The Rise and Fall of Teddy Kennedy
By Joe McGinniss
Simon & Schuster, 626 pages, $25
This book should immediately be studied by all Americans, not because of its intrinsic values-for it has none, none whatsoever-but as an illustration of just how corrupt and decadent our cultural, intellectual and political life has become.
It must say something about a society and an industry (the communications dodge) that a work of such foolishness, emptiness and dishonesty can fetch a huge advance from a major publisher (reportedly $1 million) and get bought for a mini-series by a network.
It says that many of us are airheads, or at least are considered to be by Simon & Schuster and by NBC. Perhaps it says that those corporations are led by airheads, though with this concession: if NBC can find writers who will make a watchable program out of this mish-mash, hats off to them.
Before proceeding, a consumer alert: anyone hoping to find juicy tidbits within these covers will be disappointed. Joe McGinniss has managed to write more than 600 pages on Sen. Edward Kennedy without revealing anything new. For that matter, he has managed to write them without saying anything interesting.
Oh, he mentions all of Kennedy’s character flaws-drinking, arrogance, carelessness, womanizing, self-destructiveness. But he does so without going into detail. For that matter, he does so without demonstrating their existence.
In this case, that’s almost excusable. They exist, all right, or they did recently. And McGinniss isn’t even unsympathetic to his subject. In fact, if he does not actually excuse Kennedy’s flaws, he explains them as the inevitable results of his dreadful upbringing, though, that did have one happy consequence. Again citing no authority, McGinniss explains that Kennedy’s lifelong support for the poor and downtrodden stems from “having lived his whole life at the bottom of the only society that really mattered to him psychologically-his own family.”
Oh? And just what explains Robert Kennedy’s similar impulses? They couldn’t both have been at the bottom of the same family. Maybe they were both brought up to care about others. Maybe it wasn’t such an unremittingly awful upbringing after all.
McGinniss writes well. It’s that styleless style so common these days, but at least it flows. Still, after a while even the smoothest flow becomes rough going if unleavened by information, insight or wisdom. Among the lesser vices of “The Last Brother” is that it is boring. It is also, on many levels, a lie.
The simplest level, which has already received a good deal of attention, concerns the statements never stated, the quotes never uttered and the thoughts attributed to Kennedy tha he probably never thought. This is fiction masquerading as fact.
No doubt, some of what McGinniss writes is true. But what? Almost nothing is attributed to any source at all. There are no footnotes or source notes. There is no index. On a couple of occasions he asserts that John Kennedy planned to drop Lyndon Johnson from the ticket in 1964. Maybe he did. But without any attribution the reader can make no judgment.
On occasion, “The Last Brother” degenerates into unconscious self-parody, as in this reflection on its subject’s state of mind as he walked on the beach with his sister Eunice after JFK’s assassination. “Suppose-not that there is any evidence he considered this-he suddenly just veered left, away from his sister, and plunged, fully clothed, into the roiling, frigid waters of Nantucket Bay,” McGinniss writes. Refreshing though it is to hear the author recognize the very existence of evidence, if there is none for a given proposition, why propose it?
On the next level, there is McGinniss’ attempt at explaining himself. In pre-publication versions, he acknowledged in a brief note on the copyright page that some of the material had been “created by the author.” When this received unfavorable publicity, McGinniss withdrew that small statement and substituted a longer “author’s note,” dated July 2, which appears at the end of the text.
It is a fascinating note, a lie to explain lies. Confessing that he had “written certain scenes and described certain events from what I have inferred to be (Kennedy’s) point of view,” McGinniss confronts the allegation that this amounts to “virtual reality,” by saying that “it is the Kennedys, over half a century, who have created the `virtual reality.’ “
Whatever “virtual reality” is, that’s not an answer. That’s a diversion.
McGinniss then names three writers (Marcia Davenport, Simon Schama and Walter Jackson Bate) who “have taken similar liberties in the interest of making their subject come to life.” But the three works McGinniss cites are about people (Mozart, Samuel Johnson) who were long dead or events (the French Revolution) that were long concluded when the books were written. Two of the three contain footnotes and extensive explanations of sources, and the exception, Davenport’s 1932 Mozart biography, is hardly comparable to a book about an active politician.
