The Kennedys: An American Drama
Collier, Peter & Horowitz, David
BOOK REVIEWS political power. They were demagogues of oligarchy. Disguised as populists, they championed the definitely privileged and supposedly enlightened few. These few, when ensconced in the...
...A desire to adore a head of state is a grim transgression against republicanism...
...Collier and Horowitz, former editors of Ramparts, are oblivious to this because they are social activists, proponents of vast and interfering authority...
...What's worse, the Kennedys not only believed in the primacy of government but believed it to be good...
...We got a mad crush on the lot of them...
...The authors, typical pundits, attribute the Kennedy rise to the family's pet intellectuals...
...Trust hubris to bring such trash as Kennedys to their knees...
...and Kathleen to die in airplane crashes and allowed Jack to get his PT boat T-boned by a Japanese destroyer...
...They wallow in drugs and indolence, perform wild acts of self-destruction, and roll in social manure...
...There are 230 some million of us, and we'd better start talking sense to ourselves soon...
...They raised their nine whelps in an atmosphere of brutal pride and stupid competition...
...Our governance will be managed with quiet and economy...
...This is giving the American public too little credit...
...Here, for those who have forgotten or just love to hear it all again, is the fulsome scurvy truth: Old Joseph P. Kennedy was a liaf and a greedy thief, an ignoramus, adulterer, vile anti-Semite, coward, and pompous ass...
...Just deserts...
...At Studio 54, Xenon, and Danceteria, they fritter away the advantage and wealth gained by their THE KENNEDYS: AN AMERICAN DRAMA Peter Collier and David Horowitz/Summit Books/$20.95 P.J...
...W hat fun this book is, what a storehouse of chortles and gloatings...
...With the exception of the disgusting Joe Sr., 1 he Kennedys An American Drama by Peter Collier and David Horowitz is a wonderful hater-of-Kennedys guide, an assemblage of ugly facts and rude anecdotes about this large and dirty family...
...They were so stylish, so charming, and-at least in their public moments-so gracefully behaved...
...They overdose and get arrested and, best of all, disappear from public eye...
...O'Rourke loathsome ancestors...
...Deforestation of North America would be needed to...
...Then comes the morally satisfying third act when the last generation of Kennedys reaps the trust fund dividends of sin...
...We took the Kennedys to heart of our own accord...
...And it is my opinion that we did it, not because we respected them or thought what they proposed was good, but because they were pretty...
...One family member rose, briefly, to great political power and almost unlimited sexual excess...
...The bog-trotters' circus has left town...
...It's ourselves we should be flailing...
...We may be dumb, but we're not so dumb that we ever spent a minute listening to Theodore Sorensen...
...We wanted to hug their golden tossled heads to our dumpy breasts...
...And this puts the Collier/Horowitz book in another light...
...print a book that size...
...There is something more horrible than hoodlums, churls, and vipers, and this is knaves with moral justification for their cause...
...The Kennedys were more than a rich, bad family that gained temporary there was genuine idealism in the tribe...
...And only in the vaguest, election-fixing way did any Kennedy realize public officials serve at the people's sufferance...
...When the hapless Rosemary turned out to be retarded, they had her lobotomized and parked her with the nuns...
...And thus their every excess and corruption could be excused as contributing to a larger good...
...We have to pay for every one of them, sometimes with our money, sometimes with our skins...
...The rotting leftovers can still be whiffed in Teddy Kennedy's speeches...
...Thus the Kennedys excelled in every Irish vice and learned others strange to the sons of Erin such as simony and lust...
...But it will suffice...
...We'll have no need to go looking for Kennedys to love...
...The Kennedy pitch-men have folded their tents...
...The Kennedys thought the world would be a better place for having them run our half of it...
...The remaining eight turned out foolhardy, arrogant, unprincipled, and wholly lacking in sense of consequences...
...His wife Rose was a frigid martinet, unashamed to suckle at the teat of shabby lucre, awash in pietism and tar-tuffery, filled with the letter of Catholicism and empty of its spirit...
...They think the Kennedys had a tragic flaw...
...This may be the stupidest thing that has ever happened in a democracy...
...Just hors d'oeuvres...
...With the usual leftist heavy breathing over money and power, Collier and Horowitz view the Kennedys as doomed figures who failed to accomplish noble objectives because of moral shortcomings...
...We, the electorate, were smitten with this handsome, vivacious family...
...What's the point of hating them anymore...
...These few, when ensconced in the offices of government, would decide what was best for the many...
...It never occurred to a Kennedy that the proper role of federal administration might be to guard the coasts and deliver the mail...
...The services he and his legislative cohorts contract for us are not gifts or benefices...
...The Kennedys saw political office as the source, rather than the result, of social order...
...Two were shot but under the most romantic circumstances and not, as might have been hoped, after due process of law...
...The Kennedys were themselves a tragic flaw of ours...
...A third remains a fat dog in a Senate manger that's overdue for mucking out...
...To the extent the Kennedys succeeded they did so precisely because of their unscrupulousness, never in spite of it...
...It is worse than having a head of state who demands to be adored...
...The President of the United States is our employee...
...They changed the nature of electioneering forever with thespian talents and piles of cash...
...Collier and Horowitz also fail to explain how these sewer trout managed to swim upstream into our body politic...
...And they nearly established America's first hereditary political dynasty...
...And certainly it shows an emptiness at the center of our lives...
...They are but few and a passing evil...
...Why bother...
...They did not know and probably couldn't understand the idea of a free people chartering a government for the sake of convenience and paved roads...
...We are another matter...
...But the Kennedys didn't have a tragic flaw...
...And, in fact, they accomplished lots...
...Some others nearly achieved the same results...
...Everywhere, except perhaps in benighted Massachusetts, the Kennedys are defeated and gone...
...It is not, of course, a complete collection...
...Elections, intellectuals, and press adulation were purchased...
...But that is just the problem...
...for them later...
...It is worse even than forced adoration of the state itself...
...This last trait caused Joe Jr...
...It satisfies the streak of mean self-righteousness in us all...
...A just main course of crow...
...If we can remember this we'll get a good, dull Cincinnatus like Eisenhower or Coolidge...
...Well, there are several points, none of them ascertained by Collier and Horowitz...
...They held government to be the foun-tainhead of privilege, responsibility, benefit, and constraint...
...They expanded executive power to do things like make war without congressional permission or even public knowledge...
...After reading The Kennedys one feels a little guilty for wasting the time and even a bit embarrassed at watching such manful thwacks being given to this dead equine...
...The Kennedys, however, continued to wax...
...We have no one to blame for the Kennedys but ourselves...
...The family wasn't so lucky with Teddy's Chappaquiddick skin-diving efforts three decades later...
...By having us hate the sinners rather than the sins, Collier and Horowitz distract us from the proper vein of bile...
...And no need to boil over with hatred for them later...
...They helped bring on the age of truly elephantine government programs...
...A tale of heroism was manufactured from that incident...
...Neither were lickspittle journalists at fault (though not through lack of trying by the likes of Joe Alsop...
Vol. 18 • February 1985 • No. 2
