Category: Political Biographies

In ‘Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ,’ Nicholas deB. Katzenbach offers a behind-the-scenes look at the U.S. government’s response to some of the most turbulent years in American history.

‘Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ’

by Nicholas deB. Katzenbach

W.W. Norton, 320 pp., $27.95

Nicholas Katzenbach had a front-row seat to one of the most turbulent decades of our nation’s history. As Deputy Attorney General under Bobby Kennedy and then Attorney General and Undersecretary of State for President Lyndon Johnson, Katzenbach played a key role in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In his newly released memoir, “Some of It Was Fun,” Katzenbach details the behind-the-scenes action.

Katzenbach was hired by Bobby Kennedy as an assistant U.S. attorney general, heading the prestigious Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, which provides advice to the Attorney General and to the White House.

In that post, Katzenbach worked directly with President Kennedy and with Bobby Kennedy as they confronted the tumultuous 1960s. He describes the perspective of a White House struggling to protect the Freedom Riders, young activists who traveled south to challenge segregation, from violence.

Kennedy was under pressure from civil-rights activists and northern liberals to send federal troops into the South to protect the civil-rights protesters, and to assist in the desegregation of public institutions in the South, an idea that Kennedy ultimately rejected. Katzenbach points out the tension easily lost in hindsight: Sending federal troops into the South in large numbers would not only have been intensely unpopular in the South, but would likely have greatly exacerbated the racial tension and left troops performing police functions they were ill-equipped to handle – with no exit strategy that would not leave the situation on the ground worse than when they started.

Katzenbach was promoted to Deputy Attorney General when President Kennedy named Byron White to the Supreme Court in 1962. Bobby Kennedy sent Katzenbach to the University of Alabama in 1963 to monitor the desegregation of the University of Alabama and to confront then-Governor George Wallace, who had famously promised to “block the doorway” to any effort to desegregate the school. As the angry crowds on campus grew, with a belligerent Wallace adding fuel to the fire, Katzenbach monitored the troops on hand, deftly coordinated the admission of Vivian Malone and James Hood as students, and confronted Wallace in the doorway. Katzenbach provides a riveting minute-by-minute account as he struggles to avoid a race riot, confront Wallace, get the students admitted and keep Kennedy in the loop. That chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

President Johnson kept Katzenbach at arms length for months after assuming office, suspicious of his close ties to Bobby Kennedy, but eventually promoted him to become the attorney general. From that post, Katzenbach assisted in drafting and lobbying for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark civil rights legislation. Katzenbach later assumed the post of Undersecretary of State from which he helped to advise President Johnson on the Vietnam War.

Katzenbach’s narrative begins with President Kennedy’s inauguration and ends with Robert Kennedy’s funeral train, fitting bookends to what many see as the heart of the ’60s. Looking back, despite the violence, riots, demonstrations and assassinations, Katzenbach remembers the ’60s mostly as “a time of hope, of shared aspirations for a better America” and a time when “nations all around the globe [saw] us vindicate our beliefs about human equality and individual worth in the face of opposition and looking to us for leadership to a better world.” The contrast to the present is, as Katzenbach points out, dramatic.

Although a fascinating firsthand account of some of the most crucial government crises of the 1960s, Katzenbach’s work is, unfortunately, flawed from a somewhat haphazard organization, weak editing and interesting but undeveloped political commentary on more contemporary public policy issues.

Of course, the whirlwind of a new Democratic administration and the rapidly changing world of the 1960s bears some obvious lessons that could be learned for our own time. There are few of the principal players left to tell the story and teach those lessons. Katzenbach’s contribution should not be missed.

‘Bad Bet on the Bayou’

by Tyler Bridges

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27.50

Louisiana has always been one of our most colorful states. In “Bad Bet on the Bayou,” author Tyler Bridges tells the story of the rise of gambling in Louisiana in the 1990s under the free-wheeling guidance of Edwin Edwards, the state’s four-term charismatic governor.

Edwards’ subsequent entanglement with organized crime, improper payoffs and public corruption ultimately led to his downfall and conviction. It’s a story that could teach many lessons, but not with this disappointing effort.

Edwards, having narrowly obtained legislative approval for a land-based casino, several riverboat casinos and video-poker machines, orchestrated the licensing and leasing process, obtaining huge (and hugely improper) cash payments for himself along the way.

He once stuffed $400,000 into a money vest he wore to avoid detection at an airport. But the FBI snared him with a series of wiretaps and informers with tape recorders.

Edwards himself leads an imposing cast of rakish characters. So confident of winning reelection in 1983, he opined that he couldn’t lose unless he was caught “in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.”

But Edwards is only the start. Aging organized-crime figures fumble over money-management problems, high-flying developers offer pyramid-scheme financing to build outsized casinos, and FBI agents wiretap phones. It’s a great story. Unfortunately, Bridges fails to live up to its potential. The author, a reporter for The Times-Picayune, offers little more than a nod to historical context, introduces dozens of characters with every turn of the page, often out of chronological sequence, and draws few lessons from the tale.

