Dynastic Overdrive. - Review - book review

Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy, edited by Amanda Smith (Viking, 764 pp., $39.95)

After Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral at Hyde Park in 1962, the mourners gathered at her son John's house. Arthur Schlesinger-who had flown up from Washington with President and Mrs. Kennedy to attend the service- later recalled the scene. "Thinking of the young Roosevelts," Schlesinger wrote, "lost suddenly in middle age, and of the young Kennedys, so sure and purposeful, one perceived an historic contrast, a dynastic change, like the Plantagenets giving way to the Yorks."

All dynasties end in bitterness, for the simple reason that they end. But do they not begin in bitterness as well? Shakespeare's Henry Bolingbroke, the first Lancastrian to mount the throne, is embittered by his treatment at the hands of Richard II, the last of the Plantagenets. Franklin Roosevelt got his dynastic revenge on the Harvard men who'd blackballed him at the Porcellian Club by becoming the second Roosevelt to win the White House. All of this, of course, was before W. emerged to avenge the bitterness of Poppy's defeat by terminating the reign of Clinton-Gore.

In Hostage to Fortune, Amanda Smith's compilation of her grandfather's correspondence, the bitterness that drove Joseph P. Kennedy to create America's preeminent 20th-century political dynasty is abundantly evident. The old man was bitter about lots of things, even before he was old. He was bitter that the King and Queen didn't send a letter of condolence after his daughter Kathleen's death. He was bitter about the way Walter Lippmann criticized him while he was ambassador to England. He was bitter that FDR went behind his back to conduct a secret correspondence with Winston Churchill. He was bitter about the way his alma mater, Harvard, treated him. (Kennedy was booed by classmates at his 25th reunion, and an eagerly anticipated honorary degree was not forthcoming.) He was bitter about the Catholic hierarchy, which he thought insufficiently supportive of Jack's presidential ambitions:

I think the less I see of clergy and the hierarchy, the longer I will live and the happier I will be. Their attitude towards a family that has done as much for the Church as I think we have was nothing short of a disgrace. . . . I am disgusted. . . . I will never forgive or forget.

As he aged, Kennedy said he disliked "more intensely than ever those who should have helped and didn't." He told a friend in 1961, "I am not like my older son [Jack] who makes up to the people who attack him. When I have a bad experience, I remember it forever. It is very bad, I realize, and I know I should be more charitable in my old age, but I seem to get worse instead of better."

The bitterness may not have been pretty, but it was in some ways understandable. The familiar tragedies become freshly overwhelming in the letters and telegrams that Smith, a graduate student at Harvard, has assembled. In May 1944, Kennedy's oldest son, Joe Jr., wearing the uniform of an American naval officer, escorted Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy to her wedding to Billy Hartington, the oldest son of the Duke of Devonshire. Three months later Kennedy received the Naval Department telegram informing him that his son was missing in action. In 1948, Kick herself died in a plane crash, and was buried at Chatsworth, the Devonshires' ancestral seat. A Boston Globe reporter tracked Kennedy to a Paris hotel room and over the telephone gave him the news of his daughter's death. Decades later Smith discovered, at the bottom of a drawer, the "crumpled scrap" on which the former ambassador had recorded his thoughts:

No one who ever knew her didn't feel that life was much better that minute. And . . . we know so little about the next world that we must think that they wanted just such a wonderful girl for themselves. We must not feel sorry for her but for ourselves. . . . [W]ritten by me 1/2 hr after notified of Kick's death.

The scrap is one of the many documents Smith has brought to light in her valuable reconstruction of the life of an American tycoon. The largest-and most noteworthy-part of the book documents Kennedy's service as ambassador to the Court of St. James's between 1938 and 1940. President Roosevelt gave Kennedy the job, and Kennedy's diaries provide memorable glimpses of his boss at work, ruling his empire with the easy nonchalance of a beneficent Caesar. FDR's purposes are often difficult to fathom, but surely his decision to send Kennedy to London at the tail end of the '30s ranks among his more mysterious. True, Kennedy had made a great deal of money (albeit in somewhat suspicious ways); he had acted as a key fundraiser for FDR's 1932 presidential campaign; he had served as first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. But in England he was out of his depth, as Roosevelt must have known he would be. Was his appointment merely "a great joke," as Roosevelt reportedly said, "the greatest joke in the world"? Or did he hope to get rid of a man whom some had talked of as a potential successor? If so, the plan worked; the ambassadorship ended Kennedy's public career.