JUST before John F. Kennedy won the Democratic Party nomination in 1960, former president Harry Truman made a televised appeal to try and block JFK's run for the White House. Before the nation, Truman stumbled in his speech, mixing up the candidate with his father, referring to John Kennedy as "Joe".
The slip was loaded with meaning. Many of Truman's generation suspected, even hated, Joe Kennedy, whom they saw as an anti-Semitic appeaser, an unscrupulous businessman prepared to stop at nothing to become the first Catholic President.
The Sins of the Father, though undeniably well documented and scrupulously researched, doesn't offer, much beyond this standard analysis of the Kennedys founding father. In fact, Kessler strains so hard to confirm the image of old Joe as a ruthless, double-dealing womaniser that the book frequently appears petty. For instance, he is careful to mention that Joe Kennedy wasn't quite as good at touch football as he pretended to be.
More disturbing, though, is Kessler's examination of Kennedy's attitude to Jews. Kennedy was America's ambassador in London in the late 1930s, and thought Germany would win the war (predicting, in August 1940, that Hitler would be in Buckingham Palace in two weeks). As Kessler properly points out, Kennedy sometimes appeared unsympathetic to the Jewish plight, but it is a little tenuous to link Kennedy to Auschwitz by noting that at the time when his son (JFK) was sleeping with a woman who had interviewed Hitler, up to 15,000 Jews had been reported killed in the Ukraine.
Kessler also tries too hard to blame Joe Kennedy for the tragic outcome of his daughter's lobotomy. Rosemary Kennedy was mentally ill when she underwent the operation, suggests Kessler, not actually retarded, and so her father's decision to order the operation left her a zombie, whereas with proper medical treatment she might have recovered.
Maybe so, but what we need here is a bit of context. Joe Kennedy was making the fateful decision 50 years ago, when far less was known about mental illness than it is now, and the crude lobotomy ought not to be judged by the relative sophistication of today's standards.
It is for his part in his son's presidential election victory that Joe Kennedy is best remembered, however, and Kessler deals with allegations of vote-buying in characteristic detail. Unfortunately, if predictably, he exaggerates the importance of Joe Kennedy in the campaign, and even suggests that by 1961 "after Jack, Joe was now the most powerful man in the country".
More impressive is the unearthing of Janet Des Rosiers, Joe's secretary and lover for twelve years. It is the first time she has been persuaded to speak about her affair with Kennedy, and her version of life at Hyannis Port throws significant light on the formative years of the Kennedy children. Most intriguing are the glimpses of Rose Kennedy, wandering about the house with topical news clippings pinned to her cardigan, pretending not to know about her husband and his secretary.
It is the Kennedy matriarch who comes out of this study as the most complex and enigmatic figure ("her secret . . . was drugs", suggests Kessler). Mysterious, too, is why the Kennedys pretended that Rose and Joe were chirpy and active in their final years, when in fact both were seriously incapacitated.
The myth of Kennedy invulnerability, created by Joe, meant that the effects of his stroke in 1961 were minimised that his children told the public he could talk when he could not, and that he was recovering when he was not. Kessler is reasonably convincing in his psychological explanations for Kennedy's undemonstrative nature, and shows that his children have inherited his unaffectionate habits, but once again simply pushes things too fit, for example: "Perhaps because of his Irish heritage Joe had a fear of the wind .
Thorough and well-researched though this study may be. Joseph Kennedy's contribution to American history deserves a more dispassionate analysis.