David Nasaw, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York: Penguin, 2012), 896 pp., $40.00.

THE PATRIARCH is a thorough and balanced biography that illuminates American public policy from the time of Herbert Hoover to the brief era dominated by the subject’s sons. David Nasaw, an accomplished writer, explores all of the controversial high points of Joseph Kennedy’s career meticulously, and the record is usefully set straight in many places. For the most part, the narrative is absorbing.

It is well-known that Kennedy’s father and father-in-law were prominent Irish Boston figures. It is less widely known that his father, Patrick J. Kennedy, a prosperous financier, gave him an upbringing similar to what upper-middle-class Protestant East Coast families generally provided, including Boston Latin School and Harvard. Joseph Kennedy made no bones of the fact that he did not see it as his role to fight “for the British” during World War I, although he seems to have been too pugnacious a character to have believed that the United States should accept passively the German submarine sinkings of American merchant ships on the high seas. He was no pacifist, as he amply demonstrated after Pearl Harbor, and was certainly not a coward. But Kennedy used political connections to obtain a draft-exempt position in the ship-building industry after America’s entry into the Great War.

After the war, Kennedy joined a Boston merchant bank, Hayden Stone, and largely fulfilled his early ambition of cracking the Boston Brahmin financial establishment. Previously, he had been head of the Columbia Trust Bank, where his father was a director and substantial shareholder. He took this company over as almost a private bank for his stock and investment plunging at Hayden Stone. Kennedy proved a preternaturally agile investor and was almost always successful in generating gains, yet not always with complete probity. Though well established at Hayden Stone, Kennedy saw that he would never be entirely accepted. As the Roaring Twenties began in earnest on Wall Street and across the land, he shifted his sights to the immensely larger New York financial market.

Kennedy soon saw that motion pictures were a growth industry, chronically mismanaged by fly-by-night impresarios who knew nothing of administrative economies, whatever their talents at cinematic artistry and marketing. It also was a glamorous industry. He set out to achieve fame and fortune and accomplished no less. He began with film distribution in New England but quickly moved on to industry-wide arrangements and production. “Joseph P. Kennedy Presents” became a familiar tag on film credits, and Kennedy helped amalgamate several film houses in the manner of new industries that consolidate swiftly.

Nasaw estimates that Kennedy quintupled his net worth between 1926 and 1929—to perhaps $30 million in today’s money. Using his own trust company to make loans to himself (a bold but perfectly legal move), Kennedy bought a growing number of movie theaters and soon took control of the Film Booking Offices of America, Keith-Albee-Orpheum, Pathé Films and First National Corporation. He also conducted extensive negotiations with David Sarnoff of Radio Corporation of America. Then he withdrew from them profitably as they consolidated into Radio Keith Orpheum (RKO).

Despite his ostentatious Roman Catholicism, Kennedy was proud of his extensive sex life and his many attractive companions—including, over decades, legions of assistants, secretaries, masseuses and even young female golf caddies. But in Hollywood, he was able to fish greedily in the pool of starlets and aspirants to stardom. Here Nasaw strays into the swirling waters of surmise and mind reading. He assumes Kennedy’s Catholicism actually enabled him to commit such egregious serial infidelities against the mother of his nine children. Nasaw asserts this theory through the memoirs of Gloria Swanson, one of the greatest and sexiest stars of the 1930s, with whom Kennedy had a torrid affair, notorious in Hollywood but studiously ignored by his wife, Rose, who professed not to notice. Nasaw does effectively debunk, by barely referring to it, the Swanson allegation that Boston’s cardinal William O’Connell, a notoriously imperious and abrasive man, attempted to order Swanson to desist from the relationship.

Swanson broke rather angrily with Kennedy and accused him of exploiting her financially. But before that, Kennedy combined his romantic and industrial ambitions in setting himself up as Swanson’s producer and financial adviser. He cast her as the lead in a new film by Hollywood’s most temperamental director, Erich von Stroheim, a “self-destructive madman.” It was shut down midshoot after more than a million dollars had been wasted on it. Kennedy then cast Swanson in the 1929 film The Trespasser, which premiered in Europe very successfully. Afterward, Joe and Rose Kennedy joined Gloria and members of both families on the return ocean passage to New York. Kennedy lavished copious attention on Swanson while Rose, expecting their ninth child (Edward), stayed above it all.

