The Kennedy Imprisonment
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PRAISE FOR GARRY WILLS
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
National Humanities Medal
“Sooner or later, anyone who writes about America must reckon with Garry Wills. Not that it’s easy to do. The books are demanding enough—not the prose, which is graceful and elegant—but the arguments, which are unfailingly original, often provocative, occasionally subversive and, now and again, utterly perverse, yet stamped every time with the finality of the last word. In his 50 or so books, a handful of them masterpieces, Wills has ranged further than any other American writer of his time, covering much of the western tradition, ancient and contemporary, sacred and profane.” —Prospect Magazine
“Perhaps the most distinguished Catholic intellectual in America over the last 50 years.” —John L. Allen
NIXON AGONISTES: THE CRISIS OF THE SELF-MADE MAN
“Mr. Wills achieves the not inconsiderable feat of making Richard Nixon a sympathetic—even tragic—figure, while at the same time being appalled by him. But superb as it is, his ‘psycho-biography’ of Mr. Nixon is merely prelude to a provocative essay on political theory.” —John Leonard, The New York Times Book Review
“The wit of Nixon Agonistes is a constant delight. Heckling, breezy, allusive … the author is a born reporter, a cartoonist in words, master of a tradition of tongue-in-cheek sassiness that goes back well over a century in American political journalism.” —Commentary Magazine
“Astonishing … a stunning attempt to possess that past, that we may all of us escape it.” —John Leonard, The New York Times Book Review
“Nixon Agonistes reads like a combination of H. L. Mencken, John Locke and Albert Camus.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Only a man who can’t stand to be around people would allow such a figure to be compiled about himself. Garry Wills has caught that quality in Nixon Agonistes, which must be the best book so far about the man, the best written, the best thought out.” —The New York Review of Books
“Wills succeeds, in the end, in making his point, about Nixon, and about America … the topic is fascinating, and Wills has ideas which never occurred to other writers.” —The Harvard Crimson
“[Nixon Agonistes is] still the one indispensable primer on modern American politics après le déluge of the clamorous 1960s, part Mencken, part Aristotle, part Moby Dick.” —Prospect Magazine
THE KENNEDY IMPRISONMENT
“The ultimate Kennedy book.” —New Republic
“[The Kennedy Imprisonment has] an important thesis and a ringing climax.” —Kirkus Reviews
REAGAN’S AMERICA
“Ambitious and insightful, this study examines aspects of Ronald Reagan’s life and career that account for his extraordinary popularity with the American public. Wills, author of Nixon Agonistes and Inventing America, portrays a Reagan whose optimistic personality is in harmony with the deep instincts of Americans. The President, he maintains, embodies the country’s values and its collective dreams and memories. In his show-business years, Reagan was ‘the voice of midwestern baseball’ and ‘the plain-spoken hero of horse epics’; later, as Hollywood union leader and California governor, he was the complete ‘company man.’ As President, his simple answers in the face of troubling complexities have let Americans feel positive about themselves. While sometimes overdetailed, Wills’s study succeeds admirably in isolating the sources of Reagan’s appeal.” —Publishers Weekly
“Reagan’s America is a fascinating biography whose impact is enhanced by techniques of psychological profile and social history.” —Los Angeles Times
“The best book yet by a profound student of the culture of the American presidency. Mr. Wills illuminates the symbiosis linking Middle American religion, the illusory reality of Hollywood, Ronald Reagan’s career, and the meaning of his presidency. The book is consistently entertaining. The conclusions about American politics are disturbing.” —Foreign Affairs
“A timely and brilliant analysis that presages and enlightens the current Presidential crisis in foreign policy. Written with all the wit, originality and intelligence that Wills brought to Inventing America, Nixon Agonistes and The Kennedy Imprisonment, this book, though cutting a swath through a now-familiar collection of mythopoeic falsehoods, serves not to indict Ronald Reagan, but to unearth the roots of his indestructible and charismatic faith … A provocative, readable, unique account with sources, inspirations and implications far beyond mere politics.” —Kirkus Reviews
The Kennedy Imprisonment
A Meditation on Power
Garry Wills
To the Other Garry Willses
Garry S. (1884–1956)
Garry L. (1961– )
Contents
Preface
Introduction to the 2002 Mariner Edition
Prologue: Brothers
PART ONE: SEX
1. The Father
2. The President
3. Sisters and Wives
4. The Prisoner of Sex
PART TWO: FAMILY
5. Semi-Irish
6. Semi-English
7. Honorary Kennedys
8. Ghosts
9. The Prisoner of Family
PART THREE: IMAGE
10. Creating the Kennedys
11. Style
12. The Prisoner of Image
PART FOUR: CHARISMA
13. Counterinsurgency at Home
14. Enjoy! Enjoy!
15. Delegitimation
16. Veralltäglichung
17. The Prisoner of Charisma
PART FIVE: POWER
18. Bulldog! Bulldog!
19. The Midas Touch
20. “Learning”
21. “Triumph”
22. “Restraint”
23. Charismatic Nation
24. The Prisoner of Power
Epilogue: Brotherhood
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
There lurks about the fancies of many men and women an imaginary conception of an ideal statesman, resembling the character of which Alcibiades has been the recognized type for centuries. There is a sort of intellectual luxury in the idea which fascinates the human mind. We like to fancy a young man in the first vigour of body and in the first vigour of mind, who is full of bounding enjoyment, who excels all rivals at masculine feasts, who gains the love of women by a magic attraction, but who is also a powerful statesman, who regulates great events, who settles great measures, who guides a great nation. We seem to outstep the moenia mundi, the recognized limits of human nature, when we conceive a man in the pride of youth to have dominion of the pursuits of age, to rule both the light things of women and the grave things of men. Human imagination so much loves to surpass human power, that we shall never be able to extirpate the conception.
