because of his policy position in the book that makes what he does not say as telling as what he does. -
‘The Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West’
‘The Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West’
by Charles F. Wilkinson
Pantheon, $20
The spotted owl is only the most recent and prominent symbol of the conflict between man and nature, development and preservation. In “The Eagle Bird,” University of Colorado law professor Charles Wilkinson explores the range of legal and political conflicts in the West: water rights, mining rights, Native American land claims and public land use.
Wilkinson writes beautifully, and he explores the nuances of issues often lost in the heat of the struggle. He succeeds in avoiding what has come to characterize much current writing on environmental issues: pejorative labels for opponents (“darker greens,” etc.) and strident and emotional mischaracterization of simple facts.
“The Eagle Bird” is a book that should be read by anyone interested in preserving the distinct character of the West. As Wilkinson writes, “By making the right choices now, we can promise (our children and grandchildren) steamy geysers and bright streams and lasting forests and great yellow bears and shadowy wolves and rewarding employment and welcoming communities.” And that is a goal on which both loggers and environmentalists can agree. -
‘Turning Right: The Making Of The Rehnquist Supreme Court”
‘Turning Right: The Making of the Rehnquist Supreme Court’
by David G. Savage
Wiley, $22.95
The new book by David G. Savage, the Los Angeles Times’ Supreme Court correspondent, tells the terribly depressing – or terribly exciting, depending on your point of view – story of the transformation of the United States Supreme Court from 1986 to the present. Beginning with the confirmation of William Rehnquist as chief justice, “Turning Right” goes on to discuss in some detail the nominations and confirmations of Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Souter and Thomas.
Savage is particularly adept at describing complex decisions accurately and in plain English – a talent not widely shared by reporters covering the high court. He also takes pains in his portrayals of the justices, carefully avoiding overly broad generalizations about the rightward shift in the court’s philosophy.
Taken as a whole, the book ably documents the fundamental shift in power that has necessarily resulted from consecutive Republican administrations. By the fall of 1991, Presidents Reagan and Bush had appointed 439 of the existing 837 federal judges and, perhaps more significant, five of the nine Supreme Court justices. Justice White, appointed by President John Kennedy, is the sole remaining Democrat-appointed justice, though he most often votes with the conservative majority. The book, and those statistics, are well worth pondering.