Kennedy flourished in the Depression. He was a pessimist except on the question of his own ability to succeed, and he recognized that America’s prosperity in the late 1920s was uneven and that the stock market was overbought. He sold shares and assets and was largely liquid and nearly debt free when the crash came.

David Nasaw does usefully debunk two Kennedy financial legends: One was that he had made a great financial score on Yellow Cab Company and the original Hertz rent-a-car business. He did moderately well, but John Hertz declined his offer to invest heavily in the car-rental venture. Nasaw also disposes of the malicious canard that Kennedy was a bootlegger during Prohibition. But like many others, Kennedy foresaw the end of the Prohibition folly, which effectively delivered one of the country’s greatest industries into the hands of organized crime. He secured large stocks of premium Scotch and exclusive importing arrangements, founded Somerset Importers and collected huge profits. Kennedy also led a syndicate that included Walter Chrysler, the automobile manufacturer, and the investment banks Kuhn, Loeb Co. and Lehman Brothers. Together they bought large quantities of stock in Libbey-Owens-Ford, an auto-glass manufacturer, and wash-traded huge volumes of stock among themselves while promoting the outright fraud that their company was related to Owens-Illinois, which made glass bottles and presumably would profit from repeal of Prohibition. It was brazen and cynical, but these “pump and dump” activities didn’t include the filing of written misrepresentations. Hence, it wasn’t illegal.

Kennedy’s departure from Pathé Films after it ran into trouble was a case study in the use of insider information. Kennedy arranged the takeout of his own stock in the company, which flattened the interest of uninformed minority shareholders. Then he short sold the stock as the company collapsed into the hands of Kennedy’s buyer, RKO. When he appeared at the subsequent shareholders’ meeting, according to the New York Times, “heavily armed private detectives were unable to preserve order,” although they did prevent physical violence. Kennedy was greeted with epithets but remained relatively unfazed. He short sold other stocks, but he also bought, as long-term investments, shares and other assets that he believed had been sold down to the point of being underpriced in the panic and distress. According to Nasaw, Kennedy’s net worth rose steadily through the Depression, even as deflation flattened values.

LIKE MOST Boston Irish, Kennedy was a Democrat, but he did not support New York’s Irish Catholic governor Alfred E. Smith when he ran for president in 1928 against Republican Herbert Hoover. Kennedy viewed Smith as a clownish Irish pol, rather like four-term Boston mayor James Michael Curley (once elected from a jail cell). This was an unjust rap on Smith. True, he had a broad Lower East Side accent and left school at age ten, but he was a reform governor and scrupulously honest. Kennedy identified with the educated and modern engineer and businessman, Hoover, who had distinguished himself distributing aid in war-ravaged Europe and engineering big projects in China. But Kennedy became concerned during the Depression that the economic and social problems of America were so serious that the United States could blow up in social discord. He had respected Franklin D. Roosevelt from a distance in World War I, noting that he was completely without religious prejudice as he led the pro-Smith faction in the Democratic Party at the 1924 and 1928 conventions. Kennedy saw a necessity for some radical adjustments to avoid complete catastrophe, while Hoover offered nothing but reinforcement of failure.

In this, Kennedy showed far more prescience than most businessmen, who harrumphed and quavered in their clubs, quoting the Bible, Mother Hubbard and Dickens about the immutability of the economic cycle. The Roosevelt-Kennedy relationship was strange. Kennedy had the Midas touch but was completely inept politically; Roosevelt, an unsuccessful financial dabbler, was the all-time heavyweight champion of electoral politics in the democratic world. Writes Nasaw: “What is remarkable about their relationship is how adept Roosevelt was at getting from Kennedy what he needed and how regularly he would resist giving much back.” This was part of Roosevelt’s genius and ultimately extended even to Churchill and Stalin. Kennedy never understood it.

