The Kennedys as Metaphor
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers & Writing THE KENNEDYS AS METAPHOR BY BARRY GEWEN Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An A merican Saga (Simon and Schuster, 932 pp., $22.95) is a book out of...
...The same intense determination that had won millions was now applied to winning elections, and no expense was spared to assure success, no detail overlooked by Joe Sr...
...Kennedy to the Presidency in 1960...
...It had ripped something out of him that night...
...To win elections he could, as he liked to boast, "round up more dead people in a shorter time than any other heeler...
...In effect, he ran his son's campaigns for the House and the Senate, exercising total control...
...Rose's grandfather, Thomas Fitzgerald, worked long hours as a peddler before gaining an economic foothold in his brother's grocery store...
...Joseph Sr.'s grandmother, Bridget Kennedy, was a widow, dependent upon the charity of neighbors to put food on the table for her four children...
...Dramatically, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys is a botched job...
...The answers, I would say, are nothing, none and no...
...lurks in the background, with a network of spies keeping tabs on everything his children were up to...
...Yet throughout his time in Washington, JFK was always able to draw on a wide assortment of idealistic and thoughtful men and women...
...As the wife of Richard Goodwin, a key New Frontiersman, she is better connected, too, and she had access to 150 cartons of previously unexamined material...
...So remarkable are they, in fact, that it is hard to see how they could be a metaphor for anything except individual capability, and the more space Goodwin devotes to describing their lives and achievements, the farther away she gets from her argument about the family's representativeness...
...Thwarted in his efforts to become a doctor by the death of his father, Fitzgerald chose one of the few promising careers open to turn-of-the-century Irish boys—politics—and his obvious talent quickly gained him the support of those who mattered...
...The formative experience of his life, says Goodwin, was his failure to gain admission to one of Harvard's exclusive undergraduate clubs because of his Irish Catholicism...
...Boston's Irish at that time lived their lives between disappointment and tradition, the doleful repetition of infants' deaths on one side, the consoling rituals of the Catholic Church on the other...
...By excluding "political history," The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys leaves the impression, or at least the suspicion, that these people were merely puppets, pawns in Joe Sr.'s game...
...Everyone in Goodwin's lengthy narrative revolves around him...
...Only the most complacent would unhesitatingly declare the remark untrue...
...More than drama is lost, however...
...Goodwin states in her Preface that the Kennedys' success stands as a metaphor for the collective story of America's 19th- and early 20th-century immigrants, the millions of Irish, Italian, Jewish and Slavic arrivals who struggled to survive, perhaps to prosper, and who, in the process, upended the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Establishment, unalterably transforming the politics, culture, style, and spirit of the country...
...Something more than style attracted the Bundys, McNamaras, Galbraiths, Schlesingers, Sorensons, and Goodwins to him...
...Whatever Mario Cuomo's reasons for withdrawing from the 1988 Presidential race, we can be sure that he, like the rest of us, heard the comment, usually made in whispers, that the country is not yet ready to elect to its highest office a person whose first and last names end in vowels...
...Even when she is discussing the younger Kennedys' romances, Joe Sr...
...Wanted' isn't the right word...
...The narrative has as its central figure Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., whose indomitable will shaped or remade virtually everyone he encountered in his long, Gatsbyish career, but the book isn't really about him, either...
...What he added to the brew was an element of rancor...
...Like most of those millions of newcomers, the Kennedy forebears started at the bottom...
...In this recounting of an extraordinarily political family, Goodwin has sacrificed the substance of the politics...
...As a youngster he proved to be a natural leader both inside and outside his family...
...Plunging into nontraditional enterprises thai the financial world disdained either as insubstantial or shady, he recognized the boundless potential of the young movie industry in the 1920s, and in the months before the repeal of prohibition, he carved out a profitable role for himself in the liquor business...
...Others have indeed said as much, but we have every reason to belie\ c that this is not the conclusion Doris Kearns Goodwin has in mind...
...After his first son, Joe Jr., perished in the War, he saw to it that the reluctant Jack entered politics...
...Almost as in a soap opera or melodrama, we await his comeuppance, knowing there will be one and wondering what he will draw from it...
...Soon he was a boss, "the little Napoleon of Ward 6," then a congressman, a mayor, and finally a legend...
...It was like being drafted, " the future President once told a reporter...
