‘J.F.K.’ Biographer Has Tenacity of Retriever : Books: The British writer tackles an American legend that will take more than one volume.

For four years Nigel Hamilton has inhabited the skin of a young Jack Kennedy.

Before that it was a decade inside the prickly hide of Britain’s Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. And before that the yin and yang pelt of the disparate novelist brothers Mann, Heinrich and Thomas.

Nigel Hamilton is a professional biographer.

Just out is his latest effort “J.F.K.: Reckless Youth.” Four years of research and writing scarcely get Kennedy beyond World War II. Looming ahead are two more volumes and X more years. Morning, noon and night with the shade of the late President.

The one-volume-isn’t-enough biographer is a retriever, patted for fetching one stick, only to take off after another. He may clandestinely admire Leon Edel’s near lifetime extrapolating Henry James, but that’s not for Hamilton. “After 10 years, I will have had it,” says Hamilton, who’s been there.

Biography is an uneasy calling, putting one’s own mind inside and outside the mind of another, usually dead. It is historical ventriloquism.

It transcends ghoulism to commit oneself to years of resurrecting the departed with a three-volume tombstone. The hazards are many. Will the biographer get it right? Will he become overly fond of his subject, biography lapsing into hagiography? Will his fascination be matched by the reader’s--that is, will people buy the damned thing?

Will he crawl into someone, never to emerge? Martin Gilbert, the many-volumed biographer of Winston Churchill, “thinks he is Churchill,” says Hamilton. “Asked his opinion of William Manchester’s biography of Winston, he said, ‘I do not comment on my plagiarizers.’ ”

We are not discussing here the airline terminal paperback racks bosomed with the serial bed-hoppings of the ephemeral rich and famous. We are talking scholarly biography, and so is Hamilton as he assesses his entre at a Turkish restaurant near the Library of Congress, his office pro tem.

“You have to have a great admiration and regard for a subject to live with him for 10 years,” he says. “Very seldom does anti-biography succeed. But you must guard against idolatry.

“The biographer is educating himself, investigating what it is to be a human being in history. You have to put yourself into the skin of your subject.”

Hamilton spent 10 of his 48 years on a three-volume authorized biography of Montgomery. It was both a labor of love and precaution. Monty was a family friend of his father, Sir Denis Hamilton, who had fought with him in Europe, became editor of The Sunday Times and chairman of Reuters news agency.

This was a particularly quivery tightrope. Montgomery, who had a biological son, was so fond of young Hamilton he called him “Son No. 2.”

Because of the relationship and because he had been a journalist, biographer and book seller, Hamilton was asked by Monty’s estate to recommend a biographer. “I wondered if I could trust someone else to get him right,” Hamilton says. “I thought I knew what made him tick and wanted to know more. I knew what he was like as an old man. What was he like as a young man?”

Armed with the curiosity that drives all biographers, Hamilton got the job. “I felt sorry for him. He was a prisoner of his own fame. Military historians never considered the man. Everyone is interested in El Alamein and D-Day. But once I got into his private papers, I realized this man had really given his life as a great, great teacher of training soldiers. But if you say training to people, they go to sleep. So how do you make it interesting?”

Hamilton faced no personal obstacles with Kennedy. He never knew him. But he assumed the self-inflicted burdens of biography: “to be fair and complete and hopefully find something new to maintain one’s interest and, eventually, the reader’s.”

Hamilton pauses while unskewering a kebab. “A trap of biography is wanting to put in everything. But if you want to put something in, it has to be fascinating.”

A further trap is the kith and kin of biographees. “It is almost axiomatic that families of great men have a vested interest in preserving the glory. They’re locked into it, and it becomes a part of them. Few have the interest and selflessness to be true to history.”

Hamilton recalls the widow of novelist Thomas Mann pointedly stomping to and fro in a room above while he interviewed a relative below about Thomas’ best-selling brother, Heinrich. “She didn’t want to share her husband’s glory.

