The Many Faces of Joseph P. Kennedy V

Countrycelebrants,

February opens.  Leaves have started dropping around the live oaks.  The earth creaks on its axis.

I am especially appreciative of the responses I keep gettting, even the occasional challenges.  One friend wrote back recently:  "Your quest for truth and attention to myth-busting detail are very refreshing.  Being something of a contrarian myself, your point of view is very refreshing to read."

Obviously, I liked that.  My one hesitation centered on the word "contrarian."  The truth is, it has never been my intention to pound away on the conventional interpretation of any public event except where a constant barrage of new evidence makes such a reading more and more incomprehensible. In time the accumulation of detail and fresh information erodes the established version.  For example, by now even such a spokesman for the Kennedy family as Robert Kennedy, Jr. has come forward to the press and conceded that he -- and, more surprising, his father before him -- had come to believe that there were several gunmen in Dealey Plazy -- i.e., there was a conspiracy, as I projected in detail in Bobby and J. Edgar. Increasingly, the ragged defenders of the Warren Commission Report are coming through in the media as the badly confused "contrarians," and the much-maligned "conspiracy theorists" are increasingly regarded as the repositories of well-substantiated facts.  Our day is coming, shortly.  See the new Preface to Bobby and J. Edgar in the edition to be published by Basic Books in the fall.

Even more interesting are the current attempts to revise history, to clean it up.  I have dealt in some detail with the effort by David Nasaw in his new biography of Joe Kennedy, The Patriarch, to discredit earlier biographers like myself when we insist that both reliable testimony and official documents repeatedly establish the facts that Kennedy was not only a bootlegger early in his career but maintained an umbilical relationship with top Mob figures throughout his working life.

A number of hard-core liberals can't deal with that, while others, reviewing Bobby and J. Edgar, seem to have a hard time accepting my presentation of Hoover as much more than a cross-dressing monster preoccupied with hounding progressives.  When I pointed out that Hoover probably saved FDR's regime from a hard-right putsch and -- as Morris Dees makes clear in his autobiography -- broke up the Ku Klux Klan, one half-baked reviewer accused me of going "soft on Hoover."  Another contrarian exhibition, a violation of the standard left-wing cliches.  Can't I get anything right?

I found myself skeptical as I was reading Nasaw's biography of Kennedy of the one fault of character Nasaw has been ready to admit:  Joe's alleged anti-Semitism.  The truth is, it would be hard to find a major public figure, especially in Joe Kennedy's generation, whose life was more tangled up with Jewish colleagues, patrons, and, especially toward the end, very close friends.  The financier was heard to boil over regularly with anti-Semitic bromides.  But from his early days dodging the draft as a ship-builder, when he prevailed on Honey Fitz to set him up with Bernard Baruch, the head of Woodrow Wilson's War Production Board, to his sponsorship of the Yiddish-speaking studio heads at Harvard, to his key business collaboration with David Sarnoff, to his deep, autumnal friendship with Carroll Rosenbloom -- many of Kennedy's closest and most durable associations were with Jews.  Arthur Krock, the doyen of The New York Times, was Kennedy's intimate literary collaborator.  They wrote an unpublished book together about Joe's ambassadorship to Great Britain, which I have read.

Simultaneously -- when he became vociferous about the way the Jews had supposedly driven America into war against the Nazis, or out-foxed him in a business deal, or weren't lining up fast enough behind JFK -- Joe gave a lot of offense.  Rose later confided to one of her secretaries that she regarded her husband's tirades against World Jewry as indicative of an oncoming instability.  The next day he would be ranting about joining a synagogue because the Cardinals were also holding back when it came to supporting Jack, or playing golf at his Palm Beach country club -- he was the only non-Jew -- or helping organize an interfaith meeting between prominent Catholic and Jewish leaders to improve fellowship.  Nasaw seems to have missed almost all of that.

So, am I a contrarian because I got into the complex and ambivalent way Joe Kennedy seemed to deal with Jews?  Confused by too many facts, was I insensitive to the prevailing cliche?  Read Bobby and J. Edgar and find out.