‘Monica’s Story’

By Andrew Morton

St. Martin’s Press, $24.95

For those who have not yet had enough of Monica Lewinsky, this book is must-read material. The rest of us might want to take a pass.

The just-released “Monica’s Story” is, of course, the breathless biography of Monica Lewinsky, the intern in her 20s whose sexual affair with President Clinton led to the president’s impeachment. Written by Andrew Morton, author of fawning biographies of Princess Diana, “Monica’s Story” offers a third-person account of the tawdry affair and its aftermath.

To Morton’s credit, he offers just 35 pages of material concerning Monica’s life before Washington, correctly guessing that few readers are interested in her childhood years. Morton launches the reader directly into Monica’s arrival in Washington and her indiscretions with President Clinton. “Monica’s Story,” however, offers almost no salacious detail on the sexual encounters themselves. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s nearly pornographic report to Congress is the handy guide to cigars, stained dresses and the like.

Indeed, there isn’t much new in this book not already reported or revealed in last week’s interview by Barbara Walters with Lewinsky. Monica arrives as an intern in the White House, is captivated by the president’s “sexuality,” and finds an opportunity to flash her infamous “thong” underwear. They meet in the bathroom of his private study for their more intimate exchanges.

The descriptions of their encounters are striking for the wildly reckless nature of the arrangements. The book reveals the flaws in the two primary characters. Clinton anguishes over his infidelity and struggles to break it off with Monica, only to relapse with a hopeless lack of self-control into more sordid misbehavior. Monica becomes unable to accept that maybe this married man and sitting president might not want to continue the affair.

The most interesting portions of the book concern Lewinsky’s betrayal by her “friend” Linda Tripp and Lewinsky’s brutal treatment by Starr’s agents. Tripp’s treachery is stunning: from taping Lewinsky’s phone calls to pleading with her to prevent the stained dress from being cleaned, to steering Lewinsky to use a delivery service from whom Tripp can secretly obtain copies of invoices for White House deliveries.

Although Lewinsky has been silenced by Starr from discussing her treatment at the hands of Starr’s investigators in her media interviews, she is free from such restrictions in Morton’s book. Held in a hotel room by armed FBI agents and seasoned prosecutors, she is confronted with two choices – “cooperation” by wearing a recording device to ensnare the president, his secretary and his friend Vernon Jordan, or facing prosecution and “27 years” in prison if she leaves the room or consults with her lawyer.

Her repeated requests to talk to her lawyer are refused. But more outrageous is this: her crime at that point was signing a false affidavit. Had she been allowed to contact her lawyer, she could have prevented the filing of the affidavit – a more serious crime.

Had enough? Don’t buy this book. But “Monica’s Story” does provide a voice for a humiliated woman who almost certainly wishes she never got a White House internship and fell in love with a married guy who worked there.

With the crack of rifle fire on Nov. 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald brutally cut short President John F. Kennedy’s first term in office – the “Thousand Days” that has since grown to mythic proportions and spawned a series of either fawning or viciously distorted histories.

The Kennedy presidency is examined in minute detail and refreshing objectivity by syndicated columnist Richard Reeves in his new study, “President Kennedy: Profile of Power” (Simon & Schuster, $30). Reeves strives to reconstruct the day-to-day view from inside the Kennedy Oval Office at the height of the Cold War.

Kennedy, it becomes clear, was constantly weighing his every step with an eye toward the Soviets. He was aware that many viewed him as indecisive and weak and that he had been elected by a very narrow margin of 118,574 votes – a number he kept on a piece of paper in his pocket.

Kennedy’s domestic agenda languished, despite Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, and Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats were not anxious to enact his plans for health care for the elderly, free trade for Europe and aid to education. Sounds eerily familiar.

In addition, Kennedy’s leadership style emerges as chaotic and disorganized. Envisioned at first as a break with the Eisenhower bureaucracy, Kennedy was quickly buried in paper and minutiae, and like many new presidents, he was unprepared for the job’s demands.

The trouble in Cuba

One surprise was the disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. A tiny Cuban brigade, trained and financed by the American military, was pinned down on the beach, its survival or escape in question without full-scale American intervention.

Only later did Kennedy realize that his generals had envisioned precisely that all along. He vowed not to repeat the experience, subsequently withdrawing our military from further engagement in Laos. Reeves believes the two humiliations set the stage for the increasing American commitment to Vietnam and for Kennedy’s bold confrontation with the Soviets over the Cuban missiles: “There are limits to the number of defeats I can defend in one 12-month period,” Kennedy told confidants.

