The Kennedy Imprisonment
Shannon, William V.
Books: PERSPECTIVES ON POWER THE KENNEDY IMPRISONMENT A MEDITATION ON POWER Garry Wilis Little-Brown, $14.95, 301 pp. William V. Shannon Garry wills is a highly intelligent and erudite writer...
...He is also a pacifist...
...He contrasts the Irish, Catholic, and rich family of William Buckley with the Kennedys, to the consistent disadvantage of the latter...
...But as a radical, Wills is obsessed with denigrating liberalism and politics alike...
...It is only verbal fog to argue that either of them as president was "imprisoned" by the Kennedy legend...
...Perhaps because I am a liberal and not a pacifist, I find his discussion of liberal mainstream politicians such as the Kennedys consistently out of focus, enormously enlarging some of their qualities and actions and blurring others...
...There then follow several chapters on Kennedy family life which are often em-barassing and speckled with error...
...The John Kennedy portrayed in this book is the Kennedy of the Green Berets and Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs (to which Wills devotes inordinate space...
...Because Wills has no belief in politics as it is practiced on the American scene, his meditations on power usually miss the point...
...It is as tedious as wading through the pages of Penthouse...
...the family taking its winter vacations in Palm Springs rather than Palm Beach...
...He ends his book with a tasteless and ill-founded juxtaposition of Martin Luther King's pacifism and Kennedy's politics...
...These characteristic strengths and weaknesses are again present in this book about the three Kennedy brothers, analyzing them as holders and seekers of power...
...His brother's assassination had a traumatic effect on Robert Kennedy...
...But on the next page, he writes: "To some degree, the Buckleys freed their daughters from convent backgrounds -while Kennedy girls were at Manhat-tanville, the Buckleys were at Smith...
...It is equally significant that Wills omits any mention of Kennedy's 1963 message to Congress calling for the comprehensive civil rights law that was enacted the following year...
...Robert had Edward to advise and be his surrogate...
...That law is one of the great achievements of liberal politics in America...
...Seeing the Bay of Pigs as "the very definition of the New Frontier," he uses it to discredit Kennedy's whole administration...
...Thus, he has Edward Kennedy being born in 1936, rather than 1932...
...Edward has no one but ghosts at his side, and they count more against than for him, eclipse him with bright images from the past...
...The same can be said of Nixon and his criminal tendencies...
...Johnson had his own convictions and his own hang-ups and he would have acted upon them if Kennedy had never lived...
...and both tend to disinherit him...
...He writes: "Charisma...
...Religion gets more than lip service from most Buckley children...
...Continued from page 306) nedy's aura "imprisoned" his successors in the White House as well as his younger brothers, Robert and Edward...
...is not transferable-even to members of the 'graced' leader's own family...
...He inherits the illusions of his brothers' followers with the accumulated venoms of their foes...
...less thoroughly detached from their origins-some have even married Irish spouses...
...He has much sport-as writers on this theme easily can-with the dazzling Kennedy image and style...
...I have mentioned Wills's sensibility...
...After all this gossip and low-grade sociology has laid a foundation, the author proceeds to meditate on power as the Kennedys wielded it...
...But he seems never to realize that, unfortunately or not, appearances are part of the reality of politics...
...King's doctrine of nonviolence and his demonstrations and marches were unquestionably important in shaping the civil rights revolution, but he would not have achieved very much if liberal politicians like Kennedy and Johnson and conservatives like Everett Dirksen had not responded to his trumpet call with a lot of hard, detailed, legislative work...
...and describes grandfather "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald as "the Purple Shamrock himself," a term originated to describe Fitzgerald's rival, James Michael Curley...
...He seems not to recognize the cool, cautious, skeptical side of Kennedy's nature and how much it controlled his actual decisions as distinguished from the "macho" tough-guy image he projected...
...Yet he never addresses, much less answers, the question of why Kennedy did not go plunging ahead with full air and ground support for the Cuban exiles as their invasion faltered...
...If this were a novel, one would suspect the author of getting all the commercially required "hot" scenes out of the way at the beginning...
...But later presidents would be measured by the expectations Kennedy raised...
...So intent is Wills on discrediting Kennedy that he either ignores or barely adverts to the American University speech, the nuclear test ban treaty, and the first sale of grain to the Soviet Union-all of which another author could use to depict Kennedy as the father of detente-and likewise he scants the Alliance for Progress, the Kennedy interest in Africa, and ridicules the Peace Corps...
...Since this is a book about power, the author's own political stance is significant...
...He also often writes carelessly and in haste and has an overly dogmatic cast of mind and a deficient sensibility...
...In my judgment, the scattered insights that Wills offers do not compensate sufficiently for the fundamental confusion arising from the mis-match between the author and his material...
...The book opens with fifty-seven pages of unrelenting fact, gossip, and speculation about the sex lives of the Kennedys...
...Wills moved from a young right-wing conservative to a radical without ever having stopped to enjoy-or struggle with -the responsibilities of liberalism...
...Did not Eisenhower or Roosevelt work just as carefully as Kennedy to contrive their own images...
...Wills's central theme is that Ken-(Continued on page 315) Kennedy (cont...
...As for Edward, whom Wills consistently patronizes, there is . poignant truth in his' observation: "John, campaigning, had Robert and (Continued on page 318) (Continued from page 315) Edward to work for him...
...I find this wholly unconvincing with regard to Presidents Johnson and Nixon...
...his light has cast them in shadow...
...If Johnson had inherited the presidency and Vietnam from some other Democratic president with a set of advisers different from Kennedy's "best and brightest,'' he would still have done what he did...
...If those facts were reversed, no one after reading this book could doubt that Wills would cite them as "evidence" against the Kennedys...
...William V. Shannon Garry wills is a highly intelligent and erudite writer who possesses considerable literary power and usually makes interesting points about any subject he chooses to discuss...
...It is naive to think that' 'the Appearances Presidency" began with JFK...
...With regard to JFK's own brothers, Wills has a valid point...
...He did not so much elevate the office as cripple those who held it after him...
...The Buckleys are...
...His legend has haunted them...
...Since all three Kennedy brothers have been politicians, he fails as well to understand them...
...Where they were praised too ful-somely, he is bound to be judged too harshly...
Vol. 109 • May 1982 • No. 10