Meanwhile, persevere.  The light will continue breaking in the East.

Burton 

The Many Faces of Joseph P. Kennedy IV

Countryconstabulators,

Two weeks, the heart of winter, a siege of the flu -- so epidemic, so unwelcome.  OK now, back in action.

It is probably worthwhile to insert here part of a recent e-mail exchange with Steve Sewall, a Chicago teacher and political activist who is  -- like me -- especially concerned with the media pressure these days to sugarcoat our history.  Steve indicated that "I too resist conspiracies for the very reasons you do and yet, like you, find myself hard pressed not to arrive at the very conclusions you do."

I had written him:  "I've never been much of a conspiracy theorist, preferring to derive my conclusions from the evidence.  But I am now hard pressed not to concede that there is a kind of agreement at work out there in most of the establishment publications and the ever more conglomerated book houses and periodicals to rework history, avoid the hard, internally coherent facts that keep forcing themselves through into any reasonable interpretation of events and substitute a kind of incoherent revisionism, a bland, adoring, heavily censored treatment of the primary figures and their accomplishments and limitations utterly unrelated to the reality of events.  We appear to be sliding into some kind of intellectual totalitarianism in which speech will remain free as long as it conforms with the accepted -- i.e., bought and paid-for -- wisdom of the establishment.  Anybody's hope for tenure or the more respected prizes seems to depend on falling in line.

"I suspect that this process may have begun with the propaganda campaign that led to JFK's presidency.  Joe Kennedy's money produced a series of pumped-up and highly selective treatments of the emerging JFK, which even the harder heads in the Kennedy braintrust -- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Richard Goodwin, etc., both friends of mine -- felt obliged to reflect in their post-administration writings.  The Right was so merciless, and the best of the Kennedy administration's accomplishments were so tenuous, that much of the truth fell victim.  Now, retroactively, we have the utter, shameless revisionism of Nasaw's cliche-riddent apologia, obviously intended to play to a Camelot-smitten reading audience a long way from able to deal with reality.

"One of my regrets here is that Nasaw's travesty only delays the major, incisive, reality-embracing treatment of Joe Kennedy's life for which we have been waiting.  As I attempted to suggest in my three-quarters portrait of the founder in Bobby and J Edgar, Joe was a fascinating player in his time, a driven, ulcer-ridden self-promoter with an astonishing ability to shoulder his way into the center of events.  Harry Truman and Sam Giancana, the ramrod of the Chicago Mob with whom Joe did so much business, summed it up in the same sentence:  'Joe Kennedy is the greatest crook in America.'  To disavow the subterranean level of Kennedy's accomplishments is to miss entirely what happened and why.

"In his office Ted kept a full-length photograph of his father.  The middle-aged Joe Kennedy was standing on a street corner, the collar of his trenchcoat up and his snap-brimmed hat pulled down. This was an operative accomplishing his purposes behind the scenes.  I asked Teddy about the picture once.  'Well,' the senator said, and stopped to consider his words, 'Dad was a fellow--   Dad knew a lot of people.  He had lot of friends, many of whom we knew very little about.'  In time I discovered that Ted was a bit disingenuous.  In West Virginia in 1960 and on other occasions Teddy had been forced to step in and help out a few of these mysterious friends.  But the point was made."

The problem with tracts like Nasaw's version of Joe Kennedy's life is that it has been scrubbed so clean nothing human can survive on its surface.  Typical is Nasaw's treatment of Kennedy's notorious womanizing.  Although Nasaw is willing to admit, obliquely, that Joe did have his women and that Gloria Swanson served while she was useful as Joe's "mistress," the specifics keep getting smudged.  Referring to the visit of Swanson and her husband Henri to the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach, Nasaw writes that "In handwritten notes for her autobiography, Swanson would later claim that while members of Kennedy's entourage took Henri fishing, she and Joe had sex for the first time."  Such private notes, the squeamish Nasaw implies, might or might not reflect reality.  But in her best-selling autobiography itself, Swanson on Swanson, Gloria is a lot more unequivocal -- Kennedy was on her that day "like a roped horse," followed by a premature ejaculation.

