Raffish royalty.(The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings)(Book Review)

The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings, by Thomas Maier (Basic, 676 pp., $29.95)

THE author, a biographer of Dr. Spock, describes the Irish Catholicism of five generations of Kennedys, whose influence on American religion paralleled Spock's influence on American children. Maier had full access to the Joseph P. Kennedy papers, and his book is fascinating, if neither novel nor edifying, in linking the "emerald thread" of ethnic and religious attitudes to various political matters. For the first time, an author was granted use of private photographs, among them "swims along the Cape" and "kissing the Blarney Stone," both of which activities would be engaged in by the Kennedys in later life, with varying results.

This book could have been good at half the length, but, like Madame Recamier, Maier does not seem to have had the time to write something shorter. Six hundred pages allow for a lot of compelling, if sometimes speculative, material along with redundancy and misinformation. A history as dramatic and important as that of Ireland deserves more freedom from cliche; also, the historian should know the difference between Plantagenets and Tudors, and not be under the impression that Oliver Cromwell lived during the reign of Charles II.

A long and volatile tradition of oppression and opportunity informed the confrontation between Boston Brahmins and immigrants. The old story renews itself through different faces and races in every cycle of the American experience, but Maier incants the word "bigotry" so often that he tempts the most sympathetic reader to respond as Oscar Wilde did to the death of Little Nell. Principals in the Kennedy history carry ethnic grudges to the level of an Olympic sport, and were whining a form of architecture, these chapters would be Perpendicular Gothic. Joseph Kennedy, for example, could not understand the resentment of the duke of Devonshire, whose uncle was cut to pieces in Phoenix Park. On a pilgrimage to the spot, John F. Fitzgerald taught his daughter Rose to revere the assassins as martyrs. Later, like Bill Clinton remembering the burning of black churches in his Arkansas childhood, Robert Kennedy would describe his father fleeing a Boston placarded with "No Irish Need Apply" signs. Maier admits that Joe fled on a private railway car. He is unaware of Richard Jensen's study in the Journal of Social History proving that such signs were mostly a legend with legs.

Correspondence records a lot of dealing with the Vatican, but this reviewer knew Count Galeazzi and doubts that the alleged "eminence grise" of the pope was the pawn of the "Emerald Kings" who had trouble pronouncing his name. In Boston, the Kennedys and the clergy made unlovely music playing each other like pianos. Current distress in that archdiocese may be traced in part to defective spiritual ...