Throughout his thirteen-year career as presidential candidate and president, Roosevelt needed only two things from Kennedy—to help persuade publisher and media owner William Randolph Hearst to abandon the spoiling candidacy of House Speaker John Nance Garner of Texas at the 1932 Democratic convention; and to soothe the Irish Americans while FDR gave all aid “short of war” to Britain as he ran for a third term in 1940.

Roosevelt had succeeded Smith as governor of New York and supplanted him as the leading Democratic candidate for the presidency after Smith’s 1928 defeat. The Democrats required a two-thirds convention majority to nominate a presidential candidate, and Hearst, by promoting the Garner candidacy, denied Roosevelt that majority.

Hearst was a militant isolationist who generally preferred the Germans to the British. Because he suspected Roosevelt (with some reason) of being an internationalist, he fluffed up the Garner candidacy, although Garner himself had no interest in the nomination. Roosevelt inched toward the two-thirds majority he needed through the third ballot, but his famous campaign managers, Louis McHenry Howe and James A. Farley, had no more delegates to bring over.

Kennedy had struck up a cordial relationship with Hearst in his Hollywood days and succeeded in getting through his switchboard at San Simeon. He persuaded Hearst to release Garner from the spoiling campaign in exchange for Garner getting the vice presidential slot. Garner got the vice presidency, which he later described as “not worth a bucket of warm piss.” Thus was Roosevelt nominated in a political climate that almost guaranteed his election, given the magnitude of the Depression.

KENNEDY’S PUBLIC career, though it had its moments, was a crushing disappointment, only ameliorated in his old age by the rise of his sons. On the first of Roosevelt’s railway campaign trips, Kennedy’s bonhomous talents as raconteur and his political largesse made him popular with some of Roosevelt’s entourage, while his insidious, swashbuckling self-promotion raised hackles with others. Roosevelt won by over seven million votes, and he didn’t need Kennedy to pad his majority.

Kennedy possessed administrative talents, as he had shown in the film industry and would demonstrate again soon. His gamecock aggressiveness and tendency to feel exploited or under-recognized served him well at trading, where he kept his eyes open and his guard up. But he lacked the self-confidence of a great leader. Roosevelt was an American aristocrat who spoke French and German, the cousin and nephew-in-law of a beloved president, connected to the Astors, Belmonts and Vanderbilts. As he said of the polio that afflicted him in his young adulthood, “If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your toe, after that anything would seem easy.”

Roosevelt’s intuition of the tides and currents of popular opinion were as demiurgic as, and much more complicated than, Kennedy’s shrewdness as an investor. He had the confidence of the well-born and much-loved only child, amplified by having overcome his terrible affliction and having achieved immense political popularity. He was an enigma. As one of his vice presidents, Henry Wallace, said: “No one knows him.” His sometime assistant secretary of treasury and of state, Dean Acheson, said Roosevelt ruled like a monarch—not a bourgeois British monarch but a Bourbon—by a combination of divine right, natural aptitude and popular will. “He called everyone by his first name and made no distinction between the secretary of state and the stable boy.” His successor, Harry Truman, said of FDR: “He was the coldest man I ever met. He didn’t give a damn personally for me or you or anyone else. . . . But he was a great President.”

Joe Kennedy was not equipped to deal with such a man—charming to everyone but revealing to no one. In the administration’s early days, Kennedy fumed to Roosevelt’s entourage about not being offered a job, then sent the president obsequious messages suggesting his inauguration “seemed like another resurrection,” as he put it in one letter. Roosevelt, on the other hand, read Kennedy exactly—a rich man who thought his commercial acumen could be transposed into other fields, convinced he could buy anything and anyone (starting with the president’s avaricious son James). It was the meeting of a guileless, hypersensitive, ethnic outsider and striver with an unfathomably enigmatic, overpowering national ruler and political magician. Kennedy never realized what and whom he was dealing with; Roosevelt knew precisely whom he was manipulating.

