Reviews for The Kennedy Imprisonment

The average rating for The Kennedy Imprisonment based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-04-08 00:00:00 Ethan Cooke …they ran their ops until the wind changed and the ops got run back on them. (Michael Herr) I love “Camelot” because it’s such a meretricious fantasy, a cunning compact of sleaze and style, the most vulgar political dream the country has entertained, and one perfect for a society then at the apex of its power and prosperity, but at the same time uneasy, immature, and already overstimulated by electronic mirages. To cautious counselors President Kennedy bragged: “They can't touch me while I'm alive. And after I'm dead, who cares?”—so it’s appropriate that this elaborately cynical PR fiction began to stink and spoil so soon after the end of the career—the life—it was intended to advance. Jackie did her best to extend the romance, raise a durable myth; and Americans were, for a suitable time, hushed and reverent round the flame; but by the 70s “Camelot” was a byword for sordid hubris. The Kennedys endure as historical soap opera. Their story pushes the same buttons, excites the same dreams of luxury and looks, the same dread of curse and delectation of downfall, as the most outlandish daytime drama. It’s a shame, then, that the stilted, self-important miniseries has been the favored mode of representing the Kennedys. They deserve so much worse, as we deserve to be better entertained. To say “Camelot,” though, is to give disproportionate credit to Jackie. She gave a cultured and later funereal arrangement to the images of wealth and power and winning Joseph P. Kennedy had been feeding the public since the 1930s. I could read about Joe Kennedy all day. He’s a familiar American type, the self-created mogul, a monster of ruthless ambition and vast contempt, with the difference that he never tamed himself for admission to the gentler clubs. To Wills he is a rootless raider (of Hollywood, of Wall Street) rather than a stable member of a business community—“a predator on other businessmen, not their partner”—and a kind of postmodern social climber whose goals vis-à-vis “Old Money” were not acceptance and assimilation but usurpation, transcendence, and virtual displacement. His sons would play aristocrats to an audience of voters. Amassing the fortune that would fund so many campaigns (worth $500 million in 1969), Kennedy realized that a new reality was opening up, an arena of electronic dreams whose hologram aristocrats—celebrities—might wield the same power as “real” ones. In the 1920s, Wills writes, Kennedy was giving aristocracy a new definition from the jazz age. After his rejection by the Brahmins of Boston, he oriented his world around New York and Hollywood, around the sports and journalism and cinema stars of the roaring twenties. A starlet would have disgraced the better Boston families; but Kennedy displayed his actresses as so many decorations, as signs that he was looking to new centers of power and of popular acclaim. The Boston gentry were exclusive. He would be expansive, open and racy. He was steering his family down the course that made them staples of the tabloids. As he told Gloria Swanson: “The Cabots and the Lodges wouldn’t be caught dead at the pictures, or let their children go. And that’s why their servants know more about what’s going on in the world than they do. The working class gets smarter every day, thanks to radio and pictures. It’s the snooty Back Bay bankers who are missing the boat." Captivating the general public’s debased cinematic notions of aristocracy was easy and represented a lesser prize than the seduction of the chattering classes. My favorite parts of this book were those devoted to the selling of JFK as an Intellectual, and darling of “educated” taste. Joe Kennedy had the New York Times columnist Arthur Krock substantially re-write Jack’s callow undergraduate thesis, and, with the aid of Henry Luce’s Time-Life promotional machine, was able to package Why England Slept (1940) as a daring eve-of-war meditation on preparedness in peacetime. A crack team of ghostwriters and Krock’s secret lobbying delivered Profiles in Courage and the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for History. War hero, rakish stunner, and historian of heroes, JFK was a major saint (Hemingway being God) in the Hefner-Mailer era of upper-middlebrow masculine self-fashioning. Everyone worshiped the “existential” hero—the gunslinger, the jazzman, the astronaut orbiting earth in his lonely little pod—but even the working stiff might, under the tutelage of Playboy and Esquire, seduce a woman with apposite quotation from Nietzsche and Freud while Ravel revolved on the Hi-Fi; might nonchalantly explain a canvas of forbidding abstraction, appreciate Hard Bop as a strenuous spiritual wager, and be at ease with hip Negroes (Wills: “It is easy to forget that the Sinatra ‘rat pack’ was considered a liberal phenomena in the late fifties. After all, it admitted one black performer to its carousing”). Later, under the dreaded Nixon, celebrators of the New Frontier began to express misgivings about