—WALTER BAGEHOT, of Bolingbroke
The Kennedy Imprisonment: The View from 2017
In 1981, I argued in this book that privilege can be imprisoning. Because of privilege of various sorts, bad behavior does not have consequences, which means that it continues and becomes more pronounced, accumulating bad effects. The Kennedys could coast along on their cushion of money, deference, intimidation, and sycophants.
But now, in 2017, I would like to reflect on a prison break. The liberator of those previously imprisoned was that great leveler of all privilege or pretension: death—beginning with the breaking of the enchantment around John Kennedy when his cruel, premature death
ended his presidency before he could finish his first term. That began the hard, late education of his tough kid brother, who was softened enough to learn by heart Aeschylus’s words (from Edith Hamilton’s translation of Agamemnon) on the distilling of wisdom through suffering. He clearly had the lines memorized before the next blow came—the killing of Martin Luther King Jr.—since he recited them when he had to inform an outdoor audience of blacks who had not yet heard the horrible news of his assassination. Bobby was able to grieve with them in the words he had pondered, over and over, as a way of coping with his adored brother’s grisly end five years before:
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.
If the death of a brother softened the toughest of the Kennedy brood, the death of another eventually steadied the shallowest of them. At first, the death of his brothers seemed merely to disorient Ted Kennedy. In 1969, a year after delivering the elegy for his third brother to die violently, his wild behavior killed Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick. A jolting and veering life followed during the 1970s. He made several attempts to reclaim the Kennedy legacy, as in his speech to the Democratic National Convention in 1980, but he did not regain full control of himself until the 1990s, helped by his successful second marriage in 1993. And there were the further deaths that never seemed far from the Kennedys in his mind—that of his mother in 1995 and President Kennedy’s glamorous son John Jr. in 1999, recalling when “John John” had been the boy who gave his dead father a riveting salute.
In the last two decades of his life—years he had not expected to be given as none of his three brothers were granted anything like that longevity—Edward Moore Kennedy became a steady rock of the Senate, whose advice and support were sought by others, whose principles were not broken by bargaining, who made gains incrementally—but still made the gains. Death brings a harsh end to reckless ambition, and it often comes too soon for any amends to be made. Ted Kennedy finally broke that pattern.
Introduction to the 2002 Mariner Edition
Most of my early books were someone else’s idea. This one was Peter Davison’s. He was, in 1980, not only the poetry editor of The Atlantic (and an important poet himself), but an editor at the Little, Brown publishing house. In the latter capacity, he called me up to talk about the campaign for President that Edward Kennedy was about to launch. He wanted me to write a book about the Kennedys. I answered that Kennedy biographies were being turned out at a Stakhanovite rate. “I don’t want a biography,” he assured me. “This book should be an essay on the Kennedy phenomenon.” I had written a book about Nixon, and it was not a biography, but an attempt to see what could be learned about America from the way Nixon attracted or repelled his fellow countrymen. Why not do the same thing for the Kennedys?
Well, for one thing, the Kennedys were not a single person, a man with private demons, as Nixon was. Yet the American people responded to Kennedys in general, with love or hatred, which was what Davison was talking about when he mentioned a Kennedy phenomenon. What did they see in Kennedys, despite their individual differences? It was not ideology, though some in the South thought that Massachusetts elitism was a liberal trait. That could never explain Joseph Kennedy, with his fondness for Joseph McCarthy, a fondness his sons inherited. Yet the Kennedys were not conservative like one McCarthy (Joseph), any more than they were liberal like another McCarthy (Eugene). The Kennedys represented what it was just becoming fashionable to call “charisma,” the glamour of power, the unashamed assertion of their personal privilege, not as an adjunct to class or tradition or ideology but simply because it was theirs.
A perfect example of this would be revealed only after my book appeared—the way Jacqueline Kennedy acquired the use of the estate she wanted as her base for riding in the hunt country of Virginia. She found a country place and set her heart on it, but the widow who owned it did not want to leave her home, since she also had set her heart on it, years before, and had shared the place with her husband before sharing it with his memories. Mrs. Kennedy called on the then-powerful lawyer Clark Clifford, who wanted to become what this book calls “an honorary Kennedy” by doing the will of the family, even down to its most arbitrary whims.