Finally, the call came in the summer of 1934. Roosevelt found himself less concerned about the feckless Republicans than about the rabble-rousing splinter groups led by Louisiana boss Huey P. Long, radio priest Charles E. Coughlin and the retirees’ pied piper, Francis Townsend. Thus, he created the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to round up the millions who were convinced that shady stock-market practices, false prospectuses and crooked trading had brought on the Depression. He viewed Kennedy as someone who knew all the financial tricks but was an unambiguous capitalist and no apologist of the pre-crash ancien régime. It was an astute appointment. As Roosevelt disarmingly explained to an incredulous reporter: “Set a thief to catch a thief.”

Nasaw exaggerates the crisis in financial markets at the time of Kennedy’s installation. Of the approximately seventeen million unemployed at the time of Roosevelt’s inauguration, about five million had been rehired by the private sector and seven million put to work in the New Deal workfare programs that built what would today be called infrastructure (Lincoln Tunnel, Triborough Bridge, Chicago waterfront, Tennessee Valley Authority) and conservation projects. The rest were at least receiving direct unemployment compensation, and the stock market had risen by more than 100 percent from its early 1933 low. Kennedy’s task wasn’t really, as Nasaw writes, to restore confidence in investors, though there was an aspect of that; it was to satisfy people that the markets functioned honestly and that the administration was not hostile to business.

It is a moot point whether the United States would have been better off without the monster the SEC has become, meddling and indicting in all directions and terrorizing the liver out of people throughout the economic system. But Kennedy staffed the commission with able people, ran it fairly and efficiently, and gave it a good launch. He retired in autumn 1935, and everyone agreed he had acquitted himself with distinction. He also entertained lavishly in Washington, previewing Hollywood movies after dinner. The president himself often enjoyed and reciprocated his hospitality.

In early 1937, Roosevelt gave Kennedy the chairmanship of the derelict Maritime Commission, saddled with protectionism, uncontrollable employment costs and a history of regulatory zeal. Kennedy studied the situation, then prepared an excellent report on what should be done to fix the U.S. merchant-shipping industry. Thus did he master another difficult assignment. Now he was ready for the real payoff, earned for his enthusiastic backing of the New Deal in a business community that generally felt threatened by it.

Roosevelt fully understood Kennedy’s mercurial personality and his delusions of aptitude for higher office. Some in his entourage blanched at the thought of rewarding Kennedy, but Roosevelt argued that sending him to London as ambassador would get him out of the way and dampen his unceasing maneuvering and backbiting. Besides, it would be a refreshing change of pace for the staid Court of St. James, which exasperated Roosevelt with its tendency to appease Hitler, as reflected in the diplomacy of prime ministers Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain.

But Roosevelt underestimated the extent to which Kennedy would tuck himself in with the Chamberlain coterie and become a witless dupe of the appeasers—and indirectly of Hitler. It was one of the most catastrophic appointments in U.S. diplomatic history (rivaled by his almost simultaneous nomination of the Stalin bootlicker Joseph E. Davies to Moscow). Roosevelt got more than he bargained for when he sent Joe Kennedy to London in March 1938.

THE PUGNACIOUS Irishman arrived just before the German Anschluss of Austria, and he fell in at once with the British government’s appeasement policy. Kennedy made himself the spokesman for the most absurd notions: German economic conditions required expansion; only an enlargement of American trade could avert war; Chamberlain’s desertion of Czechoslovakia was “a masterpiece.”

Kennedy told the incoming German ambassador, Herbert von Dirksen, as he had told his predecessor, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that he understood completely Germany’s concern with Jews and that Jewish influence in the media was responsible for Germany’s hostile press in America. According to Dirksen’s diplomatic cables, Kennedy said Hitler’s “ideas in the social and economic field which were responsible for such extraordinary achievements in Germany, would be a determining influence on the economic development of the United States.” Kennedy soon was sending cables to Washington predicting America would have to enact fascist economic controls; far from considering Roosevelt too economically interventionist, he was soon predicting American corporatism. He had no more economic moorings than he had any notion of geopolitical reality. He became preoccupied with the danger of war to the safety of his sons. He sent a weekly newsletter to various prominent Americans, including Walter Lippmann, William Randolph Hearst, columnist Drew Pearson, his paid mouthpiece Arthur Krock, and various isolationist journalists and senators in which he poured out his preemptive grovelings to Hitler. Nasaw records: “It was apparent now, six months into his tenure, that Joseph P. Kennedy was unfit to serve as ambassador.”

