Blow-up
Al Capp
Conversations with Kennedy Benjamin C. Bradlee (Quartet £4.50) Fifty or so years ago, there flourished an American biographer no one now remem- bers, and whose books have disappeared from our library shelves, who shared the same burning ambition all writers have; to get rich. He had tried every way, when, in the fullness of his years, he struck the mother lode. He began debunking our na- tional heroes. (Bunk is hogwash, debunk- ing is removing it). He started with Abra- ham Lincoln who, he revealed, was horri- fied by the South's treatment of blacks, not because they were human, and treated like animals, but because labour as cheap as that gave the South an unfair economic advan- tage over the North, and he wanted them rounded up and sent back to Africa. The money rolled in, and our biographer went on to George Washington who he revealed was a snob, and more than a bit of a fag; to Andrew Jackson, who, he jeered, couldn't read, and so on through our Valhalla, until with great age, and great prosperity, he was gathered to his fathers.
One of the proudest boasts American literature can make is that very few took his place. But there were one or two. Some years ago, a lady living in straitened cir- cumstances, wrote a book called The Presi- dent's Daughter in which she claimed she had been the former girl friend of President Warren Harding, and was the mother of his daughter. It was the wrong time; the wrong President. Americans of that time knew that only the French had mistresses. They all remembered President Harding as a handsome, rugged man with a wife, so for- bidding in her corsets, that we still shudder at her as we shuddered at the Bad Witches of our childhood. He had died, on a Presi- dential train, under circumstances so inex- plicable that nobody wanted to explore them. The public felt so sorry for Harding that when the lady's book came out, it was treated with disgust. Nobody reviewed it, only perverts bought it. As the decades roll- ed on, and respect for fathers rolled down- hill, the ageing son of the dead President, dead broke, wrote a book, revealing that all through the years at the White House, his father had a mistress. It now had become chic to blame one's father for everything, so nobody was surprised at anything in the book, except to wonder just how broke a President's son could be, before he sold his parents.
The books about John F. Kennedy have been voluminous. From The First Thousand Days to Johnny, We Hardly Knew You he was portrayed with a nice mixture of affec- tion and reverence. All the books made money, of course, but we had the feeling that, although that was the important part, they were all garlands on his grave. Now comes Conversations With Kennedy by Ben Bradlee, a former editor of Newsweek, which is fighting it out with Time, as the definitive news magazine.
Why was this book written? Certainly not out of malice. Ben Bradlee liked the President, or at any rate being the pal of the man who was President. Was it for money ? It is true that Bradlee has been appearing on every TV show, including the shabby ones which usually specialise in authors who have written books called 'Home From Copenhagen! I'm a WOMAN Now, and I have the Papers to Prove It'. Could it have come of a simple, childish desire to let everyone know what a buddy he made of the President ? Why, then, does it come out that the President seemed to have made a dummy of him ?
Bradlee was the only editor in America with the ultimate source, the President. When the editors of Newsweek felt they really had to know what Time had on its
upcoming cover, was able to get the answer from the President', Bradlee wrote, 'and he was never wrong'. Bradlee wrote this with pride. Yet, nowhere in the book, is there anything of historical importance, literary importance, or even of wit. There is only one explanation that makes any sense: Is this the prelude to knocking off
Teddy Kennedy? This nation was shock- ed, when we read the Nixon expletives from his tapes. Never before, in our history, have we been told of any President with Nixon's ugliness. Yet, reading the memoirs by a friend Kennedy trusted we realise that, compared to Kennedy, Nixon was a scout- master. Why did Bradlee spell it out so mercilessly? Was it supposed to make us feel warmer, closer to a President we loved? Or is it to pull the last rug out from under the surviving brother ? On a now forgotten tug of war with the steel industry: " `They kicked us in the balls,' said the President. 'And we kicked back. Are we supposed to sit there and take a cold, deliberate
f g.' " Some tug of war.
At a gay, family party of his closest inti- mates the President told of Jim Patton, President of Republic Steel, grousing that his line was being tapped. The President said that was wholly unfair and, then and there, called the Attorney-General, his brother Bobby. Bobby said that it was untrue and unfair. Patton left mollified. Then the President grinned. " 'Of course,' he said. `Patton was right.' Bobby grinned. 'They were mean to my brother.' " The editor of America's most important journal didn't report that at the time. He wanted to be asked again. There must be a difference be- tween selling out for a couple of thousand, and selling out for a couple of drinks, and I wish someone would explain it to me.
Was this 'Camelot'? Or was it the White House, and the nation, being taken over by a spoiled and unhousebroken family who knew only one loyalty—to each other. The family was hilarious to watch, day by day, but, apt, any day, to blow up the planet. In Kennedy's first thousand days, the family sunk us at the Bay of Pigs, but, thanks to the sanity of Nikita Khruschev, we were saved from a war of annihilation. Yet those were days we remember with longing. Our Presi- dent was young and handsome. His wife was incomparably dashing. His brother, Bobby, had never tried a law case, yet, heaven help us, he was Attorney-General, and we really didn't mind. His youngest brother stepped out of nowhere and became the Senator from Massachusetts. No one complained. The nation was under the spell of a magic family. Men like Bradlee were under the spell. I used to wonder what would happen to us if any- thing went wrong. We might have been blown up. But we'd go in style.
It was never the same after Dallas. The magic was gone. Bobby came and, poor combative soul, he left. Teddy has tried. He has tried harder than anyone thought he could. But he can never live down the mys- tery of Chappaquiddick. Bradlee has grown older too. Maybe he now sees we're a nation, not a houseparty. He has written his book. It is sordid. But it will be followed by more sordid books; the confessions of Judith Campbell, the Mafioso playmate, will come first. There will be others. Maybe the nation wants, at long last, to bury the tattered magic, and give the running of the Republic to older, duller men.
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