My point here is not so much to showcase Joe Kennedy's free-wheeling sex life as to suggest the role Kennedy's conquests played during his rise.  Swanson was Kennedy's ticket into big-star movie-making.  More venturesome biographers than Nasaw have tracked Kennedy's many bed-partners, from Missy LeHand, FDR's durable summer wife, to Clare Booth Luce, the eminent playwright and wife of the most powerful media mogul of the age, perhaps the foremost -- and best paid, by Joe himself  --propagandist by the later fifties for the emerging John F. Kennedy.  The pious Rose Kennedy was uncomfortable enough about Joe's sexual foragings to leave him at one point and return home only when Honey Fitz threw her out and Rose had to bite her lip and crawl back to active motherhood.  She would gradually come to understand that the privileges she craved depended to some extent on Joe's glandular versatility.

As Bobby and J. Edgar specifies in meticulously sourced detail, all this as well is part of the history of the Kennedys.  To leave the human moments out is to desecrate our history.

Stay warm,

Burton Hersh   

The Many Faces of Joseph P. Kennedy III

Countryconsolidators,

Into 2013.  Survived the Mayan apocalypse.  Anticipating spiritual rejuvenation.

For several weeks now I have been gnawing away at the recently published biography of Joe Kennedy by David Nasaw and basing my observations entirely on the reviews I've run across.  But now I have the book,  I've combed it out pretty well.  I hope my comments are more specifically on point.

First : this is a big book -- 868 pages -- with very small print.  With that much room to run the knowledgeable reader might hope for new information, fresh insights, an expanded sense of this dynamic if compromised paterfamilias.  Sadly, what Nasaw has produced reads like a poorly thought through campaign biography, steering around anything really controversial, anything that might help us understand the accomplishments and miseries of Kennedy's blighted family.  Even the earliest serious treatments of Joe Kennedy's life -- by James MacGregor Burns, by Richard Whalen, by Lawrence Leamer -- went farther, dug deeper and a lot more honestly than this.  It is as if -- from the grave, through his descendants -- Joe Kennedy is still campaigning for respectability.

This book is essentially a paste-up, a sequence of letters and documents culled from research libraries and devoted to bringing alive again a man who never was.  Virtually nothing hands on, no original interviews or breakthrough revelations to give this endless narrative some purpose.  Nasaw dismisses rumors of Kennedy's bootlegging as having originated in "unsubstantiated, usually off-the-cuff remarks" by "Mob figures not particularly known for their truth telling."  By so doing, Nasaw ignores a vast body of evidence pulled together by real researchers and writers like Gus Russo and Kennedy relatives John Davis and Gore Vidal and many others as well as solid, carefully vetted work by Sam Giancana's descendants.  FBI files on Johnny Rosselli and Kennedy himself, which I have copied and sourced in Bobby and J. Edgar, nail all this down.

Nasaw evades dealing with this preponderance of evidence by the -- to me -- unique device of replacing what in most historical works is labeled, simply, "Bibliography," with what he calls "Bibliography of Works Cited."  That way whatever he does not choose to recognize ceases to exist, my own book definitely.  Historically important incidents, like Joe Kennedy's telephone manipulations from poolside on Marion Davies' estate to push Lyndon Johnson onto the ticket with JFK against the preferences of both Jack and Bobby, go completely unremarked.

Nasaw sidesteps Joe Kennedy's physical decline, his prostectomy at 68, and his heartbreaking eight-year involvement with Janet Des Rosiers -- brilliantly reported by Leamer but sloughed off by Nasaw, who refers obliquely to Janet as somebody who "would later claim to have been his mistress since around 1948."  There is the occasional oblique reference to Kennedy's "girls" from time to time;  Nasaw lets that go most of the time, womanizing doesn't seem to have any place in what its publisher bills as Nasaw's "definitive" biography.

