The Last Brother. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 20, 1993 by Jacob Cohen

Aware of the fusillade of abuse that has been aimed at this latest book about the Kennedys, I approached it cautiously, hoping, frankly, to find in it some redeeming features, if only out of sympathy for an author who had captured me in the past and now seemed to be the victim of an ambush. Even a thrice-familiar tale, well retold, can be instructive (I was prepared to say).

Alas, the book is simply awful: sinfully second-hand; juvenile, rhetorically and psychologically; grossly overweight; noxious in its invention of purported thoughts and motives; sneaky in its evasions of responsibility for outrageous insinuations; ignorant; and, more than occasionally, ridiculous.

Mr. McGinniss seems to have learned exactly nothing beyond what he has repeated from other people's books and has mislearned some of that. (He doesn't even know, for example, what time President Kennedy was assassinated - it was 12:30, not 12:40.) Much has been made of his unattributed borrowings and his unverifiable embellishments on that material, and indeed one could cite many egregious instances. Copying William Manchester, for instance, he tells the story of Edward Kennedy finding himself without formal trousers just before the President's funeral and needing to wear a pair of his dead brother's pants. Manchester reports that a tailor was hastily called and the pants enlarged until they fit the heftier youngest Kennedy perfectly. McGinniss makes the story his own by guessing, in several painfully padded pages, that while the fit may indeed have been perfect in the physical sense, Edward nonetheless squirmed and fretted during the funeral worrying that his brother's patched-up pants would somehow fail him, or he them. Do you get it? He feared that he couldn't fit into his brother's pants!

But worse than what McGinniss purloins without attribution and inanely embellishes is what he does with attributed gossip and accurately cited conspiracy claims concerning the lives and deaths of the Kennedys. McGinniss's assumption seems to be that if someone has said something ugly or stupid about the Kennedys and you refer to the source, you may repeat it as if it were plainly true. No further judgment, no supportive evidence, no intelligent defense of the item is required.

Thus we are invited to entertain the possibility that Joseph Kennedy sexually molested his daughter Rosemary, shattering her psychologically in the process, and then had her lobotomized and permanently removed to an institution to prevent her from revealing that dangerous intelligence. His wife and his many other children may have known of this primal atrocity and may have become accomplices by remaining silent and by repeating the mendacious cover stories which were created over the years to explain the fate of the missing daughter. (She was finally said to have been hopelessly retarded from birth.) From this incident, says McGinniss, in a typical non-sequitur, the sons learned the dreadful consequence of failure. The evidence McGinniss offers for this ghastly insinuation? Jack's biographer Nigel Hamilton said that someone else said that this might have happened. Joe was a shameless rake who frequently pawed his sons' female companions and therefore may have been capable of raping and lobotomizing his daughter. Don't blame me, blame Hamilton's informants, McGinniss seems to be saying. And as further extenuation: "the documentation that might resolve the question remains sealed to researchers." The motto here and throughout the book is: If you can't know what you are talking about, talk about it.

In McGinniss's telling, Kennedy pere is the "unforgivably immoral" first cause of all Kennedy effects. Even eight-year-old Teddy's pneumonia, in the fall of 1940, he says, "might" have been caused by a weakening of his immune system by news of his father's latest public disgrace. The sons imitated Joe sexually and psychologically, protected his notorious reputation, and one another's, from constantly looming scandal, obeyed his commands, made good on his outlandish promises, and in every manner tried to enact his limitless ambitions for them.

Crucially, when Jack needed a primary victory in West Virginia during the 1960 campaign, Joe approached old associates in the Mob, specifically Sam Giancana, who, according to McGinniss, was signally responsible for that victory and perhaps for the narrow triumph in the presidential election as well. In return, Joe may very well have promised the Mob that the new President would rid Cuba of Castro, enabling them to return to that highly profitable venue. Or, at least they may have thought that he promised that, McGinniss confidently asserts. As a result, Jack, true to his father's promise, or, rather, true to the Mob's possible understanding of such a promise, eagerly embraced the disastrous assault at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, recklessly and needlessly brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster during the missile crisis in 1962, and plotted with the Mafia to assassinate Castro. (McGinniss seems ignorant of the fact that it was the Eisenhower Administration that first approached the Mafia in this regard.) Anyone who thinks these events had something to do with the context of the Cold War, be disabused; we learn from this book that they were a payoff to the Mob pure and simple.