Volume 40, Number 1 & 2 · January 14, 1993
The Kennedy Scandals
By Elizabeth Hardwick
OTHER BOOKS USED IN THIS ESSAY
JFK: Reckless Youth
by Nigel Hamilton
Random House, 898 pp., $30.00
The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
St. Martin's, 932 pp., $19.95 (paper)
A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Houghton Mifflin
A Question of Character: The Life of John F. Kennedy
by Thomas C. Reeves
Free Press, 421 pp., $13.95 (paper)
The Founding Father
by Richard Whelan
New American Library
The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power
by Garry Wills
Little, Brown
Of Kennedys and Kings
by Harris Wofford
University of Pittsburgh Press, 496 pp., $16.95 (paper)
The price of public life is the exposure of the follies, or worse, the disgraces of private life. Nothing new here—rumors, palace gossip, scandals whispered by the disaffected and the competitive, each sometimes adding false transgressions to a mountain of genuine turpitude. Macauley writes of the 'libellers' who, not content with a rich, damaging dossier on Napoleon, were in the habit of publishing 'how he poisoned a girl with arsenic, when he was in military school—how he hired a grenadier to shoot Dessaix at Marengo—how he filled St. Cloud with all the pollutions of Capri.' Still, nothing in previous history equals the powers available today, available and tempting to scandal: the discrediting accusation, the compromising revelation sent out without hesitation to the public—all in the friendliest way clanging and banging reputations like cans in the weekly shopping basket. And to this our times have added the playful hidden camera and the amusing bug on the bedside telephone.
Review, 5768 words
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