Even the quotes are doctored.  When Pat Jackson, a liberal, prepared a statement during the 1960 campaign for Jack to read opposing Joe McCarthy, James McGregor Burns is quoted in Nasaw's book, "..Joseph Kennedy sprang to his feet with such force that he upset a small table in front of him.... 'You and your friends are trying to ruin my son's career!'"  Actually, Burns quoted Kennedy as having said "You and your Sheeny friends are trying to ruin my son's career."  Nasaw left Sheeny out.  The surviving Kennedys probably wouldn't have liked a quote that pungent.

One point reviewers made was that Nasaw did face up to Joe's anti-Semitic outbursts.  But even that was much more complicated than Nasaw is willing to admit.

Next time.

Burton Hersh

The Many Faces of Joseph P. Kennedy II

Countrycalamityseekers,

So here we are, wading through the last few days of 2012.  Christmas is behind us; most of us have survived the Holiday Goose.  Will we be so lucky with the fiscal cliff?

My last blog, in which I questioned the apparent determination of David Nasaw, in his current biography of Joseph P. Kennedy, to maintain that Joe was innocent of any involvement with bootlegging or any of the nastier underworld honchos of his time, has stirred up quite a lot of comment.  Perhaps the shrewdest arrived from Steve Sewall, who cited Nasaw's "categorical denial of Joe K's bootlegging" recently on Chicago Public Television, following which "Nasaw boasts that he was virtually commissioned by the Kennedys to write about Joe: after being 'approached by Jean Kennedy Smith' he had lunch six months later with Senator Kennedy."

The truth is, too many contemporary biographies amount to carefully confected public-relations puff jobs, produced largely to project the image that the supporters or the friends or the heirs of the subject would prefer.  One principle I have always held to in my work is never to permit the people I am writing about to see the result until after the book or magazine piece is out.  I tell my subjects that it is really in their best interest not to go over the manuscript prior to publication -- whatever I say is certain to offend somebody in their world, and, having reviewed the material, they too will be tarred with resentment.  I also tell them that I have enough editors already.  Mostly they attempt to live with this, although they always maintain -- Ted Kennedy was no exception -- that they only hope to pick up on any mistakes before the book goes to press.  I always say no, and usually they can live with the result.
 
The one -- to me -- regrettable exception was Paul Mellon.  Over several years, during which I saw or heard from Mellon every week, we developed a genuine friendship.  Paul was a very graceful and utterly honest individual -- he gave his huge fortune away, mostly through enormous philanthropic endeavors like the East Building of the National Gallery.  He had his human susceptibilities, and -- in keeping with my responsibilities -- I touched on those, observing at one point in The Mellon Family that, like J.P. Morgan, Paul remained devoted to Old Masters and Old Mistresses.  I also took a selective blowtorch to his parents' sticky divorce and some of the deserving Pittsburg relatives.

When the book came out Paul was evidently furious, and vented in an interview in the the Pittsburgh newspapers.  I had abused the extraordinary access he had granted me.  I did not respond.  Then, years later, Paul himself wrote an autobiography, Reflections in a Silver Spoon.  It was a solid book, characteristically adroit, which dealt with many of the same details that upset him when I opened them up. Then he wrote me a letter, admitting that pretty much everything I had dealt with needed to be included, and apologizing for his tantrum at the time.  Still -- foolishly -- miffed, I never wrote him back.

A few years ago Yale gave a banquet in celebration of Paul Mellon's centenary -- he had died eight years earlier.  I was invited.  There were many speeches, but I suspect that of the perhaps one hundred celebrants at that dinner, the shrewd and generous-spirited Englishman who helped Paul assemble his wonderful collection of English art for Yale, John Baskett, and I were the only guests who actually knew the man.  Paul had built a museum for this outstanding collection in New Haven and donated the paintings and drawings and sculptures to the University.