The first two times Clifford tried to persuade the woman, he was turned down; but Mrs. Kennedy told him to keep trying. Clifford then resorted to what he called his national security argument: It was the woman’s patriotic duty to help the President meet challenges to the nation by giving him a place to relax. This worked. The delighted Mrs. Kennedy sent Clifford a drawing to congratulate him on these ingenious bullying tactics. It shows him striding up to the woman’s house with a lawyerly sheaf of documents labeled “Acts of Exile, Tortures, List of Jails.”1 All very funny, except to the woman. Clifford told the story to reveal how charming was his client. That is what I consider the Kennedy effect. The continuing idolization of Mrs. Kennedy shows that people believe she deserved whatever she wanted, just because she proved she could get it. That was in the finest tradition of her father-in-law, who showed the same skill in getting what he wanted when he had the Pulitzer panel of judges overridden to given his son its prize.
In Nixon Agonistes, I had described Nixon’s obsession with the Kennedys as a pathology that helped lead him to his fatal excesses. But I had to admit that at some level he was right to see how many unfair advantages had been ceded to his rivals. Somewhere between the popular idolatry of many and the obsessive resentment of Nixon there must be a more measured way to criticize the Kennedy “charm.” As a Catholic I did not much like the opportunistic use Kennedy made of his religion. Ben Bradlee, the honorary Kennedy, just laughed at Kennedy’s brazenness when the President told a cluster of adoring nuns, “Jackie here always wanted to be a nun … she went to a convent school and really planned to take the orders.”2 Murray Kempton, as usual, made the definitive comment when he wrote of Kennedy’s 1960 victory, “We have once again been cheated of the prospect of a Catholic president.” His use of Catholicism here was on a level with Clifford’s use of “national security”—anything to get the job done.
When, by exception, the Kennedys did not get their way, their motto, Ben Bradlee said, was “Don’t get mad, get even.” Only this can explain the obsession with Fidel Castro. Castro had survived Kennedy’s attempt to overthrow him by invasion, and Robert Kennedy would spend the rest of his brother’s lifetime trying to make Castro pay for that effrontery. This obsession (like Castro himself) would outlast the century, still roiling animosities in the Elian Gonzales affair of 2000. The serial assassination attempts on Castro made him take the dangerous step of turning his country into a target by accepting Russian missiles on its soil. Since he was already a target anyway, perhaps this would make the Kennedys think twice about sabotage and assassination. During the missile crisis, Kennedy, unable to admit to his secret activity in Cuba, said the missiles could have no defensive purpose. He was lying on this point, while Castro and Khrushchev were telling the truth.
As I mulled over Peter Davison’s proposal, I was working on a series of lectures that would become my book on George Washington, Cincinnatus. Washington, it seemed me, used power so effectively because he distrusted it so. He had been inclined to risk as a youth, and learned how destructive that can be. He came to realize how easily those trying to use power can be used by it. On the night when he arrived in New York for his inauguration as President, he wrote in his diary:
The roar of the cannon, and the loud acclamations of the people which rent the skies as I passed along the wharves, filled my mind with sensations as painful (considering the reverse of this scene, which may be the case after all my labors to do good) as they are pleasing.3
This was not, I believe, the mood of the Kennedy inaugural. Words written of President Eisenhower could have been said of Washington
: “His love was not for power but for duty.” But those words were written as a condemnation of Eisenhower, by Richard Neustadt, the adviser to Kennedy.4 Instead of distrusting power, the Kennedys’ temptation was to believe in nothing but power. It was to explore this idea that I accepted Davison’s proposal. This book and Cincinnatus make a diptych on the two sides of power.
Of course, “the Kenendys” is too global a term. Though there may have been a Kennedy mystique or cult or phenomenon, it affected individual members of the family (or their in-laws) in varying ways. What held for them all was a pressure to win imposed on them by what Richard Whalen called “the Founding Father.” Readers of The Kennedy Imprisonment noticed that I was less critical of the younger Kennedys, who replicated less the father’s attitudes. Robert and Edward Kennedy came off better than Joseph and John—and they would need more nuanced treatment in much that I wrote about them in later years. They had less of the buccaneering spirit than their older brother. Though Robert’s ruthlessness was an homage to his father, it was less his own nature than a violation of his nature, as we saw after John Kennedy’s death. Edward was not cool and calculating enough to be a power seeker of the patriarch’s sort. He was also the only one who showed a fondness for drink, since serious power seekers do not want to be befuddled as they scheme.
For the younger men, sex was not so much a game of power. My friend Ovid Demaris ghostwrote Judith Exner Campbell’s book, and it seemed to me, discussing the matter with him, that John Kennedy’s use of Campbell (as a power symbol in the Sinatra circle—and, without his knowledge, in that of Sam Giancana) showed that he was as much interested in sex as a score in the competitive world of male power as in mere pleasure (or in anything so “square” as love). In this he resembled his father, who wanted to collect celebrity “conquests” (significant word). Though Robert was alleged (on unconvincing grounds) to have had an affair with Marilyn Monroe, that relationship—whatever it was—began in compassion for her confusion, which was hardly the governing principle in John’s affairs. Robert’s solicitude for Jacqueline Kennedy also reflected his sympathy for the woman to whom his brother was being unfaithful: