Big Daddy

We speak of the Kennedys, en masse and individually, as if they were neighbors who have lived next door to us for years. We are quick to judge as we monitor their comings and going and bear witness to their accomplishments, misdeeds and sorrows. After all, we know them so intimately.

Of course we don’t really, but if it feels that way it is understandable for, as Amanda Smith notes in her introduction to “Hostage to Fortune,” the family has “generated more words than anyone or any phenomenon besides Christ and the War Between the States.” Yet though we have granted his progeny an immediate place in our collective consciousness, the patriarch of the clan, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, has remained an elusive presence. We imagine him in singular terms: as a vote-fixer, an “America first” isolationist, a man who made his fortune manipulating stocks--or was it by selling liquor during Prohibition? And we are not alone for, as Smith says, she was nudged into learning more about her grandfather after a dinner party companion called him a “bootlegger.”

“It struck me as unfortunate that any life, especially one as varied and momentous as his own (however exemplary or contemptible) could be reduced to a single word.” She goes on to say that though, yes, he was indeed a bootlegger, he was also “a father, speculator, film producer, chairman [of both the SEC and the U.S. Maritime Commission], ambassador, appeaser, philanderer, philanthropist and kingmaker.”

Joe Kennedy was each of those things, but to label him as one, or even all, does not begin to describe the man we understand after reading “Hostage to Fortune.” Until now, what we have known about him has been filtered through other peoples’ opinions and conclusions; with “Hostage to Fortune,” we see him as he saw himself. The Joe Kennedy who emerges from his own letters, memos and diary entries--almost all made public here for the first time--is a man who invented himself several times over with a blinders-on determination. He flirts with secretaries, flatters studio heads, cajoles editors and variously tells Franklin D. Roosevelt what he really thinks and what he thinks Roosevelt wants to hear. Kennedy fluctuates between unctuous charm and nail-spitting anger--and everything in between--to get what he wants. He reveals a paper-thin sensitivity to the use of “Irish” as a descriptive term (finding even “joyous Irish laughter” offensive) and an eye that rarely wavers from the bottom line.

As revealing as the letters, memos and diary entries are about Kennedy himself, they simultaneously tell a personal story of the 20th century. The Kennedys were high-perched witnesses and participants in two world wars, the early years of Hollywood, the Depression, the New Deal and the road to Camelot. Their communications feature an impressive cast of characters that includes Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, William Randolph Hearst, Clare Boothe Luce, Louis B. Mayer, J. Edgar Hoover and dozens of other supporting players. Though it may sound facetious to call attention to the footnotes, they are one of Smith’s finest achievements. With pith and accuracy, she unobtrusively guides the reader by identifying literally hundreds of individuals who cross the paths of the family in the course of 50 years. The devil is in the details, and she has conquered them.

Although the cover page reads “Edited by Amanda Smith,” “editing” hardly describes what she has accomplished. As the granddaughter of Joe and daughter of Jean Kennedy Smith, she had unfettered access to the “over 200 linear feet of documents, largely uncataloged and in advanced state of decay” known collectively as “The Joseph P. Kennedy Papers.” Most of these were deposited at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston in the 1970s and formally deeded to the National Archives in 1995 but remained, with rare exception, inaccessible. Smith’s research added many more linear feet of documents to the collection and today, in large part because of her initiative, many of the boxes have been archived and organized and there is a process, albeit a strict one, in place for scholars who wish to study the material.

The collection in “Hostage to Fortune” has been carefully chosen to show the breadth and depth of Kennedy’s activities, and Smith does not stint on including entries that show him in a negative light. She doesn’t veil; she doesn’t blink, and though her own writing is limited to the introductions and chapter openings, it is packed with information and insight, remarkably devoid of bias. The result is an extraordinary accomplishment for a scholar, let alone a relative.

There is no question that much of what Joe Kennedy wrote, particularly as the years progressed, radiates his awareness that history might be looking over his shoulder. Still, filtered by flattery or posterity as some letters are, his diary entries regarding the abdication of King Edward (“Windsor hoped he might get out of being King while he was Duke [sic] of Wales, but never had the courage to discuss it with his father”), his confidential memo to Roosevelt, written in London in September 1939, during the first week Europe was at war (“there is no question that the war is being conducted with eyes constantly on the United States”) and dozens of other on-the-spot reports give a new illumination to the time and the participants. In between, there are jaw-dropping nuggets, like the letter from Kennedy in 1955 telling J. Edgar Hoover he will support him for president “whether you were on a Republican or Democratic ticket” because “I think the United States deserves you” and the one-line missive to Theodore Sorenson noting that in Richard Nixon’s case, the word “experience” is “used to describe a lifetime of mistakes.”

After more than 30 years of being a high-placed player in a number of fields, Kennedy wrote David Sarnoff in 1942 that “my energy from now on will be tied up in [my children’s] careers rather than my own.” Though he added to his fortune with real estate and other deals, Kennedy’s focus did turn more to molding his family’s future, and correspondence from them is laced throughout the volume.

From his wife, Rose, we get the nuts and bolts of family life as well as some luscious bits of gossip (“Callas was at Monte Carlo sitting opposite Onassis and she is said to have had her nose fixed, but it still looked big and homely to me”). Rose loves to travel, but it is clear that her church, her husband and her children are the center of her world. As each child goes out on his or her own, she is frustrated by their seemingly spendthrift ways as well as their failure to keep her informed so she knows which one to blame for the bills that keep coming in. She is proud of Joe and his influence in the world, but on the home front she is the one issuing fiats.

Rose encourages the reporting of everyone’s activities in “round robin letters,” and these are helpful touchstones, but it is the children’s individual letters (each annotated with their age at the time) that reveal outlooks and attitudes we could never get as clearly in other ways. Twenty-four-year-old John’s playful humor and insights come through as he ribs his mother for her “every mixed metaphor and each somewhat split infinitive” and when he chides his sister Kathleen to be careful not to “bum rides on other people’s opinions. It’s lazy at best.”

The hard, cold reality of many of Joe Kennedy’s letters and the documenting style of Rose’s missives are softened and enhanced by the letters written by the children, particularly after they have left home for college, traveling through Europe and World War II. The intensity, generosity, curiosity and optimism expressed by Joe Jr., John and Kathleen paint the possibilities of a wide-open future. Of course the reader, unlike the writers of these letters, knows what will happen next, and that reality hovers over each page, never more poignantly than when reading the letters of Joe Jr. and Kathleen (“Kick”) Kennedy, who both died in their 20s. Their letters present two remarkable human beings who use thought and caring in both their words and their actions. They wear their hearts on their pens as their letters reflect a time when concentrated thought went into written communication, so different from the quick phone calls or typo-laden e-mails of today.

The title “Hostage to Fortune” comes from a radio broadcast Joseph Kennedy gave in 1940 urging Roosevelt’s election to a third term, wherein he describes his children as “nine hostages to fortune.” A more telling, if less florid, title might have been “The Portable Joe Kennedy” or “A Kennedy Family Sampler”; it is impossible to read this book and conclude that Joe Kennedy was anyone’s hostage.

The self-created, multifaceted man presented here is a complex bundle of attributes and accomplishments. The good, the bad, the brutal, the generous, the desperate, the self-righteous, the astute, the incisive, the conniving and the spiritual are all jostled together on these pages. No life can be conclusively reconstructed, but “Hostage to Fortune” comes closer than we have seen in a long while and, because of it, no one will have an excuse to reduce Joseph Kennedy to being just “a bootlegger” again. Uncluttered by secondary excuses or analysis, “Hostage to Fortune” opens a unique window on history.