Reeves devotes an extended portion of the book to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the account recalls how close the nation came to a nuclear exchange with the Soviets. Kennedy’s strategy ultimately defused the crisis, but only on the Sunday morning before a planned military invasion on Tuesday. Like many Americans, JFK drew his family close during the confrontation, recognizing the potential disaster lurking.

Smaller confrontations

Reeves also portrays a seriously ill man, heavily medicated by a number of sometimes feuding doctors, and almost incapacitated at times by his back pains, but still struggling Richard Reeves with the decisions and emergencies demanding his attention. He also recalls less momentous situations.

In early 1962, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wanted to know why the president was not taking action against an ambassador in Europe who was caught, literally, with his pants down, jumping from the window of a lady’s bedroom. Kennedy smoothly replied that he would make an effort to hire ambassadors who could run faster.

Kennedy’s possibly most revealing comment was made to Washington Star reporter Mary McGrory, who had written about Republican presidential hopeful Barry Goldwater. Kennedy told McGrory that he had noticed the article, but had not read it: “I don’t read things about politicians who say they would rather be right than be president.”

Ultimately, that comment defines the Kennedy presidency for Reeves: an intensely pragmatic politician willing to defer his ideals to the political reality of the moment.

Reeves’ writing is fluid and captivating, but he could have used a more careful editor. Several quotations are repeated, and Reeves’ thoughtful analysis drops off as the book progresses. Still, these flaws are minor. The book is spectacularly successful in providing a ground-level view of the White House in operation. One can see Kennedy in action, flaws and all, and better understand the awesome responsibilities of the job.

Assassination revisited

Gerald Posner’s “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK” (Random House, $25) picks up where Reeves leaves off. The book is a detailed study of the assassination, including dozens of new interviews, discussions of recent computer-enhanced analyses and almost 200 pages on Oswald before the assassination.

Posner reveals that Oswald earlier unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate retired U.S. Gen. Edwin Walker, a right-wing activist relieved of his duties by President Kennedy in 1961. Posner also details Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union, the skeptical reaction to him there, and his disillusioned return.

Posner takes on all the major conspiracy theorists, with particular disdain for Oliver Stone’s recent movie, “JFK.” He advances a compelling case that Oswald acted alone and that the Warren Commission reached the correct result, albeit through flawed investigative work.

Quoting historian William Manchester, Posner acknowledges that for many the assassination is difficult to comprehend, with the murdered president on one side and “that wretched waif Oswald” on the other.

“You want to add something weightier to Oswald” to invest the murder with meaning, making JFK a martyr, Manchester has written. “A conspiracy would, of course, do the job nicely. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatever that there was one.”

Agreeing with Manchester, Posner concludes: “To say otherwise is to absolve a man with blood on his hands, and to mock the president he killed.

‘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.

‘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’

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.

‘Order & Law: Arguing the Reagan Revolution – A Firsthand Account’

by Charles Fried

Simon & Schuster, $19.95

“Order & Law” is one of the best accounts of the inner workings of the Reagan administration, as seen by Charles Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who served as solicitor general from 1985 to 1989. In that capacity, he directed the elite group of Justice Department lawyers who represent the United States government before the Supreme Court.

Fried attempts to accomplish two goals: to respond to his critics and to recount his accomplishments. He succeeds in the latter; he fails in the former.

As solicitor general, Fried wholeheartedly embraced the “Reagan Revolution,” and he spends a considerable amount of time articulating his version of the administration’s conservative legal “philosophy” – with some pointed mischaracterization of “bad faith” liberalism along the way. Because of its frequent appearances before the Supreme Court, the “S.G.’s office” has long had a special relationship with the court, yet historically, its effectiveness has largely stemmed from its reluctance to advance rhetoric for political purposes.

All that changed, according to Fried’s critics, during the Reagan administration. Far more than any of his predecessors, Fried looked to political, not legal, sources for his arguments. While some argue that the solicitor general should represent the ongoing U.S. government, not simply the political agenda of the current administration, Fried disagrees.

He derisively notes the career lawyers in the S.G.’s office who seemed “more interested in protecting their `special relationship’ (with the court) than in arguing their `client’s’ position.” To Fried, the solicitor was nothing more nor less than the administration’s spokesman before the high court.

For example, Fried explicitly sought to have the court overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case, despite the near hopelessness of his argument. The position was argued not to convince the court, but for political, public-opinion reasons.

He also reveals more than he intends in describing his conflict with the Justice Department over “federalism.” Fried eloquently demonstrates the hypocrisy of much states’-rights rhetoric by describing the argument not as a matter of principle but as a dispute over which route would be more effective in achieving a political goal: deregulation. Power should be returned to the states, Fried argued, unless they adopted liberal regulatory schemes.

“Order & Law” finally is an odd and revealing mixture of legal philosophy and political history. To “movement conservatives,” diehard liberals or anyone interested in the nuts-and-bolts of representing the federal government before the Supreme Court, it also is essential reading.