...The shrewdest among them learned not to fight brutal necessity but to turn it to their own advantage—and no one was shrewder than John Fitzgerald, Rose's father, JFK's grandfather...
...The incredible energy and willfulness, the sharp eye for the main chance, the irresistible charm that caused others to sacrifice their own ambitions to his—all these qualities show up again and again throughout the history of the clan: in Rose, Joe Jr., Jack, Kathleen, Bobby, even the unheralded Eunice...
...Yet on this occasion, it never arrives, taking place offstage...
...A generation younger than John Fitzgerald, giving him 25 additional years to shed the Irish peasant's passivity, he was not content to make the best of the cards he was dealt...
...If they encouraged their constituents to act on a perceived communal tie, they hardly stand alone in having reaped political advantage by manipulating the symbols of the tribe...
...Fitzgerald would have been a stand-out in almost any circle, but among his relatives and heirs, he was simply one of many...
...His family, like his wealth, was essential to his bid for power, and as the patriarch, themolderof Jack, Bobby andTed, he pushes all the others of f the pages of the book...
...In another time and place, some of the Kennedy men might have become popes, while some of the spellbinding Kennedy women might have been burned as witches...
...He actually made money in the market during the Great Depression...
...There is still a great distance to go...
...Everything about him spelled success...
...The identification some voters may have felt, and may continue to feel, with the Kennedys is sheer sentimentality...
...During the contest for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1960, he went so far as to bet a large sum in Nevada to guarantee that the gambling odds favored Jack...
...The summit of that story, and the point where The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys ends, is the election of JohnF...
...When most others on Wall Street were insouciantly riding the speculative wave, he saw the crash coming and, with exquisite timing, sold his holdings in early 1929...
...could equal any of theFitzgeralds or Kennedys in intelligence, drive and charm...
...And in the place of that loyalty, resentment had crystallized out hard as rock...
...For several hundred pages, we have had our eyes on the father, admiring his brilliant audacity while recoiling from his malignant will...
...There was never a time when he didn't make money...
...As Goodwin tells it, the story of the Kennedy/Nixon race is really Joe Sr.'s, not an immigrant generation's, and the book therefore lets its readers down by concluding with JFK's victory...
...JOSEPH Patrick Kennedy Sr...
...He was a man who decided to run f or of fice before he had any reason to, and Lyndon B. Johnson observed of JFK's years as a Senator: "He never said a word of importance in the Senate and he never did a thing...
...He had done everything right as a student, except to be born into the correct family, but that was enough: "Harvard had hurt him more than anyone knew...
...The rest," says Goodwin, "is a part of American political history...
...He wanted the entire deck, and whereas his father-in-law is remembered, despite the odor of corruption that trailed behind him, as a colorful rogue, the younger man emerges essentially as a buccaneer, who brooded over his wounds and plotted his revenge...
...Writers & Writing THE KENNEDYS AS METAPHOR BY BARRY GEWEN Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An A merican Saga (Simon and Schuster, 932 pp., $22.95) is a book out of focus...
...It was a position that enabled him to accumulate millions as a financier and speculator...
...My father wanted his eldest son in politics...
...They were the most Anglophile Irishmen imaginable, and about as "ethnic" as George Bush...
...Issues count for little, the manipulations for almost all...
...Kennedy was an athlete and a campus leader...
...True, the author is more serious and intelligent than most of the Kennedy family's chroniclers...
...never again would he experience loyalty to any institution, any place or any organization...
...Yet after turning the last page, with its brief five-line coda on the two assassinations, a reader may well wonder what the flood of facts added up to, what new insights were provided, whether it was necessary to tell this familiar, albeit compelling, tale once again...
...Kennedy remained an outsider till the day he died...
...Certainly, the Kennedys didn't view themselves as embodying anyone else's aspirations...
...Her 800 pages of text flow by effortlessly, a Mississippi of information about John Fitzgerald's Boston mayoralty and Rose Kennedy's commitment to Catholicism and Joseph Kennedy Jr.'s tragic heroism...
...Moreover, to state, as Goodwin does, that our first Catholic President's " dazzling rise to power was a recognition that the great immigrant revolution was finally complete" is to hurry things along rather too hastily...
...Admittedly, questions have persistently been raised about the content of John F. Kennedy's career...
...Although its declared theme is the emergence in American life of non-Anglo-Saxon ethnic groups, it isn't really about that...
...He demanded it...
Vol. 70 • June 1987 • No. 8
