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.

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