Kennedy was like a hyperactive child, never content to let events take their course. When Chamberlain and his foreign minister, Lord Halifax, decided to take a harder line, Kennedy briefly got in step. He invited the Lindberghs, who were living in Germany, to London and commissioned a report from Charles Lindbergh on the effects of war. Lindbergh produced a hair-raising forecast of utter aerial devastation of Britain. At a dinner at the Astors’ splendid Cliveden estate attended by Chamberlain, Kennedy read a letter from Germany from his son Joseph. When he finished, wrote fascist sympathizer Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Kennedy looked “like a small boy, pleased and shy . . . like an Irish terrier wagging his tail.” When Chamberlain and Halifax veered back to appeasement as the Czech crisis reached its climax, Roosevelt had to veto Kennedy’s request that one of the prime minister’s defeatist addresses be broadcast directly to the United States.

Only a few weeks after the Munich summit meeting between Chamberlain and Hitler, a Polish Jew in France murdered an official of the German embassy in Paris. Hitler and his spokesmen unleashed the horrible pogrom of Kristallnacht (the night of the broken glass), in which scores of Jews were murdered, thousands were imprisoned and hundreds of synagogues were burned. Roosevelt, who had called for the “quarantine” of the world’s dictators a year before, pulled the U.S. ambassador to Germany, and Hitler withdrew his from Washington just before he was expelled.

As Hitler propelled Europe toward war, Kennedy torqued himself up to lurid political fantasies: the United States would have to adopt a fascist economic model. He badgered Arthur Krock to get the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to call him as a witness, as he considered himself an expert on European affairs. After Hitler seized Prague and all Bohemia in March 1939, Chamberlain and Halifax abandoned appeasement and unilaterally guaranteed they would defend Poland, but Kennedy took the failed policy to new depths. He proposed to the British and American governments that Hitler be offered cash incentives not to attack his next target, Poland.

He explained to Lippmann in June 1939 that the Royal Navy was “valueless” because the German air force could sink it, after effortlessly brushing aside the Royal Air Force. When the Nazi-Soviet pact was concluded, Kennedy begged Roosevelt to urge Poland to negotiate with Hitler, as if that could have accomplished anything. He was clearly in a delusional state.

Fortunately, Roosevelt paid no attention to any of it. He had known from the beginning that it would come to war with Hitler, that Germany was too strong for France, that appeasement would almost certainly fail and that civilization could only be saved by the United States, preferably after Germany was immersed in the morass of Russia, with Japan in the morass of China.

Kennedy was now a virtual mental case. On September 30, 1939, he wrote the president three letters saying that Britain could not be saved and wasn’t worth saving, and that it had only gone to war to save its colonies (which Germany didn’t want). Neither the moral nor strategic implications of the war were remotely comprehensible to him. Roosevelt had a raving fascist sympathizer in his embassy in London. But he was secretly planning to break a tradition as old as the Republic and run for a third term, and so he had to keep Kennedy in place and out of the domestic debate. Roosevelt couldn’t deal with Chamberlain, so he spoke with the British ambassador, first Ronald Lindsay and then Lord Lothian, and struck up direct communications with the returned head of the navy, Winston Churchill, whom he had not liked when they met in World War I but now embraced as someone who would carry the fight to Hitler. (His initial message to Churchill purported to thank him for a hitherto unacknowledged book Churchill had sent him—seven years before.) Kennedy, in what Roosevelt described as “typical asinine Joe Kennedy letters,” urged that America fight in its own backyard. Roosevelt understood it was better to stop the enemy, using the forces of other countries, on the far sides of the Atlantic and Pacific.

