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.
Year: 1993
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Understanding Jfk — Two Detailed Studies Of His Life, Death
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The Court Tapes — Publication Of Tapes Of Famous Arguments Before The Supreme Court Has Stirred Legal Criticism And Has The Justices In A Snit
Peter Irons has his work cut out for him.
The 53-year-old attorney and political science professor may soon be taking on the toughest possible legal opponent: the entire United States Supreme Court.
He is no stranger to controversy. A 1960s civil-rights activist who later served 2 1/2 years in federal prison for draft resistance during the Vietnam War, Irons has angered the court by making public some of its most significant debates in the past four decades – debates such as Roe v. Wade on abortion rights, Cooper v. Aaron on school desegregation in Little Rock, and United States v. Nixon on the Watergate tapes.
Irons, who is director of the Earl Warren Bill of Rights Project at the University of California at San Diego, released copies of the tapes through the nonprofit publisher, The New Press, only after signing a pledge not to reproduce them. The court considers it a “clear violation” of Irons’ contract with the National Archives, said a court spokeswoman, and “is considering what legal remedies may be appropriate.”
Public records
Irons, on the other hand, considers it common-sense disclosure of public records and adamantly rejects the court’s justification for its restrictive rules.
“It seems a little odd that they have only complained when the tapes were made available more widely to the general public,” said Irons in a telephone interview. “Why is it in the public interest to require every person who wants to use one of the tapes to go through the laborious and expensive and time-consuming procedure Supreme Court public information officer of requesting each one individually from the National Archives – and then waiting months for a response?”
The tapes, Irons pointed out, have been available to legal scholars for years, and the court has “never defined what the harm would be by wider release of these tapes.” He said he is distressed by what he called the court’s attempt at “trial and conviction through press release.”
The tapes are available at bookstores in a boxed set titled “May It Please the Court. . .” – the traditional opening phrase used by attorneys before the nine justices. Priced at $75, the package edited by Irons and his associate, Stephanie Guitton, includes six 90-minute audiocassettes and a 370-page book of transcripts of oral arguments in 23 landmark decisions.
Irons admits that he asked neither the court nor the National Archives for permission to reproduce the tapes.
“I knew perfectly well that . . . it would be an exercise in futility,” he said, acknowledging that he agreed not to reproduce the tapes or allow them to be reproduced for any purpose. The contract with the archives, provided by the court to The Seattle Times, also shows that Irons agreed “to use such audio tape for private research and teaching purposes only.”
Though the agreement seems clear-cut, Irons explains his signing and subsequent disregard of it in true lawyerly fashion. His release of the tapes, he said, is “consistent with the contracts to the extent that the contracts are intelligible at all.”
The tapes, he continued, “belong to the American people. They do not belong to the Court or to the justices. . . . They’re public records.”
Recording since 1955
The Supreme Court itself began recording oral arguments for internal use in 1955, and in 1969 began turning the tapes over to the National Archives, where copies are made available “for private research and teaching purposes only.” The archives bars duplication of the copies for any other use, including radio or television broadcast – a provision already violated this week when National Public Radio aired excerpts from “May It Please the Court. . .” during a three-day series on its “Morning Edition” news program.
Calling the set of tapes a “clear violation of Professor Irons’ contractual commitments,” the spokeswoman for the Supreme Court notes that others have sought permission to reproduce the tapes and such requests have been routinely denied.
“He signed several contracts with the archives, but he must have had his fingers crossed behind his back,” said Toni House, the court’s public information officer. The tapes, she said, belong to the court and the court had neither the obligation to produce them nor to deliver them to the archives.
However, in a telephone conversation House was unable to articulate any compelling public interest in restricting distribution of the tapes. She acknowledged that copies of the tapes were available to scholars and even for classroom use. What further public interest was served in denying the taxpaying public access to the tapes?
Sound bites
“The court,” she said, “is concerned about distortion and sound bites.” House refused to say what actions the justices might take when they reconvene later this month, noting only that the court has its own lawyers and could refer the matter to the Justice Department.
Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in California, does see some purpose in the court’s restrictions.
“Oral arguments are high-pressure situations, for both the judges and the lawyers,” said Kozinski in a telephone interview. “Judges may be hesitant to ask questions if they know that every stutter will be on the evening news.”
But constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School agrees with Irons that the court has “no legitimate general interest” in precluding distribution of the tapes. In fact, Tribe said by telephone, the “general public ought to have access to the tapes. It’s wrong in principle that the only people who have access to these arguments are those that can fit into the courtroom.”
However, he noted that “it doesn’t follow that the restrictions are unconstitutional or that you should take the law into your own hands . . . I think that’s a pretty extreme way of challenging a rule.”
Louis Michael Seidman, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University and a former clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, agrees with Tribe, saying that the court “looks foolish” for refusing to release the tapes and that it “makes the court look like it has something to hide.”
A glimpse inside
The tapes themselves are a fascinating glimpse into the marble and velvet-shrouded public courtroom of the highest court in the land. Among other highlights, they include:
— Gideon v. Wainwright, in which the Court established the right to counsel for the poor. Abe Fortas, later a Supreme Court justice himself, shakes with indignation at the state of Florida’s suggestion that an indigent could possibly match the state without the assistance of counsel, as he booms “(n)o man, certainly no layman, can conduct a trial in his own defense so that the trial is a fair trial.”
— Cooper v. Aaron, in which the court rejected the state of Arkansas’ attempt to block school integration. A young Thurgood Marshall makes a passionate argument, including: “I worry about the white children in Little Rock who are told, as young people, that the way to get your rights is to violate the law and defy the lawful authorities. I’m worried about their future. I don’t worry about those Negro kids’ future, They’ve been struggling with democracy long enough.”
— United States v. Nixon, or the Watergate tapes case. This tape includes then-Justice Marshall’s cutting cross-examination of James St. Clair, President Richard Nixon’s lawyer, on whether the president would obey the court’s ruling if it compelled release of the Watergate tapes.
— Gregg v. Georgia, in which the court held the modern death penalty constitutional. Robert Bork, then U.S. Solicitor General, made a ponderous argument for the government, facing off against New York University’s sparkling Anthony Amsterdam.
— Roe v. Wade, in which the court first recognized constitutional protection for abortion. Texas Assistant Attorney General Jay Floyd began his argument against young attorney Sarah Weddington with a ghastly, perhaps revealing, attempt at humor: “It’s an old joke,” Floyd says, “but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they’re going to have the last word.” No one laughed.
There are many other prominent or controversial arguments, from “one-man-one-vote” in Baker v. Carr, to the right to remain silent in Miranda v. Arizona. Irons has done a masterful job of editing the tapes, and he introduces each with a brief background on the case. From time to time, he interrupts the tapes to identify (and sometimes misidentify) the justices asking questions, and he concludes each with a brief summary of the court’s ultimate ruling.
The summaries make clear Irons’ personal approval or disapproval of the results, but he argues that “it is virtually impossible to totally eliminate your personal perspective on things. I’ve never made any pretense of being totally unbiased”
Ultimately, the tapes are a wonderful resource, even if sensationalized by the method of their release. The contrast between the more emotional and passionate arguments of the early tapes and the cooler, more formal recent arguments is striking.
Stripping away mystique
For the vast bulk of the American public, unable to attend any argument before the high court – much less 23 of its most important – the tapes are invaluable. They strip away the court’s black-robed mystique to reveal the very human, very simple, and very compelling core of nine men and women struggling to come to terms with difficult issues in a responsible way.
As Irons notes, the tapes make the court look like the serious, deliberative body it is.
“There is nothing on the tapes that diminishes the integrity of the court,” he said. “I think that people will have a better understanding of the Court as an institution and also (an opportunity) to experience these historic cases. -
Kennedy `Biography’ Reads Like Pulp Fiction
‘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. -
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.