The Brothers Kennedy
DRAPER, ROGER
THE BROTHERS KENNEDY BY ROGER DRAPER To anyone who came of age in the 1960s, as I did, the emotional climax of last summer's Democratic convention was surely the film clip of 16-year-old Bill...
...The Ambassador probably never read his second son's Harvard senior thesis...
...because she's not only beautiful, but she's warm, she's affectionate, she's wonderful in bed...
...In the summer of 1944, Joe Jr...
...He exploited women sexually...
...Joe Jr., who imitated his father's strong dislike of Jews, was an isolationist...
...This maintained that appeasement was the inevitable outcome of a widely held belief in the futility of World War I, not of stupidity on Chamberlain's part, yet implicitly treated appeasement as a problem??in spite of passages tinged by it...
...He did...
...Jack was Joe Jr.'s "nonconformist rival," writes Hamilton: funny, irreverent, sloppy, and usually late...
...Kennedy returned to his family the winner of the long competition with Joe Jr...
...Choate, his prep school, virtually threw him out for being leader of a student "opposition party" called the Muckers Club...
...His irresponsibility was astonishing...
...Roosevelt followed the case on high...
...Jack finally did end the affair, although in one of the most irresponsible ways he could possibly have chosen: by concealing the ill health that had dogged him from birth to get into the fighting in the Pacific...
...Thereafter, it was the mean and charmless Joe Jr., his oldest son, two years Jack's senior, who was to be the first Catholic President...
...Be that as it may, women and men alike flocked irresistibly to John F. Kennedy...
...had been the focal point of the Kennedys' dream of glory, culiminating in the White House...
...Ted and Eunice cooperated "at various times...
...His letters, quoted extensively by Hamilton, are often so amusing one envies those who had the privilege of receiving them...
...Hamilton plausibly regards Inga as "the greatest love of Jack's life," and she was also, in all likelihood, his greatest folly...
...As the 17-year-old Jack put it to a psychiatrist, his brother was "the efficient one...
...Yet we have also long understood that this enchanting person was a creature of darkness as well as of light...
...In 1940, Joseph Kennedy predicted to an interviewer that "Democracy is finished in England" and "may be here" in the United States...
...Jack knew Inga was under suspicion...
...Fejos [Inga had a husband and, incidentally, a second lover] engaged in sexual intercourse on a number of occasions" is a typical entry of the agent assigned to monitor them...
...Despite his character and medical problems, he made a very creditable officer, Hamilton insists, particularly on August 1, 1943, when a Japanese destroyer wrecked PT 109, the torpedo boat he commanded...
...In one respect, however, the unconventional side of Jack's personality reflected the example of his father, a man of many mistresses...
...He was the wittiest, most stylish of the Chief Executives following Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he had a tremendous impact on our general culture...
...In September 1943, at a farewell dinner held to send Joe Jr...
...he was "the boy that doesn't get things done...
...Hamilton's JFK: Reckless Youth (Random House, 898 pp., $30), the initial installment of a projected three volumes, is compellingly readable, albeit more for its content than its style...
...He admitted in a letter to a friend that she had "connections with the Fascists...
...Soon afterward he started his affair with Inga Arvad, a Danish journalist who, at 28, was four years his senior...
...Jack, Hamilton notes, "would have been well advised??and many times was advised??to leave Inga alone...
...and the desire of fame, and love of truth, and all that makes a man...
...Nor was JFK a performer...
...But unlike Joe Jr., he drew closer, in substance, to his father's enemies than to his father, who either accepted this or failed to notice it...
...otherwise the Kennedys were resistant...
...The balance between them was changing...
...During the 1946 campaign, for example, a member of Kennedy's staff apprised him that he had impregnated a campaign worker...
...Of course, Joe Jr...
...But he did make history as "America's worst ambassador to Great Britain," applying "daily pressure" on Neville Chamberlain "to back off from war or even confrontation" with Hitler...
...Kennedy and Mrs...
...With many of them excised, the work achieved best-seller-hood in 1940 under the title Why England Slept, a book Joseph Kennedy probably didn't read either...
...A British friend, Hugh Fraser, quipped of him, "Just as there was no political issue apart from the multiparty diversity of democracy in which Jack deeply believed, so his love life demonstrated no other principle than multiwoman diversity...
...The Kennedys come in for much stronger criticism than JFK himself does...
...He failed at everything else, above all his absurd ambition to be the first Roman Catholic President...
...At Choate, Jack organized an outing to a Harlem bordello where he and his roommate, Lem Billings, lost their virginity to the same prostitute...
...He didn't give a damn about the girl," says the author's informant...