On May 20, 1940, with Churchill (a warmonger and a drunkard, in Kennedy’s view) now prime minister and with Germany slicing through France, Kennedy wrote Rose: “My God how right I’ve been in my predictions.” Of course, it all turned, and he soon resented the prowess of the Royal Air Force and Churchill’s eloquence, seeing them as somehow increasing the likelihood of U.S. involvement in war. He was at this point, as Nasaw rightly summarizes, “exhausted, lonely, frightened, bitter, and self-pitying.” He claimed to believe that if he had been allowed to meet Hitler, he could have worked it out. Kennedy’s private plan was to take over Canada, Mexico and Central America militarily and impose a fascist dictatorship in the United States, though he shared this brainwave only with himself in his private notes.

Roosevelt played a supremely deft hand, resupplying the British Army by executive authority after the Dunkirk evacuation, selling his policy of all aid short of war, insisting the best way to stay out of war was to keep the British and Canadians in it, engineering a bogus draft of himself for a third term as president, lending Britain fifty destroyers and instituting the first peacetime conscription in American history. Nasaw presents this gripping drama well, though there are a few irritating lapses, such as the references to Sir Alexander Cadogan as a lord and the resuscitation of the hackneyed myth that Hitler deliberately allowed the escape at Dunkirk by holding back two armored divisions. As the Blitz opened in September 1940, Kennedy bet one of his officials that “Hitler will be in Buckingham Palace in two weeks.”

Kennedy was desperate to leave his post and spent much of his time in the British countryside, out of harm’s way. He was now despised by the British for wailing that Britain was finished and that Roosevelt was insane and incompetent. He let it be known to friends in the administration that he had written an inside account of Roosevelt’s dealings with the British government, for release if he were not back in America before the election—an act of gross insubordination, as well as a falsehood, as he didn’t know the full inside story. He believed the presence of the Labour Party in Churchill’s coalition showed that socialism, and therefore Nazism, was “budding up so fast that these fellows don’t recognize it.”

KENNEDY FINALLY returned to America, arriving just a few days before the election. Roosevelt cleverly invited Joe and Rose to the White House without any press involvement. When they met, the president adhered to his practice of ignoring the vast accumulation of Kennedy’s insolences and disloyalties and told him that all his problems were due to the “officious” people in the State Department, whom he would clean out as soon as the election was over. There is some dispute about what was said next; only Roosevelt, Joe and Rose Kennedy, Senator James Byrnes and the president’s assistant, Missy LeHand, were present. But there seems little doubt that Roosevelt warned, obliquely or explicitly, that Kennedy’s sons would have no future in the Democratic Party if Kennedy defected at this point. Kennedy gave a speech for Roosevelt three nights later and paid for it himself. Though not effusive, it was an unambiguous endorsement. Roosevelt was reelected comfortably enough, whereupon Kennedy went public with his crusade against the war and his assertion that Britain was washed up. He even gave a three-hour anti-Semitic harangue to a largely Jewish movie-industry audience in Hollywood. He retired as ambassador and did not return to England until after the war. If he had just behaved like a normal diplomat, with any idea of the moral forces at issue in the war and the real strategic balance, he could have served through the war, gained great distinction and possibly have even been the vice presidential candidate in 1944 or 1948.

He didn’t break openly with Roosevelt personally, but he wasn’t relevant anymore, and Roosevelt paid no attention to him. As Nasaw accurately states:

He had never been able to accept the reality that being an “insider” meant sacrificing something to the team. His sense of his own wisdom and unique talents was so overblown that he truly believed he could stake out an independent position for himself and still remain a trusted and vital part of the Roosevelt team.

After Pearl Harbor, Kennedy grandly telegrammed Roosevelt: “I’m yours to command.” Roosevelt ignored him. Kennedy, believing Roosevelt had provoked Hitler into war, now made a specialty of being abrasive and obnoxious to the great officeholders he met. Kennedy’s latest crusade, which began shortly after the war, was against any attempt to combat communism in Europe. He was as faithful a dupe to Stalin as he had been to Hitler, and he fatuously debated with Truman and Eisenhower as he had tried unsuccessfully to do with Roosevelt. He had no notion of or respect for the greatness of any of them, or of Churchill, only a chippy sense of his own right to know better.

