‘The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy’ by David Nasaw

The squandering of Kennedy’s reputation began during his stint as ambassador to Great Britain, starting in 1938. With his breathtakingly handsome brood, Kennedy took the English social scene by storm, delighting in the “garden parties, rowing regattas, formal balls, afternoon teas, dinner dances, [and] . . . tennis matches at Wimbledon.” But practically from the start, he ran afoul of Roosevelt and the State Department with his shamefully rose-colored view of Adolf Hitler, whose dangerousness Kennedy minimized at every turn. Indeed, Nasaw makes clear that Kennedy’s tolerance for Hitler ran deeper than has been generally realized, exceeding that of Neville Chamberlain and continuing even after the 1939 invasion of Poland — and even, perversely, through the 1940 London blitz, during which Kennedy lamented the hardihood of the British because, he figured, the longer they held out, the likelier the prospects of American intervention.

Equally revealing is the depth of Kennedy’s anti-Semitism, which Nasaw makes clear. Not only did he fail to meaningfully advocate for Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s barbarism — a failure in which much of the State Department was complicit — but he privately partook of conspiracy theories that imagined Jewish power in the news media and the movie industry to be responsible for growing hostility toward Germany and increasing readiness to intervene in the war. Mingling with other isolationist anti-Semites such as the aviator Charles Lindbergh and the transplanted American socialite Nancy Witcher Langhorne (known as Lady Astor), he rationalized his loss of influence with FDR as the fault of the Jews.

(Penguin) - ’The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy’ by David Nasaw

Nasaw is properly scornful, although never shrill, toward Kennedy’s anti-Semitism and fascist sympathies. But he is, oddly, rather more tolerant of Kennedy’s postwar “appeasement” — as Kennedy himself defiantly called it — of the Soviet Union. In the 1940s and early ’50s, the former ambassador spoke out forcefully against Harry Truman’s Cold War policies: support for anti-communist regimes in Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan, even NATO. To be sure, the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race have in retrospect made clear that the Cold War exacted terrible costs, and it’s tempting to look back favorably on those who warned as much. But the alternative Kennedy offered resembled not so much the sober realism of journalist Walter Lippmann — who argued with diplomat George Kennan over the wisdom of containment yet harbored no illusions about the Soviet Union — as the unabashed, drawbridge-raising isolationism of senator Robert A. Taft.

This was a policy also at odds with that of a rising young legislator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. Although Nasaw does a commendable job of chronicling Joe Kennedy’s story without undue reference to his children — bringing them in only at pertinent moments in Joe’s life — by the 1950s this separation is no longer tenable. As JFK explodes as a national figure, he breaks away from his father, relying on Dad for money and other help but making more and more of his own political decisions — the father opposed Kennedy’s bid for the 1956 vice-presidential nomination, for example — and arriving at his own policy stances. Accordingly, the book’s narrative, too, breaks from its tight focus on the elder Kennedy as the son takes center stage. Even though Nasaw throughout the book refers to the father as “Kennedy,” it becomes jarring in the book’s last chapters to find the freestanding surname used to refer to Joe, not Jack.

Nasaw notes some similarities between the two Kennedys’ foreign policies, but it’s the differences that are truly striking. In foreign policy, JFK was notably less complacent about communism than his father, while also arguing presciently against Western colonialism, notably in the case of French Algeria. In domestic policy, a similar pattern emerged. Although Joe Kennedy supported the Democratic Party’s traditional belief in federal largesse, he was too much the businessman to call himself a liberal and too close to the Catholic hierarchy to share JFK’s belief in the strict separation of church and state. In contrast, JFK, like his brothers after him, managed to transcend his father’s parochialism and identify as a liberal — hardboiled, certainly, and disdainful of bleeding-heart sentimentalism, but proud to promote the New Frontier policies that would bear fruit under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

As with many a patriarch, the influence of Joseph P. Kennedy lay largely in the ways that his strong-minded and talented sons found to rebel.

bookworld@washpost.com

David Greenberg is a professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. He is working on a history of the American presidency and the development of spin.

THE PATRIARCH

The Remarkable Life
and Turbulent Times of
Joseph P. Kennedy

By David Nasaw

Penguin Press. 868 pp. $40