Stand By Your Men : THE KENNEDY WOMEN, <i> By Laurence Leamer (Villard Books: $27.50; 796 pp.)</i>

The Kennedy women, like their brothers and husbands, were trained to merchandise the family mythology, no matter what. They were pressed into service most effectively in late October, 1960, the final week of the presidential campaign. Across America, television viewers turned on their sets to see “At Home With the Kennedys,” one of the earliest attempts to sell a presidential candidate as if he were a mere celebrity. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, the candidate’s wife, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, his mother, and all of his sisters except for Pat Lawford sat stiffly in a living room and talked about Jack Kennedy’s personal life. The sisters, Eunice and Jean, burbled about their lives at Hyannis--the houses near each other, the children’s horseback rides and swims. For the 1960 audience, these exotic women were like birds of paradise, and America, newly prosperous, was captivated by the illusion of their lives.

In the days after Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ recent death, snippets from this commercial were aired frequently. How young all the Kennedy women looked! They were hardly out of their 20s, and it showed: They were proper Sacred Heart girls, sitting with their ankles crossed as the nuns had taught them. And, as if it were part of their catechism, they had already learned how to camouflage a lifetime of family secrets.

Sitting beside a tentative and delicate Jackie was her mother-in-law, Rose, in a good suit, her cold ambitions apparent even through a 1960 camera eye. Rose’s cadence was robotic: Isn’t Jack lucky he found a wife who is fond of campaigning! Jackie’s response was equally stiff and equally false. “I’ve always enjoyed campaigning so much, Mrs. Kennedy. Your son, Teddy, is the campaign manager, as you know. . . .” How could anyone in 1960 say that the Kennedy women, despite being Catholic, did not represent the best of America? “At Home With the Kennedys” is credited with being the final salvo in J.F.K.’s narrow victory.

Would history have been different if the American public had known that the mystique of this glamorous family was based on a pack of lies? By this time, of course, Jackie, very pregnant, was desperate, miserable in her marriage. She was an ambitious, rather fey young woman mired in the contradictions of what it truly meant to be a Kennedy woman. She was surrounded by evasions and half-truths and had already debated leaving Jack. Off-camera as well, Pat Kennedy Lawford’s marriage was a shambles of alcohol and indifference. The exuberant Kathleen (Kick) Kennedy and her older brother, Joe Jr., were long dead; Jack Kennedy was suffering in secret from Addison’s disease, and the women in the family had learned to live with the horror of their retarded sister Rosemary’s lobotomy, the result of a decision made cravenly by their father, Joseph Kennedy.

For anyone with a conscience in the America of 1960, Joe Kennedy was a sleaze who had supported appeasement before the war and he was personally repulsive as well, often running his hands up and down the thighs of his daughters’ friends and talking about which women were great lays.

Ahead of this family were the glory years of Camelot and then murders, drug addictions, Chappaquiddick, William Kennedy Smith’s rape trial, more alcoholism and lies; and courtiers who would build up their image, perhaps because, as Jackie once wrote, the family was like “carbonated water when everyone else was flat.”

The Kennedy women gathered again more recently for Jackie Onassis’ funeral in late May. I watched them as they appeared at the wake and in the church--indefatigable, almost jaunty, a Kennedy-esque way to grieve. The wake was as raucous as Ethel’s yearly reunions at Hickory Hill, repelling many of Jackie’s closest New York friends. The sisters, who had called Jackie “the deb,” seemed as if they were at a cocktail party, one friend told me. One sister had sat at Jackie’s bedside as she slipped into a coma, narrating loudly, “So-and-so says they love you, Jackie!!”

At the funeral on Park Avenue, Ethel Kennedy bounded out of her car with her son Joe Kennedy Jr., smiling and waving at the hundreds of reporters gathered on the street as if she were on a campaign stop. It is a commonplace of biographers, including Leamer, to tacitly criticize this family for such boisterous vulgarity, for its refusal to look at shadows, to avoid pain at any cost. And yet the Kennedys have produced a President, an attorney general, a senator and dozens of grandchildren who retain a ferocious loyalty to the myth.

I approached “The Kennedy Women” with some dread. Its size is daunting. I felt the very title set up a false premise with its implication that there was something admirable, even exemplary, about the Kennedy women when, in fact, they were defined by the family men. I wondered what new material there was to add to the scores of books that have already been published on the family. The family’s matriarch, Rose Kennedy, once called her own kin “a nation unto themselves,” but she clearly had no idea that this nation would provide a cottage industry for dozens of biographers.

Leamer has done an exhaustive and admirable amount of reporting. The book is filled with new material about Rose Kennedy’s early life and Kathleen Kennedy’s time in England during the war. Leamer was given Kathleen’s letters by the family, and they are fascinating documents that reveal her desperation to be accepted by her parents. Leamer also chronicles Joe Kennedy’s appalling years as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, a stint marked by such anger from Franklin Roosevelt that after his last harsh words to Kennedy he ordered his secretary to “never let that man in here again.” The entire story of Joe Kennedy’s mutilation of his retarded daughter, Rosemary, is also retailed, as are the details of Jean Kennedy’s youthful self-importance and moments of entitlement--which foreshadow the behavior and brutish personality of her son, William Kennedy Smith.

“The Kennedy Women’s” strength however, is also its weakness. Leamer lacks the historical overview or compelling narrative vision that has made such biographies as Robert Caro’s studies of Lyndon Johnson definitive works of history. At times, I felt overwhelmed by the author’s inability to streamline some of his material. This is not to say I did not happily spend several long plane rides in the last month with “The Kennedy Women”--and I was rewarded with many fine anecdotes and scenes: gossip as insight.

