Teddy, We Hardly Know Ye

By PRISCILLA PAINTON

TITLE: THE LAST KENNEDY

AUTHOR: JOE MCGINNISS

PUBLISHER: SIMON & SCHUSTER; 626

PAGES; $25

THE BOTTOM LINE: Ask not why you should buy this book; ask why it was written in the first place.

It seems the courts will now decide whether Joe McGinniss is a plagiarist or, as his readers will find, just a lazy reporter. For at the very least, this is not a biography but the world's most slowly executed book report -- except this one has no footnotes and no index, only a bibliography listing 74 other books involving the Kennedys that McGinniss took years to ingest. Last week William Manchester, the historian who wrote the definitive account of John F. Kennedy's assassination, told New York magazine he intends to sue McGinniss after pinpointing 187 instances where he claims the author largely lifted his prose. McGinniss also draws heavily -- sometimes down to the dialogue and sentence structure -- from Leo Damore's exhaustive account of Chappaquiddick, from Nigel Hamilton's portrayal of the dysfunctional Kennedys and from Doris Kearns Goodwin's description of Ted Kennedy's childhood. Have any of these authors thought of a class action?

The remarkable achievement of McGinniss's book is not that he fails after 618 pages to unearth fresh nuggets about Ted Kennedy or that he ignores the basic obligations of journalism and historical biography (you know: legwork, attribution). No, the remarkable thing is that McGinniss does not even live up to his pretensions. In the author's note, he says he is a storyteller. He also claims for himself the right to invent the thoughts of his main character for the sake of "making Teddy come alive for a reader as he never has in any of the previously published works." But by the end of the book, Kennedy remains a stony caricature, and the reader mourns McGinniss's enrollment in the David Halberstam school of bad writing -- where repetition is meant to create drama and the accretion of subclauses is meant to create elegance.

Here is McGinniss's imitation of mini-series string music: "Riedel, that was his name. Richard Riedel -- now running toward him." Or this: "Little emotion was expressed. Kennedys did not express emotion openly, not even to one another, especially at times of emergency. Emergency required action, which was something with which emotion interfered. Emergency required logistical planning, which was something at which both Bobby and Eunice were expert."

For all its literary thievery, the book is a bazaar of banalities: we find out that Jack's assassination was "a national event -- a worldwide event," that "it had always been ((Ted's)) belief that however junior and sometimes unsatisfactory a member, he was a part of the Kennedy family," that the "waves of Nantucket Bay ((were)) a brilliant blue," and, two pages later, that "the sky was as blue as the waves in Nantucket Bay." Most of all, despite McGinniss's purported empathetic imagination, Ted remains a peripheral figure throughout the first three-quarters of the book.

When McGinniss does focus on him, it is only to say obvious things with superficial evidence: that he carried the burden of having bigger-than-life brothers (one sign: his face twitched when McGinniss broached the subject years ago), that he felt left out of the family, and that he had a lousy childhood and marriage. The book seems obsessed with debunking the Kennedy myth, as if it needed debunking. And nowhere does it explain Ted's fundamental paradox: that a man so self-destructive stuck so willingly to the daily tilling of the legislative field and left such a profound mark on his country.