Inflation

By Paul Gray

THE KENNEDY IMPRISONMENT by Garry Wills Atlantic-Little, Brown 310 pages; $14.95

Like many others, Author Garry Wills was surprised by Edward Kennedy's long nosedive through the 1980 Democratic primaries. The man who could not possibly lose to Jimmy Carter did so spectacularly. Plenty of explanations surfaced. The candidate ran halfheartedly, bowing to sense of duty rather than conviction; new austerities left voters impatient with free-spending liberal promises; Chappaquiddick would not go away; the hostages in Iran kept Carter safely off the hustings and out of Teddy's range. But Wills suspected that something more metaphysical was afoot. The Senator was not undone by ineptitude and adverse circumstances; his last name, with all that it had come to symbolize, fated him to fail.

This conclusion rests on a paradox that Wills insists on throughout The Kennedy Imprisonment: power is debilitating, and power as conceived by the Kennedys is especially so. The driven patriarch gave his sons the means and the marching orders to impose themselves on the world: "They need not scramble, or be predators. They would live on the heights to which he lifted them." The result of this freedom, Wills argues, was utter confinement.

To make his case, the author has to recycle much dirty laundry. He starts off with sex. Old Joe Kennedy showed his boys an example of relentless womanizing; he courted their dates and embarrassed their mother with his public attentions to Gloria Swanson. The lesson was clear: Kennedy men asserted themselves by breaking rules. When John followed this path, though, he got into trouble. The FBI taped the young naval officer's wartime dalliance with a European beauty-contest winner who had Nazi connections. In the White House, another affair put him in worse jeopardy. His partner, Judith Campbell (later Exner), was also seeing Mobster Sam Giancana, whom the CIA was trying to enlist in a plot to kill Castro.

Wills' point in rehashing all this is to claim that J.F.K.'s private behavior crippled him and his brother Robert in their public roles. Neither the President nor his Attorney General could cross or restrain FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, for fear of what he knew and might leak.

Some links in Wills' chain of reasoning are obviously speculative, although he does not always label them as such. To show the Kennedy brothers unknowingly destroying themselves, in bedrooms and strategy sessions, he must assume much and exclude even more. J.F.K.'s attempts to circumvent the federal bureaucracy are recalled in detail and condemned. His use of a loyal cadre of White House advisers set a futile precedent: "The real impact of Kennedy on his successors was not so much an inflation of the office they succeeded to, but the doomed way they imitated his attempt to rule against the government." The possibility that the national legislative machinery has grown too large to control is never raised. In Wills' view, later Presidents were mesmerized by the example of John Kennedy, not frustrated by the sluggish response that met their own commands.

Even the most ardent Kennedy loyalist would blush at such a claim. In his ten earlier books, Wills proved himself a dazzling inverter of conventional wisdoms. Nixon Agonistes (1969), his best work, offered amiable, golfing Ike as Eisenhower the Machiavellian governor; the old Red-baiting Nixon was refurbished as "the last liberal." But in trying to puncture the Kennedy reputation, Wills falls victim to the paradox of debunking: the loudest noise must be preceded by the greatest efforts to inflate.

--By Paul Gray

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