“There is a Kennedy Administration in exile also,” Hamilton says. “These loyalists want to keep the memory alive of a man who to them could do no wrong. They have no interest in changing their view.

“To the Kennedys, history is P.R.”

Hamilton claims that the Kennedy Library, whose material is an adjunct of the National Archives, opened his mail and spread rumors that this “sleaze-minded Brit journalist” was going to stoop to featuring Kennedy’s contracting gonorrhea at Harvard on the “J.F.K.” dust jacket.

“They tried to have me disinvited to a Kennedy conference in Italy last October,” Hamilton says. He persevered and attended the conference. The dust jacket remains innocent of mention of the late President’s social life.

“I’m a pacifist, but certain battles you fight as a biographer are like war, and the biggest battle is the battle with the family.”

Hamilton shrugs down a chunk of lamb. “To be an authorized biographer is worse than a trap. That’s your real test.

“You’re writing for the future. To what extent are you being objective? You can never be totally so, but you like to go to sleep at night without your conscience pricking you.”

The rewards and stimuli of biography come serendipitously: Monty’s personal papers found in an attic trunk that illustrated how he was appalled at the trench butchery of World War I and devoted his life to teaching men how better to face battle. A letter on the death of his wife that revealed the emotion behind the facade of a seemingly icy man.

“I let Monty speak in his own words. You use as many letters as possible.”

Hamilton tackled “J.F.K.” with what he considers an invaluable biographical tool: “Virtual ignorance.”

He had come to America in 1962 as an intern at the Washington Post from Cambridge University, which he thought was “the center of the universe.” He hobbed with lesser nobs at work and play and went home impressed with how little he actually knew. While researching Monty in the United States, he was asked the unfairest question of all to a biographer by his old Post editor, Russell Wiggins: What was his next book? When Hamilton said that Kennedy “intrigued” him and bemoaned lack of a full-scale biography, Wiggins urged him to “go to it.”

“I was an Englishman with no ax to grind, intrigued with him and the question of leadership,” Hamilton says.

Crawling into another’s skin is an osmotic process. Hamilton moved his wife, two children and 13 suitcases to Boston, became the John F. Kennedy scholar at the University of Massachusetts and dug in.

Chance led him to the FBI’s files of Kennedy’s wartime, Danish-born girlfriend, suspected spy (wrongly) Inga Arvad. Against the Kennedy Library’s better wishes, he got hold of a family album that contained Inga’s letters to Kennedy. A year’s wooing of her son plus a set of his Monty biography, produced photostats of Kennedy’s letters to her. Bird-dogging.

Gathering such rosebuds along the way, Hamilton has written, is not a process of invention as Kennedy loyalists might allege. Rather “the biographer is like a botanist preparing a tropical garden for public viewing.”

The letters proved to Hamilton that young Kennedy had been contemplating the White House years earlier than has been previously thought. “And the irony is to find it in love letters.”

Hamilton doesn’t begrudge the archive years to come. “I’d like to live his life as he lived it. He didn’t know what might happen tomorrow. Neither do I.”

On the lure of such uncertainties do biographers feed. “I’m never bored, but I’m terribly isolated. On the worst days I wonder why I have to live in a foreign country and take all this b.s. (from the Kennedy Library, with which Hamilton has made a restless peace). You can either go in a corner and cry or press forward. You don’t want to get beaten.”

Displaying the Labradorian doggedness of the retriever-biographer, Hamilton told his full-time researcher, Stephen Corsaro, to put up a sign in their Boston office like one at Bill Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Little Rock: “The Economy, Stupid.”

“Ours says: ‘The Book, Stupid.’ ”

Hamilton pulls out an advance of the Sunday book review of the New York Times lauding “J.F.K.”

“When you see something like that, it makes it all worthwhile,” he says.

Hamilton drains his Turkish coffee, then heads home to pack for a talk show tour promoting “J.F.K.”