the Imperial Presidency. Schlesinger himself then traced the growth of presidential power, admitting faults in his heroes, Jackson and Roosevelt and Kennedy. But Kennedy’s short time in office was not just an acceleration of prior trends. It added something new—not so much the Imperial Presidency as the Appearances Presidency. The man’s very looks thrilled people like Mailer: “If the nation voted to improve its face, what an impetus might be given to the arts, to the practices, to the lives and to the imagination of the American.” Kennedy was able to take the short cuts that he did, command support for rash acts, because he controlled the images that controlled the professional critics of our society. They had been recruited beforehand on minor points of style. He was not Eisenhower—and that was sufficient achievement for the “eggheads” who had been mocking Eisenhower for years. Kennedy was the Steerforth who flattered and tamed the schoolboys by standing up to their master. He was their surrogate, their dream-self, what all the old second lieutenants from World War II wished they had become. Through him they escaped their humdrum lives at the typewriter, on the newspaper, in the classroom. From OSS to MLA is a rude descent. Kennedy’s affinities with Reagan, Wills argues, go much deeper than the cheesy surface histrionics (“Camelot,” “Morning in America”) of the “Appearances Presidency.” Wills traces the demise of the Rooseveltian “liberal consensus” to Kennedy’s glamorous personalization of the office; to his campaign claim that Eisenhower’s cautious bureaucracy had hampered America’s ability to combat the spread of communism in the globe’s far corners; to his redefinition of the president as a “charismatic” figure who to accomplish anything (protect us from Communism/terrorism, eliminate Castro/Saddam) must concentrate power in himself and deploy it outside of, or even against, the inherited procedures and bureaucracy of “big government.” This “delegitimation” of the idea of government is now central to both parties and a fact of the terminal decline of our political instutitions. Domestically, it has allowed politicians in the pay of various poisoners and exploiters to make “regulation” a dirty word—as if regulation isn’t what keeps the feces out of your Happy Meal—and to brand as tyrannical services and infrastructure that most voters, if they could stop and think for a minute, if they could put aside their cinematic nostalgia for simpler self-sufficient times, might understand as essential to the civil society they wish to live in. In foreign affairs Kennedy’s charisma also casts a shadow. The Kennedy Imprisonment was first published in 1982, so there are no Iraq parallels, but reading Wills on the Bay of Pigs (and on the opening moves in Vietnam), one fills them in: the bureaucratic fractiousness, the governing against government; the Joint Chiefs and traditional intelligence heads sidelined or browbeat by secret planners; the caution innate in generals dismissed as lethargy or spinelessness; the “lean” forces that turn out to be skeletal, inadequate; the promised “flexible response,” the delivered overreach and quagmire. And I wasn’t surprised to read that Kennedy’s men had no plan for a post-Castro Cuba, should the invasion have succeeded. I really, really like this: If bureaucratic “big government” gets defined, permanently, as a doddering old sheriff, then each presidential election becomes a call for some new gunfighter to face the problems “government” cannot solve. Kennedy’s successors have drifted, steadily, toward this conception of their role. But their appeal to Roosevelt as a model in unjustified. It is true that crises gave Roosevelt quasi-dictatorial power, and that dictatorship in the old Roman sense became respectable again in the thirties. A widespread disillusionment with parliamentary procedures, combined with a fear of the radical Left and with economic breakdown, led to a call for strong leaders—for Hitler and Mussolini, Franco and Salazar. This mood even gave a momentary glamour of menace to American figures like Huey Long and Father Coughlin or an Englishman like Oswald Mosley. But Roosevelt’s achievement, like Washington’s, was to channel his own authority into programs and institutions. In that sense, Roosevelt resisted even while exercising “charisma,” relegitimating institutions at a time when other strong leaders were delegitimating them. This made Roosevelt differ not only in historical moment from the Kennedy period, but even more basically from Kennedy’s conception of power. Theorists of “deadlock” in the Eisenhower fifties felt that the lethargy of the public, the obstructionism of Congress, the external menace of communism made it imperative for a President to seize every margin of power available to him: he was facing so many hostile power centers that only the glad embrace of every opportunity could promise him success. No internal check upon one’s appetite for power was needed; the external checks were sufficient—were overwhelming, in fact, unless the President became single-minded in his pursuit of power. But Roosevelt did not have this ambition of seizing power to be used against his own government. He sought power for that government, and set up the very agencies and departments that Neustadt and his followers resented. He created subordinate power centers, lending them his own authority. He began that process of “routinizing” crisis powers that is the long-range meaning of the New Deal. There is something perverse about the “liberal” attack on Eisenhower’s bureaucracy in the nineteen-fifties, which simply revived the Republicans’ first response to the New Deal.