THE STANDARD READER
1 The Standard Reader Books in Brief Allies: The U.S., Britain, Europe, and the War in Iraq by William Shawcross (Public Affairs, 261 pp., $20). William Shawcross is not the fellow you'd expect to...
...and the Kennedy talent has run out with Ted, a gifted legislator who has used his abilities to serve an agenda that has failed to move with the times...
...Ted had exacerbated insecurities that he never lost," Leamer writes...
...The saddest is Patrick, Ted's son, who came out of the shipwreck of his parents' marriage with serious drug problems and bought himself a seat in Congress in a desperate search for a foothold...
...Whew...
...The worst thing Joseph P. Kennedy ever did for his family was to insist that Ted enter the Senate in 1962 at age thirty, with no credentials beyond his last name...
...Allies is botli enltghte3ing and morally invigorating...
...His divorce from his first wife was amiable enough, but his subsequent push to force her into an annulment created a backlash that helped to end his career...
...Twice during the 20th century Europe proved unable to stand alone against totalitarianism," Shawcross writes...
...If you read)u3t one b)ook on the Iraq war and its aftermath, this is it...
...It is arguable that the refusal of key European countries to stand up to the threat of Saddam Hussein in 2003 showed thatit w^as still capable of failing the test that it flunked in 1936, whenitshould have threatened force...
...But those elected on their names in some ways never grow up...
...This is the theme of Laurence Leamer's Sons of Camelot, which follows his The Kennedy Men and The Kennedy Women...
...William Shawcross is not the fellow you'd expect to defend the effort of Tony Blair and George Bush to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein...
...Joe Kennedy II appears a decent sort who was ill served by the political hacks pushing him into Congress before he was ready and the family flacks and coat-holders who cosseted him when a clap on the ear would have helped him grow up...
...He skewers the French for their "grotesque cynicism" and criticizes German chancellor Gerhard Schroder's anti-American rhetoric as "graceless, reckless, and wrong...
...By this time, the weight of the family scandals had become too much for even the cleanest of Kennedys: In 2002, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and her cousin Mark Shriver lost races in Maryland to hungrier rivals, who became stars by beating them...
...Despite their advantages, John and Robert Kennedy had to fight hard for their triumphs, take risks, and face setbacks...
...Shawcross is famous as the nemesis of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon over the military incursion in Cambodia in 1970...
...The Kennedy excitement ran out with Robert, killed in 1968...
...Noemie Emery...
...It is no wonder that the one "Kennedy" with a viable future is Arnold Schwarzenegger, an immigrant with the raw drive of the Kennedy founders...
...Without the United States, it might either still be collaborating with Nazism or be under the control of the Soviet Union...
...For the third generation, now moving up close to their fifties, the political world has been a snare and delusion...
...Ted's nephew, Joe II, elected and then indulged as a Kennedy, paid no price at first for his outbursts of temper...
...These sands were enough to subvert his ambitions: The free ride he got helped produce Chappaquiddick, which ended his hopes for a national future...
...It is now axiomatic that in political families the weight of a legacy is at its most crushing just as the talent to sustain it runs out...
...He's also an admirer of the United Nations and a biographer of Rupert Murdoch...
...When you did things yourself, you stood on firm ground, and Ted still stood on shifting sands...
...Fred Barnes Sons of Camelot: The Fate of an American Dynasty by Laurence Leamer (William Morrow, 656 pp., $27.95...
...Free rides in the end do no one a favor...
...His brother Michael seems a sociopath, beyond redemption or rescue...
...But in the short, scintillating Allies, Shawcross says Saddam was "an inevitable threat" and insists leaving him in power would have been "both immoral and dangerous...
Vol. 9 • March 2004 • No. 27
