Volume 27, Number 13 · August 14, 1980
All in the Family
By Ronald Steel
Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy
by Herbert S. Parmet
Dial, 586 pp., $14.95
Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance
by Michael R. Beschloss
Norton, 318 pp., $14.95
Somewhere in the clouds over the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, or wherever his soul resides, Joseph P. Kennedy must be smiling. Having labored to immortalize himself through the greater glory of his nine children—or at least his four sons, whose careers he orchestrated as surrogates of his own—he has now succeeded. A man whose greatest talent lay in making money, and whose goal in life was to preserve as much as possible—'an Irish Sammy Glick…driven by nothing beyond personal gratification, which included his immediate family as an extension of himself,' in Herbert Parmet's unkind but not inaccurate phrase—he was neither a particularly admirable nor even a significant figure in American life. His claim to our attention comes not from his public positions, but from his private ones. It is as sire that Joseph P. Kennedy is renowned. His is a case of the virtues of the sons being visited upon the father.
Review, 2499 words
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