Nasaw gives him too much credit for starting a “great debate” over postwar involvement in Europe and East Asia. It wasn’t much of a debate, and Kennedy didn’t contribute much to it. He never grasped that Hitler was incompatible with Western civilization, that a rampant Nazi Germany was a mortal threat to the United States and that Roosevelt had made the United States the supreme power in the world while Stalin took 95 percent of the casualties in fighting Hitler. America’s prewar rivals—Germany, Britain, Japan, France and Italy—were all docile American allies now, and functioning democracies.

KENNEDY RETAINED his genius for profit and invested intelligently, including in America’s largest building after the Pentagon, the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. It must be said that his most endearing characteristic was his devotion to his children. He was always accessible and concerned, never overly stern or too busy for them. Nasaw believably explains that Kennedy acted reasonably in ordering a lobotomy for his mentally handicapped daughter Rosemary in 1942. When it failed, he was horribly upset and even more so by the deaths of his eldest son Joe Jr., heroically in a 1944 bombing mission, and his universally liked daughter Kathleen, in an air accident in 1948. He made prodigious efforts to assist his surviving sons in their political careers, getting John F. Kennedy’s books “edited,” published and excerpted, financially assisting James Curley back into city hall to open up for Jack the congressional district that had once been held by Rose’s father and contributing tangibly to the effort to keep Joseph R. McCarthy out of Massachusetts when JFK ran for the Senate there in 1952. He had been egregiously tolerant of McCarthy, a red-baiting grandstander who sought to attach the communist label to Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and General George C. Marshall—four of America’s greatest statesmen. The third Kennedy son, Bobby, was McCarthy’s assistant committee counsel for six months.

He contributed generously to his son’s presidential campaign and was a member of the strategy committee. But he did nothing indicating JFK was not his own man. The author suggests John Kennedy shared some of his father’s reservations about overreaching for the defense of Europe, but he soon got over those. This book is not a history of that campaign, but it does pass rather swiftly over the extent of Nixon’s potential grievances. There is little doubt that Illinois—won by Kennedy by less than nine thousand votes out of nearly five million cast, with many ballots missing—was stolen; nor that Nixon won the popular vote, if the votes in Alabama had been allotted fairly between Kennedy and the splinter southern Democrat, Senator Harry Byrd. The many other very close states, including Texas, are not referred to specifically, and the election was really a toss-up. Nixon had a right to contest it, and he deserves credit for not forcing the issue.

Joseph Kennedy, turbulent soul that he was, felt that too few Roman Catholics had voted for his son in 1960 and too many Protestants had voted against him because of his religion. Yet he was rightly jubilant at being father of a U.S. president.

In 1962, Kennedy suffered a stroke that left him half paralyzed, wheelchair-bound and unable to speak. He became a prisoner in his own body, much as his daughter Rosemary was. His thoughts on the assassination of his son can only be imagined, and the similar fate that befell Robert Kennedy nearly five years later finished the father, who died on November 18, 1969, aged eighty-one.

Next to his love of his children, his most admirable quality was his appreciation of classical music. He was a congenial companion and a fine-looking, nattily dressed man. But he excelled only at financial speculation and administration. Apart from his talents as a sire and parental provider and motivator, he was an improbable person to earn the title of this book. And his family, as Marlene Dietrich’s daughter said, all had “smiles that never ended.” They scarcely seem to merit the crazed idolatry they have received. But, thanks to the patriarch, they were numerous, tremendously ambitious, wealthy and led eventful lives. It was really only a dynasty for the decade of the 1960s, a glamorous and tragic meteor of a family that fleetingly brightened the sky of America and then passed on. They were not brilliant exactly, but they were attractive and energetic and remarkable, though only JFK and his wife Jacqueline would qualify as classy. But the thought of what the Kennedys were and might have become lingers yet, and will for a long time.

Conrad Black is chairman emeritus of The National Interest as well as a columnist and biographer of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. His latest book is A Matter of Principle (Encounter Books, 2012). He was chairman of the London Daily Telegraph from 1987 to 2004 and is a member of the British House of Lords.

Pullquote: The Kennedys were really only a dynasty for the decade of the 1960s, a glamorous and tragic meteor of a family that fleetingly brightened the sky of America and then passed on.Image: Essay Types: Book Review