Furthermore, those three books are by genuine scholars, whose knowledge of their subjects is palpable. In this case, only the writer’s ignorance is palpable. This is a book about a politician by a writer who does not understand politics. Otherwise he would not say that John Kennedy won the 1960 Wisconsin primary with “only 56 percent” of the vote. Some “only.” Otherwise he would not say that Mayor Richard J. Daley “would be controlling the (1968 Democratic) convention in his home city,” and hence could issue “a direct order to the delegates, one they dared not disobey.” Maybe the 118 Illinois delegates, but not the other 1,504.
Nor would he have written that the accident at Chappaquiddick destroyed any chance that Kennedy would ever be president. In 1979, Kennedy was ahead of both President Jimmy Carter and the leading Republicans in most polls. Had he run a good campaign in 1980, he might well have won. Had he chosen to run in 1988, he probably could have been nominated, and who is to say he could not have defeated George Bush? Michael Dukakis was way ahead of Bush, and unlike Dukakis, Ted Kennedy knows how to fight back.
But there are deeper levels of ignorance and dishonesty, and to be fair to McGinniss, he is not entirely to blame for all of them. He is only part of a general inanity that pervades some circles.
That inanity concerns a subject about which Americans have been foolish for a generation-the Kennedys. First, the foolishness took the form of turning flawed mortals into demigods. Now comes conspiracy-theory demonizing, turning mortals into tools of bizarre conspiracies involving spies and gangsters. McGinniss’ version goes like this:
John Kennedy’s presidency was entirely arranged, and bought, by his father, who bargained with mobsters, primarily Sam Giancana of Chicago, promising to get rid of Fidel Castro so the mob could reopen the Havana gambling houses. Giancana stole enough votes in Chicago to elect Kennedy, who in turn had to get rid of Castro.
It was because of this arrangement that Joseph Kennedy forced the President to appoint Robert Kennedy as attorney general, with orders not to bother Giancana. Because J. Edgar Hoover learned something about the arrangement (and about JFK’s and Giancana’s shared mistress), the Kennedys had to go easy on civil rights to appease the racist FBI director. And it was because Kennedy failed to get rid of Castro that the mob had him killed.
Except perhaps for the part about the mistress, evidence for this scenario does not exist. The evidence against it? Well, plots against Castro began under Eisenhower; the FBI under Robert Kennedy relentlessly investigated Giancana; the Kennedy admininstration acted vigorously (if belatedly, but for obvious political reasons) on civil rights and if Kennedy really had to get rid of Castro he would have approved air cover for the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Richard Daley may have stolen some votes for JFK in Chicago, though probably no more than Republicans were stealing for Richard Nixon downstate. But it is time everyone stopped inflating the powers of mobsters, most of whom are truck drivers without jobs. Sam Giancana couldn’t have stolen enough votes to elect a dogcatcher, and at any rate Kennedy would have been elected even if he’d lost Illinois.
Later McGinniss says that Robert Kennedy wouldn’t run against Lyndon Johnson in 1968 for fear that Johnson would unleash Hoover’s damaging information on the Kennedy family. But of course, Robert Kennedy did run against Johnson.
Forgotten in all the conspiratorial fantasies and the psychobabble is the one important thing about Edward Kennedy-that for 30 years he’s been an increasingly important United States senator, perhaps the Senate’s most effective member. Were he to leave public life tomorrow, he would rank with Webster, Clay, Douglas, Dirksen and the other giants of the Senate.
For this there are several reasons, and one of them involves ambiguity, even contradiction-qualities with which McGinniss cannot deal. Obsessed by Kennedy’s character flaws, he has to ignore Kennedy as a senator so he can ignore the fact that Kennedy’s success stems from strengths of character-selflessness, generosity, breadth of vision. Kennedy is such an effective senator in part because his fellow senators like him. Even Republicans like him, which explains how he often makes common cause with them.
But all this is just reality. The Joe McGinnisses of the world don’t deal well with reality or with complexity. They play their little games, for which they get rich and famous. Shame on them. Shame on us.
