Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 9, 1993 TAG: 9308100054
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
How do you read Joe McGinniss' new biography of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, "The Last Brother," without being overwhelmed by the tempest it has already created?
You try to read it objectively, but it all too quickly becomes apparent that its problems are even greater than anticipated. The book isn't bad; it's awful.
By now, most readers are aware that McGinniss has both inferred thoughts that Kennedy might have had and depended heavily on "The Death of a President," William Manchester's 1967 book about John F. Kennedy.
McGinniss acknowledges as much in an author's note concluding his biography, as well as his reliance on 72 other books he lists in his bibliography, most prominently, as he states, "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys," by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon & Schuster, 1987), and "Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Coverup," by Leo Damore (Regnery, 1988).
In the same author's note, McGinniss cites, as respectable precedents for his imaginary reconstructions, books like Marcia Davenport's biography of Mozart; Simon Schama's history of the French Revolution, "Citizens," and Walter Jackson Bate's biography of Samuel Johnson.
If one were to protest that these subjects have been dead for hundreds of years, whereas Kennedy is still alive, McGinniss would doubtless counter with the argument he implies elsewhere in his author's note: that since the Kennedy myth-making machine has had the same obscuring effect on the truth as death, "a writer must attempt an approach that transcends that of traditional journalism or even, perhaps, of conventional biography."
In blunter words, fight liar with liar.
What a reading of "The Last Brother" reveals is the remarkable lengths to which McGinniss has taken his biographical techniques, and the disappointing payoff, which, to say the least, does not quite justify McGinniss' insouciant gambles.
Writing classes of the future will be richly rewarded by studying the art of inferred hypotheses as wielded in "The Last Brother." My favorite is McGinniss' explanation for what he perceives to be Kennedy's rather sudden marriage to Joan Bennett: "It is true that no child was born the following year, but also true that if Joan had miscarried (and she later had at least three miscarriages, as well as three children), it would not have been a development the ambassador would have publicized."
From this, one is supposed to conclude that because no announcement of a miscarriage was made, Kennedy married Bennett because she was pregnant.
As for imagining thoughts: nothing surpasses the way McGinniss has it both ways trying to read Joseph P. Kennedy's mind long after the former ambassador to the Court of St. James' had lost the ability to communicate because of his stroke:
"Whatever his agonies, they would be locked inside him until death set him free. And whatever his sins, this punishment seemed sufficiently severe: to be forced, every waking hour, to confront the stark fact that his drive for power, glory and freedom from the laws that governed man had been satisfied only through the spilling of his children's blood."
But the area that raises the greatest difficulties in "The Last Brother" is McGinniss' uncritical appropriation of sources. Any rumor that suits his purposes is fair game.
For instance, he cites the speculation by John F. Kennedy's biographer Nigel Hamilton that Joseph P. Kennedy may have sexually abused his daughter Rosemary and thereby caused the emotional disturbance that later led him to have her lobotomized, presumably to remove an embarrassing stain from the family's image.
After balancing this speculation with mention of Goodwin's heated refutation of "any such notion," he hits us ungently with how he imagines Rosemary's sudden disappearance might have affected his subject as a youth:
"In the absence of any assurances to the contrary, it might well have begun to seem to the 9-year-old Teddy that this could be the price of failure within the family: to suddenly cease to exist."
Where McGinniss' indiscriminate use of sources gets him into severe difficulties is in his uncritical embrace of the unproved theory that the Mafia assassinated John F. Kennedy for failing to oust Fidel Castro and revive the mob's criminal stake in Cuba, an obligation that McGinniss says the Kennedys incurred when Joseph P. accepted illegal election help for his son in West Virginia and Illinois.
McGinniss' version of this conspiracy is built out of highly speculative books like John H. Davis' "Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy" (McGraw-Hill, 1989) and Jim Marrs' "Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy" (Carroll & Graf, 1989).
It is knitted together with sentences like the following: "It would not have been out of character for the ambassador, alarmed by the close vote in Wisconsin, to seek the assistance of Giancana and his associates, not only for the West Virginia primary but in the larger campaign that lay beyond," and "It would not have been surprising if the removal from power of Fidel Castro and the reopening of Cuba to those gambling interests were among the subjects discussed."
And what is McGinniss' point in embracing such half-baked history? Not to buttress one conspiracy theory against another, but simply to milk the reader's sympathy for Senator Kennedy.
For in this hyperthyroid version of his life, he has not only been afflicted by a myth of Camelot that he can never live up to; he has also been cursed by the fear of what will happen to him if he tries.
And it provokes one of McGinniss' most spectacular thought inferences, when his subject is considering whether to run for the presidency in 1968, after his brother Robert has been killed: "He knew the time was not right, but he knew also that for him, the time would never be right. Why not just jump in and get it done? Maybe somebody would shoot him and then he, too, could die a hero, like his brothers. Then the family destiny would be complete."
Of course, it all makes for a highly dramatic story, gathering such momentum that it becomes hard for a reader to stop and consider that it simply isn't true. Oh, well; it's the hypertruth.
The sad thing is, the same dramatic points could have been made without so much narrative manipulation. But then, of course, it wouldn't have been so undemanding to read. We might have had to take our thumbs out of our mouths and our blankets away from our ears.
by CNB