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-07-23 00:00:00 Martin Roman Garry Wills, who has been described as “a sort of intellectual outlaw” by the New York Times, has written many books related to politics, including Reagan’s America, Nixon Agonistes, Lincoln at Gettysburg (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize), and The Kennedy Imprisonment, originally published in 1982. This 2017 edition of The Kennedy Imprisonment includes an updated preface, but is still essentially Wills taking on the myths surrounding the Kennedy clan and disabusing people of the popular vision of the Kennedy image as viewed through the lens of Camelot. For Kennedy fans who haven’t done much reading about the reality, this book may be unsettling as it pulls back the curtain and reveals a corrupt and opportunistic political family who valued image over reality, flattering myths and stories over truth, and a world of “almost-Kennedys” and hangers-on who gave up their own integrity for the privilege of basking in the reflected glory of the Kennedy clan. Wills covers the PT-109 story and the expert manipulation of it in print and film, the question of actual authorship of Profiles in Courage, the story that was presented as historical fact about the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the notorious womanizing of Joe Sr., John, and Teddy (with Bobby allegedly being the faithful one). The book is divided into five sections, each devoted to a particular aspect of the Kennedy family: Sex, Family, Image, Charisma, and Power. But even before we get to these, the prologue tells us the particular slant of the author: “Because of privilege of various sorts, bad behavior does not have consequences, which means that it continues and becomes more pronounced.” The heavy weight on each of the brothers following the deaths of their siblings culminates in Teddy’s sad comment: “After Robert was killed, he told his aide Dun Gifford: “I can’t let go. We have a job to do. If I let go, Ethel will let go, and my mother will let go, and all my sisters.”” Yikes, what a heavy load he carried…and his dysfunctional, doomed campaign for the Presidency in 1980 is covered in depth, including a good look at poor Joan, who never really made it into the insular inner circle of the clan. Wills says there was a palpable energy between and among the Kennedys that excluded all outsiders: “When the nurse took the Kennedy children swimming at Taggert’s Pier, back in the thirties, they all wore the same color bathing hats, so they could be distinguished from the other children…Ever since they have been wearing invisible caps that signal to each other on a radio frequency no one else can use.” I have vivid memories of JFK’s inauguration (when a TV was wheeled into my elementary school classroom so we could watch and hear his speech) and the assassinations, including the televised coverage of the aftermath each time another tragedy unfolded. I admit it was a bit disconcerting to learn the level to which coverage and myth protection was managed and manipulated, but I was still pleased to have the opportunity to read a copy of this edition (thanks to Open Road Integrated Media and NetGalley). For me, the problem is that this book, written as it was in the early 1980s, assumed a familiarity with many of the people and events that was likely appropriate 30+ years ago, but for many of us, memories fade – and for others, there is complete cluelessness about who these people are and what their significance was to the Kennedy story of the 1960s-80s. In addition to needing to figure out the characters and their roles, the author’s writing became annoying. I appreciate a strong vocabulary, but in several instances, it seemed like a simpler word might have served the purpose: for example, “jansenist,” “circumnambient, ””orotundities,””thurible,” and “perdured’ seem a bit over the top (while the less puzzling “circumlocutious,” panegyric,” and “simulacra” seem to adequately demonstrate the author’s fine vocabulary). Or maybe it’s just me, and everyone else is completely familiar with the over-the-top examples listed above? In any case, that detracted from my appreciation of the book. (And spellcheck was equally puzzled by 7 of the 8 words listed above!) In any case, it is a fine history of the clan and their impact on U.S. history and, while it may provoke a certain level of disappointment for readers to learn about both the human frailties and downright corrupt actions of their heroes, it is hugely entertaining. Political junkies in particular will love this. Four stars.