My point here is that the treatment of any important historical subject that is likely to endure is one that is not compromised by prior commitment, implicit or explicit, to the subject of the work.  The heirs are not interested in a vivid depiction of their ancestor -- the last thing they want, as the poet says, is the truth with the bark off.  I would be more than curious about whether Jean Kennedy Smith demanded and got the opportunity to go over and "correct" Nasaw's manuscript before it was published.  Did money change hands?  Apart from the sanitized remains of Joe Kennedy's selected papers in the Kennedy Library, what sources did Nasaw trust?  In Bobby and J. Edgar I worked the entire waterfront, careful to validate whatever I found and key the reader to the authenticity of every source in close to seventy pages, thousands of careful, tightly packed notes.

I haven't gotten to Nasaw's biography yet.  When I do, you will hear.

Warmest wishes for the New Year,

Burton Hersh 
 

The Many Faces of Joseph P. Kennedy

Countrycontentadores,

Again, a trip under the lights for several reviews and commentaries, all suggestive of the fact that what turns up in print is too often a long way from what really happened on the ground.

On The New York Times op-ed page of December 1,  Paul Finkelman compares the unfailingly laudatory treatment of Thomas Jefferson in Jon Meacham's recent, prizewinning biography of the statesman with results derived from the work of Jefferson scholar Henry Wiencek.  Wiencek's research would have it that Jefferson was particularly reactionary when it came to his judgement of blacks, whom he kept enslaved in large numbers, impregnated, refused mostly to liberate in his will, and regarded as no better than children, "pests in society," and "inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind."  Jefferson was, Finkelman concludes, "a creepy, brutal hypocrite."

All this is tough on Jefferson, and surprising to find in The Times.  More relevant to my efforts has been the Times' treatment of the current biography of Joseph P. Kennedy, The Patriarch, by David Nasaw.  A lot of the press Nasaw has been getting revolves around his assertion in essence that Kennedy was not a bootlegger at the start of his career and that he never affiliated himself with the kingpins of organized crime.

Now -- where to start.  Having myself written a long and meticulously researched book -- everything in it is carefully sourced -- that tracks in great detail the history of the Kennedy family, Bobby and J. Edgar (Carroll and Graf, 2007), which focuses especially on how Joe Kennedy's dependence on mob resources and the intervention of major criminal personalities from Al Capone and  Frank Costello to Sam Giancana led to the assassination of John Kennedy, I had to be astonished at Nasaw's conclusions. 

Nasaw makes a great point during interviews that his material was largely derived from unlimited access to the Joseph P. Kennedy papers in the Kennedy library, which -- unsurprisingly -- made little mention of Joe's criminal connections.  Having myself had unlimited access to these same documents, I assure the reader they were mostly, not entirely -- see Joe's exchange of letters with Carroll Rosenbloom, who was heavily mobbed up, here and in Havana  -  well sanitized before innocents like Nasaw got a look. 

But I was also given unlimited access to FBI records on the Kennedy family by J. Edgar Hoover's right-hand man, Deke DeLoach, who remembered well Joe's mob involvement.  Based in the documents alone  many of the cross-connections became apparent.  Experts like Gus Russo helped fill in the gaps, along with individuals involved in Joe Kennedy's practical affairs.  Credible insiders from Peter Maas to Gore Vidal, a shirttail relative of the Kennedys, have spelled a great deal out.  Unmistakably, Joe did have regular arrangements with mob leaders his entire business life, and was in fact a co-owner with Sam Giancana, the gangster who reportedly gave the go-ahead to shoot Jack, of the Cal-Neva Lodge at the time the president got shot.

When Bobby and J Edgar came out a number of the most important Kennedy historians immediately recognized its accuracy.  Richard Whalen, whose seminal biography The Founding Father opened up the subject, wrote that my book constituted "a major contribution" to the Kennedy literature, since my "original research on [Joe's] mob connections and his bootlegging career, among other revelations, shed important new light on this mystery-shrouded subject."  Richard Reeves was generous in his appreciation.  Facts are facts.

Go buy Bobby and J. Edgar yourselves and see what you think.  A new edition, concurrent with the fiftieth anniversary of the shooting of JFK, with a startling new Preface, will be coming out next year,
 courtesy of Basic Books.

Meanwhile, y'all, cheers.  And a Merry Christmas.

Burton Hersh