...Jack's relations with his father were ambiguous...
...JFK would not have been elected to the White House if the country had known of these unsavory realities...
...Inga Arvad, the most important of his mistresses, told an acquaintance that (in Hamilton's words) he was "a poor lover??a boy, not a man, intent on ejaculation and not a woman's pleasure...
...Mother Rose is depicted as almost abandoning her nine children...
...On the one hand, he was a model of filial loyalty, never criticizing him or openly defying his wishes...
...Jack was no longer the fey rebel of his youth...
...as a human being and not merely as a pro-Fascist numskull...
...in secret stock pools designed specifically to hoodwink investors," and then at suppressing such practices when he became chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission...
...Some recall this aspect of his personality with less amusement...
...indeed a defeatist...
...In fact, his own political career was finished...
...Joe Jr...
...Inga's correspondence suggests that Jack had informed her, several years before his brother died, of his own desire to be President...
...felt humiliated by the ascent of the younger brother he had always eclipsed, at least among relatives...
...Her apartment was bugged and watched...
...No other political figure of the past two generations can evoke such potent memories...
...Prior to her arrival in this country in 1940, she had met several high-ranking Nazis, including Hitler, and had liked them in a naive, apolitical way...
...The plane blew up in flight, and "no particle of Joe Jr.'s body...
...off to Britain, where he was to serve as a Navy pilot, a guest had referred-in a toast to "our own hero"??Jack...
...When he walked into a room," said Inga, "you knew he was there??not pushing, not domineering, but exuding animal magnetism...
...she did a lot of traveling and was distant when she bothered to be home...
...And was he really elected...
...Notwithstanding the abundance of books about JFK, nobody had attempted a full-scale biography until Nigel Hamilton, an Englishman who earlier published a life of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, started research on one a decade ago...
...In the beginning, the author claims, he "was treated like a spy," and a lawyer was dispatched "to ask me to change my tune...
...The "odious" father was successful at "manipulating share prices...
...THE BROTHERS KENNEDY BY ROGER DRAPER To anyone who came of age in the 1960s, as I did, the emotional climax of last summer's Democratic convention was surely the film clip of 16-year-old Bill Clinton reaching out, adoringly, to touch President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, while JFK contemplates him with what I suspect is amusement at his eagerness...
...Jack later told a biographer, James MacGregor Burns, that his older brother's bullying had been the sole unhappy element of his childhood...
...Oh shit' was all he said...
...volunteered for a crazy mission to fly a dynamite-laden bomber into the air and bail out, so it could be guided remotely to a target in France...
...FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover suspected wrongly that she was a German agent...
...We will never be sure, but from the outset, when Old Joe bribed a congressman to stand down so Jack could contest the seat, his campaigns were clearly corrupt...
...Joe Jr., observes Hamilton, "took after his father ??aggressive, mercurial, quick to fly into a temper...
...At this point it becomes possible to see Joe Jr...
...Although eventually, he indicates, the machinations ended, the present work, covering the period up to Jack's election to Congress in 1946, will not please the clan...
...was ever found...
...In September 1941 Jack joined the Navy, and four weeks preceding Pearl Harbor became an outright interventionist...
...His father, the stock swindler and appeaser Joseph P. Kennedy, bankrolled his career and greatly influenced it behind the scenes...
...The tragedy, whatever else JFK may have felt about it, permitted him to fulfill that desire...
...Joseph Kennedy's world was shattered...
...Henceforth he was to be a voracious sexual predator...
...He was "more fun than anyone I've ever known,' remembered Billings, among many...
...Even by his late teens, Jack must have realized that he was a lot smarter and better liked than his brother...
...was the apple of his parents' eye...
...His heroism once the survivors reached an island behind enemy lines was perfectly real...
...Nonetheless, Joe Jr...
...That night, reported a guest sharing a room with him, he went to sleep sobbing, "I'll show them...
...For Kennedy, to borrow a line of Tennyson's, seemed to embody "high thought, and amiable words...
...He was now the chief product of the family business: the business of electing the first Catholic President...
...It had been Jack who wrote a best seller, Jack who was on the winning side of the debate over intervention, and Jack who distinguished himself in action...
...But as to [her] being a spy, it's hard to believe...
...But you know, Goddammit Henry, I found out that son-of-a-bitch Hoover had put a microphone under the mattress...
...Instead, he persisted in this entanglement even after his Navy superiors, to thwart it, moved him to South Carolina...
...In October l941, Ensign John F. Kennedy was assigned to the Foreign Intelligence Branch of the Division of Naval Intelligence, in Washington...
Vol. 75 • December 1992 • No. 16
