The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings - A Five-generation History of the Ultimate Irish-Catholic Family [Paperback]

This book is about the apotheosis of an ideal, emanating from the desperation of a people to escape a famine plagued country to the realisation of the highest office in the world. It is of a family whom within a few generations many regarded as royalty.

President Kennedy is the cynosure of our interest. But he is the product of an Irishness that has kept alive the cause of their diaspora largely sustained by their Roman Catholicism.

We are reminded of the potato famine and the callous neglect of the governing superpower.
We read of the unbearable coffin ship Atlantic crossing to Boston of the President’s paternal great grandfather Patrick Kennedy . We witness the dogged spirit of an immigrant people trying to improve their status within a prejudiced bedevilled society, which placed the Irish only slightly above the blacks. The top stratum was the preserve of the ‘Brahmins’ – the heirs to the nation’s Protestant founders, which spawned the WASPish (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) culture.

But the story of the Kennedys is also one of contradiction and ironies. The brilliant patriarch and shrewd entrepreneur Joseph Kennedy was U.S ambassador to the court of King James (1937-1940). His inherited antipathy towards the British made him a staunch isolationist. As someone acutely conscious of the disadvantages of his race and religion, he is nevertheless noted for harbouring anti-semitic prejudices. Some have even said he was a Nazi sympathiser. Yet this devoted father lost his eldest son in combat (needlessly so) over France, and nearly lost his second son in the PT109 incident in the Solomon Islands. A third - his daughter Kathleen (Kick), who was briefly married to then future Duke of Devonshire, died in a plane accident in the Rhone valley in 1948. She is buried at Chatsworth.

Readers might be somewhat surprised how significant the issue of religion featured in the family and political life of the time. Kathleen’s apostasy in marrying into a family with a long history of anti-catholic bias was never really forgiven by her mother, the matriarch Rose Kennedy. So much so she hinted that Kathleen’s death was probably retribution. This no doubt might appear callous. But her stoic invocation of St. Luke’s “ to whom much is given, much will be required” served as a solace for all the family throughout their tragedies.

Next is the contradiction of serial adultery in so religious a family. And the remarkable forbearance of the women, who overlooked their husbands’ indiscretions, including the independent Jackie Kennedy, . All the male members of the Kennedys were overdosed on testosterone. Sometimes they even shared their females. It was once remarked that President Kennedy needed a fresh female each day. But there is some credibility in the suggestion that the large dose of steroids he was given for his chronic pain partly stimulated his sexual appetite.

The President’s public persona was also misleading. He was an ill man in constant pain. He nearly died several times apart from the war. Once when he was very young with scarlet fever, and in 1954 as a result of a spinal operation complicated by his concealed Addison’s disease. The last rites were read on this occasion.
This history truly enlarges the mosaic surrounding the portrait of an outstanding human being . A young leader who made mistakes. A man of intellect transformed by his office into the heroic warrior who risked civilisation itself. A leader of promise - a space frontiersman - prematurely slained. We are poignantly reminded of the lament written on the death of the Irish commander Owen Roe O’Neill:

Sheep without a shepherd when the snow shuts out the sky,
Why did you leave us, Owen? Why, why did you die?

There is much to move us in this book. There’s the powerful symbolism at the President’s funeral of the caparisoned riderless gelding bearing the sheathed sword and reversed boots of a fallen commander . Earlier that year we see this most powerful leader grief stricken and standing alone next to the little white coffin of his prematurely deceased infant son Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. We learn for the first time about Jackie’s depression and suicide inducing moods after the assassination.

But the President’s Churchillian oratory, with its New England cadences, still inspires us. Invoking a spirit of endeavour against real and imaginary obstacles, it encapsulated the American dream for a world-wide audience.

Inevitably this book contains many biographical cul-de-sacs. There is the parallel life of the Kennedys who remained in Ireland. We are intrigued by the Byzantine Pope Pius XII and the reformist Pope John XXIII. There is also a curious insouciant photo of Gerry Adams standing next to the President’s daughter Caroline Kennedy at an award ceremony. Caroline was nearly killed by an IRA bomb in October 1975, which was aimed at the M.P. Hugh Fraser - a Kennedy friend and outspoken critic of terrorism.

On a lighter note I found an amusing typo error on page 350. With reference to JFK attending a dinner, the writer states that JFK decided to attend ‘even though he would be surrounded by the Cardinal’s courtesans’. I suspect the word ‘courtiers’ was meant! But I’m sure JFK would have been delighted either way.