Toronto, Saturday, January 13,
2001 [David Irving's
comment] Poking about in the
Kennedy attic Grandpa
Joseph's letters edited by adopted
kin Charles
Laurence National Post NEW YORK - Back in the
mid-nineties when she was a graduate
student at Harvard, Amanda Smith
found herself standing in the dusty attic
of a seaside house that might well be
considered the ground zero, the Inner
Tabernacle, of American tabloid culture.
It was the attic of the main house of the
Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, the
place where the clan of Camelot has
gathered to celebrate and to grieve, to
mark the milestones of their glaringly
public lives, for as long as most of us
can remember. Ms. Smith was there to do what no
others have been permitted to do: poke
about. And in old filing boxes, trunks and
crates, Ms. Smith, now 33, found treasure.
Here were letters and documents, here a
swatch or two of cloth chosen for
tailor-made suits from the '40s and '50s,
and there a priceless lost album of
photographs from the wedding of
Kathleen Kennedy, the first-born
daughter of the generation of Jack and
Robert and Teddy who died, in yet another
tragedy, soon after marrying into the
British aristocracy. "What I found was astonishing, and
unexpected," says Ms. Smith. "And for me,
to be in that attic, finding those
photographs, was very moving." Smith was
there in a unique position because she has
spent her whole life in a special position
within the Kennedy family, for she is an
adopted daughter of the family that values
blood above all. "Becoming a Kennedy was a strange
lottery to win," she says. "In some ways
it is great. But it is also great to be a
Smith, a name which offers a fig leaf of
privacy." Adopted as a baby by Jean Kennedy
Smith, sister of JFK, she has the
unusual viewpoint of the insider who is
also partly the outsider, the one who
could watch the gaudy parade of the
Kennedys as them as well as us. And now Ms. Smith, encouraged by her
mother and with the blessing of the clan,
has used this special viewpoint to edit
and publish
Hostage to
Fortune, the first collection
of the private letters and documents of
the old patriarch who began it all,
Joseph P. Kennedy, or Grandpa. It
was a task that took her on a journey
along 300 linear feet of documents, to use
the formal means of academic measurement,
and a journey deep into her own
memories. "On going into those papers, I
really had no idea what to expect," she
says over lunch in New York's Odeon
cafe. "He was, after all, a man who
people love to hate, one of those
mid-century oligarchs, and I could not
help but be aware of his reputation.
What I found was a man of real
extremes.There is evidence of his being a
really hard man in competition. But the
letters also illustrate how he was also
a great, affectionate father." Ms. Smith was "a little horrified" by
letters stinking with anti-Semitism and
such homophobic outbursts as "the embassy
was decorated by a fairy," and by some of
the company he kept with intimate letters
to the notorious Senator McCarthy
and the FBI boss J. Edgar
Hoover. She took the title, Hostage to Fortune,
from a wartime speech of Kennedy's
referring to his own nine children as the
hostages to fortune they would become if
America declared war on Germany. His
isolationism and his defeatism destroyed
his political career. But Ms. Smith sees
in the phrase a perfect pointer to the
price his family would pay for the
"Faustian bargain" which saw his own
ambitions fulfilled by his sons. The senior Kennedy was something of an
enigma, and remains that even to his
granddaughter. This does not not surprise
Ms. Smith. Her insider knowledge, indeed,
prepared her simply because she grew up
knowing instinctively a key factor to the
Kennedy story that is only recently being
generally understood: Kennedy was among
the very first to realize the value of
image, of spin and celebrity, and took
astonishing and prescient steps to create
and preserve his own myth. His letters,
for instance, not only reveal what we now
know as spin, but also editing notes which
make it clear he wrote them with an eye to
posterity. He was among the first to
realize the power of the new media
technology in both business and
politics. "Where did that ambition, that drive
come from?" she asks. "There were many
insecurities that drove him, that becomes
obvious. Look at the way he found being
accepted by the British royalty and the
prime minister when he was ambassador in
London absolutely intoxicating. "But there is a lot I still
don't know. He was amazingly careful:
you find letters wonderfully revealing
of his own concept of his family as the
embodiment of the American Dream, but
then after five years of research, I
still have not found clear evidence of,
for instance, his bootlegging
operations or his affair with Gloria
Swanson." This fits her own memories of
mysterious old Grandpa. In the
introduction, Ms. Smith, recently married
and planning to start her own family,
describes her one personal memory of the
old patriarch. It is a cloudy picture of
being taken by her nanny to see him on his
deathbed, and marvelling how this frail,
slight old man could be the same Grandpa
who dominated not just the family
conversation but the public universe
too. "I always saw him as a scary figure,"
she says, "very scary. But when I asked my
mother what kind of dad she remembered him
being, she answered, 'cozy.' That was not
at all what I had expected. And it was
something that made me decide to do this
book, to find that side of him." The letters -- thousands of them -- to
his children reveal that it took a truly
attentive father to produce his fabled
legacy. Jack, at Choate prep school, is
chided for spending $10.80 on
suit-cleaning in a single month. "While I
want you to keep looking well," he writes,
"I think that if you spent a little more
time picking up your clothes instead of
leaving them on the floor, it wouldn't be
necessary to have them pressed so often
..." Kathleen is comforted with assurances
that her love for a British Anglican
should not be considered a "sin," and
Kennedy goes on to defy the Roman Catholic
bishops who turned her marriage into a
scandal. And there is a letter to
eight-year-old Teddy, today's
senior senator, from London during the
Blitz. "I am sure of course that you
wouldn't be scared," he writes, "but if
you heard all these guns firing every
night and the bombs bursting you might get
a little fidgety." That was the sort of letter that began
to put a human face on the man who Ms.
Smith now believes has become a sort of
Titan figure in terms of the family's
public mythology. Titan, she explains, was
the fearsome, unapproachable old god who
spawned the more human, sympathetic
figures of Mount Olympus, and is one of
those figures whom the human imagination
seems to have a need to recreate in
mythology over and over again. Without the
fearsome Titan, there could have been no
American Camelot. Ms. Smith may well be right. She may
also be right when she peers at her
generation of her adoptive family and
declares that there are none with the fire
and the soul to match Grandpa and his
deeds. "They may look like Kennedys," she
says. "But there is no one in the family
now who is much like Joe, except in those
looks." And that, she goes on, may be because
with the deaths of John Jr., Jack and
Bobby, all of them but Teddy, the "male
line was cut short." The Kennedy women
were raised to different, nurturing
values. "The boys had no one to raise them
to those expectations," says Ms.
Smith. And that, in the end, might be the
final payment in the Faustian bargain that
made Old Joe's American Dream come true,
and then turned it into a
nightmare. |