Unfortunately, no detail or moment is too small for Leamer, and at times there is a glut of information. We learn that Joe Kennedy had the largest long-distance telephone bill in America; that Rose Kennedy wore the wrong gloves to be presented to the queen; that Eunice had to sleep with earplugs and an eye mask. It is all here, sometimes far too much of it, the bottom pinching, the alcoholism of Pat Lawford, Joan Kennedy and Ted, as well as Jean Kennedy Smith’s purported affair with Alan Jay Lerner.

Infidelities and craven opportunism permeate the narrative, but what is lacking is the author’s sense of the political vision of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, which captivated a generation. Leamer is more interested in the personalities than the politics of the Kennedy White House, detailed in the historian Richard Reeves’ fine study, “President Kennedy.” In Leamer’s White House, Eunice bombards her brother on the subject of mental health to such a degree he often avoided her calls; Jackie tells Oleg Cassini that she doesn’t want “all the fat women in America” to wear her dresses, Jack Kennedy treats Arthur Schlesinger with a surprising offhandedness that borders on contempt. After Schlesinger attempted to take credit for advising the President about the Bay of Pigs, the President reportedly snapped: “I’ll tell you what Artie can advise on. He can devote all of his mental capacity to advising Jackie on . . . furniture.” Leamer’s barb at Schlesinger seemed a bit gratuitous to me and I wondered if Schlesinger had refused to cooperate with him.

Leamer is adept at describing how the Kennedy women learned not to see, viewing character flaws and horrendous amoral behavior as “a thread that if unraveled would ruin the entire suit.” Rose Kennedy’s tendency to push away from pain all of her life might have been a legacy of her mother, Josephine Mary (Josie) Hannon. As a child, Josie Hannon, was given the responsibility to watch over her younger sister, Elizabeth, and a friend. The two little girls accidentally drowned in a pond; Josie’s father laid out their two bodies in his parlor as a rebuke to his older daughter. This might have sent another child into the nunnery, but young Josie learned to hide all emotions behind a mask of tranquillity and she escaped her family very young to marry John (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald, who became the notorious Boston mayor.

Once in the middle of her husband’s 1913 campaign for mayor, Josie received a black-bordered letter saying her husband was involved with a woman named Toodles. Honey Fitz was forced out of the race, but Josie refused to look at the shadows of this relationship, as Rose would someday refuse to acknowledge the shadows in her own relationship with Joe Kennedy. Although Honey Fitz doted on his daughter, Rose, he was filled with bitterness that she chose Joe Kennedy for a groom. Honey Fitz had once given Rose the grandest deb party Boston had ever seen, but her wedding was modest and tainted by anger as Honey Fitz and Joe almost came to fisticuffs at the reception.

In the first crisis of her marriage, Rose pulled the wedding ring off and stood with her father. Later, she rarely spoke of her wedding day and her marriage disintegrated into a stage set very quickly. But what a stage set! Grand houses, sweeping ambitions, audiences with prime ministers and presidents. The back-story of Joe Kennedy’s life is familiar; we know of his nights with chorus girls, the intense affair with Gloria Swanson, the safaris into the bedrooms of his daughters’ friends. If Rose went to the family screening room, she might see her husband sitting cozily with “a secretary,” her daughters present. Is it any wonder that the Kennedy women, Pat, Jean and Eunice have had their own troubling histories with men?

As her daughters would someday do, Rose saw her life as a complex matrix of obligations and duties. Leamer does not have the fascinating detail of Rose’s purported neglect of her children that Nigel Hamilton chronicled in “Reckless Youth.” Although Rose often didn’t see her children for months, she was able to make her maternal concerns quite clear. For example, she kept her weight at 115 pounds and was obsessed with appearances. In May, 1927, when Kathleen was only 7 years old, she wrote to her mother, “I gained a pound and a half. Eunice gained some too. Rosemary is as fat as ever.” The family was so disciplined that each night after dinner they were only allowed a single chocolate.

The Kennedy women paid a very dear price for their inability to see reality if it blocked their ambitions. On the night of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, his 11-year-old son, David, was alone watching TV when he saw his father gunned down. A campaign worker quickly scooped him up, but no one in the family evinced much interest in his whereabouts. Years later, he died of a drug overdose and Leamer reports that Caroline Kennedy went into her cousin’s bedroom at a Palm Beach hotel to clean up the horror before the police arrived, although she later denied this. Is it true? If so, it means that the family tendencies have unhappily been inherited by one of the brightest and toughest young women the Kennedys ever produced.

I was particularly haunted by one scene in “The Kennedy Women.” It is the very day in 1961 when Joe Kennedy has a stroke. Rose, appearing to be dutiful, is told by the servants that her husband has been stricken. Think of it: The Kennedys are at home in Palm Beach, close to excellent hospitals. She airily passes off the news, refuses to call the doctor, has a long lunch and then goes for a leisurely swim. Late in the afternoon, she arranges to get her husband to the hospital and by that time, he is beyond help.

The rest of his life, of course, is spent almost comatose. In another family, such as the Von Bulows, this kind of neglect might have a murderous subtext. Rose, as Leamer has convinced us, has pushed away truth for so much of her life that she chose not to see how desperate her husband’s condition was. Was this, yet again, a case of Rose avoiding the shadows of life in the Kennedy family or was it, just perhaps, a case when a Kennedy woman might have wreaked a fair bit of revenge? Is it possible that all along, Rose Kennedy, who has recently turned 104, knew that avoiding pain was the ultimate secret of a long life?

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