CORRESPONDENCE

To the Editor:

All I learned from Gary Indiana’s review of Ronald Steel’s new book on Robert Kennedy (Book Review, Jan. 16) was that the reviewer harbors a deep hatred for the Kennedy family and is historically impaired. Gary Indiana made so many factual errors and mischaracterizations that it’s hard to know where to begin.

Joe Kennedy had nine children, not 11, and Robert Kennedy had 11, not 13. Bobby was not a senator for “10 undistinguished months,” but was elected in 1964 and had served 3 1/2 years, longer than his brother’s presidential term, before he too was assassinated in June 1968.

To portray Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy as “pro-Nazi” is an outright lie. Kennedy’s views were anti-war and pro-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, a huge difference. He wanted to prevent, if possible, another bloody European war and felt that if we could just somehow deal with Germany, another disaster could be avoided. At the time this was a widely held view on both sides of the Atlantic. But to say that Kennedy was “pro-Nazi” implies that he supported Hitler, which is false.

There are a lot of myths surrounding the Kennedys, both positive and negative, but perhaps the biggest is that Joe Kennedy was a “bootlegger.” Joe Kennedy made his fortune in banking, real estate, the stock market and the motion picture industry. Does Indiana, like so many in the public at large, truly believe that Kennedy would have risked everything he had accomplished for himself and his family by becoming involved in illegal alcohol trafficking? The idea is absurd. Where the myth comes from is the fact that Kennedy’s father was in the saloon business, and when Prohibition went into effect the family had a large reserve of alcohol in private shortage. No doubt some of this booze got passed around, but it was hardly what could even be remotely considered bootlegging. And just before the 19th Amendment was repealed, Kennedy was able to obtain a license to import Scotch from Britain into Canada, a smart business move placing him in position to profit when the ban was lifted. To characterize Kennedy as being involved in bootlegging implies that he was some sort of Al Capone-like figure, which is just not true. Like a lot of other businessmen, he was at times ruthless, greedy and unethical, but he was not a criminal.

Indiana also suggests that Kennedy had one daughter lobotomized and disowned another because they “fell short of his social ambitions.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The daughters in question were Rosemary and Kathleen. Rosemary is what we used to call retarded. Yet despite this handicap, the Kennedys always went out of their way to include Rosemary in their social activities. The lobotomy, suggested to Kennedy by Rosemary’s doctors, was a tragic mistake that the old man profoundly regretted for the rest of his life. The legacy of this event has been the Kennedy family’s outstanding efforts on behalf of the mentally handicapped, one of their most meaningful and lasting achievements. And as for Kathleen, the idea that she was socially ostracized is a joke. She was a star on the British social scene when Kennedy was ambassador, and later married an English nobleman. That she had trouble with her mother over marrying a Protestant is well documented. So is the fact that Kathleen was her father’s favorite daughter. Her death in a plane crash in 1948 devastated the old man.

RFK was not an “aide” to Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Rather he served on McCarthy’s committee as the counsel for the minority Democrats. He despised Cohn and Shine, McCarthy’s real advisors, and thought they were leading the senator, whom Bobby liked personally, far astray. There is no record whatsoever of Bobby ever engaging in any kind of “red-baiting” McCarthyism.

To claim that the Kennedys started the Vietnam War is another lie. Anyone knowledgeable on the conflict’s history knows the country had been in a continuous state of armed conflict since the 1940s. When JFK was killed there had been fewer than 100 American lives lost in the war--a good week under Johnson and Nixon--and there were only 16,000 troops stationed in Vietnam, a drop in the bucket compared to the 500,000 engaged three years after JFK’s death. Strong evidence, both documentary and circumstantial, exists that President Kennedy was looking for a way out of what he rightly saw as a potential quagmire.

RFK’s bad behavior toward LBJ was played out on a very wide two-way street, with Johnson going so far as attempting to prevent Bobby’s interment at Arlington National Cemetery. Jack and Bobby often defied their father’s will, as evidenced by JFK’s seeking the 1956 Democratic vice presidential nomination and entering the 1960 West Virginia primary, both actions the old man opposed. The suggestion that Rose Kennedy “detested” JFK can only be proscribed to the workings of a twisted mind. Say what you will about the Kennedy’s politics and historical legacy, but that family was about as close, loyal and loving to each other as one ever gets.

Thomas Rush

Orange, Calif.

To the Editor:

In his review of Ronald Steel’s “In Love With Night,” the perverse knee-jerk cynicism of Gary Indiana’s claim that RFK “accomplished almost nothing in the real world” is repellently stupid.

Hours of White House tapes of Cuban missile crisis strategy sessions recorded JFK’s political and military advisors insisting that we must invade Cuba. They didn’t know that the Russians had tactical nuclear weapons in place to repel any invasion attempt--which would have killed tens of thousands of troops, almost surely triggering a nuclear counterattack.

With RFK’s cool-headed support and creative counsel, the president resisted his advisors’ sincerely impassioned arguments and managed to craft an ingenious behind-the-scenes deal to end the most perilous showdown in the history of the planet.

RFK not only accomplished much in the real world, he helped save it from thermonuclear war.

Roses Prichard

Los Angeles, Calif.

Gary Indiana replies:

Rush is correct about two factual errors in my review, which were the result of a transposition of numbers in a quick rereading of Steel’s paragraphs: Bobby and Ethel had 11, not 13, children. The point that these were two more than Joe and Rose had remains true. Bobby was indeed a senator for 3 1/2 undistinguished years, rather than 10 undistinguished months. These are fact-checking mistakes and do not reflect a deep, misguided conviction about Bobby’s fecundity or his tenure in elected office.

Of Rush’s other points, let me say that if I do not, in fact, happen to share his apparent infatuation with the warm and wonderful Kennedys, it is also the case that most of what he is pleased to characterize as my personal animus is merely my synopsis of Steel’s argument. Some of Rush’s objections are semantical. As even partisan biographers have noted, Bobby was infuriated that the title of chief aide went to Cohn rather than himself, but his role as minority counsel was virtually the same job--that is, chief aide to Joseph McCarthy.

As anyone familiar with the vast literature on the Kennedy era will recognize, Rush’s nonnumerical assertions are not matters of fact but of interpretation. His views can be confirmed by a hundred sympathetic accounts and refuted by a hundred unsympathetic ones. Whether Joseph P. Kennedy was technically, indictably a bootlegger, or simply a ruthless, philandering, money-grubbing social climber who rigged the booze trade with Mafia help during Prohibition, pro-Nazi or merely, meretriciously, soft on Germany during its Nazi period, regretful or unfazed about ordering his daughter’s lobotomy (and surely the point, here, would be the lobotomy and not how Joe Kennedy felt about it afterward) is quite beside the point of Steel’s book, and my review of it, that is, that the symbolic figures of history function almost independently of, often contrarily to, the prosaic details of their actual lives.

Pritchard does raise an interesting factoid, again a matter of densely tangled dispute, regarding Bobby’s role in the Cuban Missile Crisis. In many accounts, Bobby’s initial advice was far from “cool,” but as it happens, even Steel credits Bobby with much of the back-channel resolution of the crisis. Others dispute this. Bobby may well have saved us from thermonuclear annihilation. (I did, after all, write that he’d accomplished almost nothing.) Yet whatever the case, it doesn’t affect Steel’s hypothesis that Bobby’s supporters in 1968 responded to his symbolic and charismatic qualities rather than a record of tangible accomplishments, since they would have known nothing about the then still-secret history of the Cuban Missile Crisis.