“Are you sure this is what you want?” That’s what historian David Nasaw asked when U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy proposed a no-holds-barred biography of his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch of one of America’s most famous families.
Announced earlier this month by publisher Ann Godoff of the Penguin Press, Nasaw’s book will have the full cooperation of the Kennedy family, including extensive interviews and unprecedented access to all the Joseph P. Kennedy papers. The family will have no control over the process or the result.
Joseph P. Kennedy (1888-1969) had such a sprawling life and career that no one repository could contain the whole story. A bank president at 25, shipbuilder, Wall Street speculator, Hollywood financier, early booster and later opponent of Franklin D. Roosevelt, first chairman of the SEC, ambassador to Great Britain and father of three senators and one president, Joe Kennedy left footprints across the financial, political and cultural landscape.
Nasaw, 61, a historian at City University of New York, is the author of “The Chief,” a best-selling 2000 biography of legendary newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst and another about Gilded Age tycoon Andrew Carnegie, in a biography to be published in October. He had never given a thought to writing about Joseph P. Kennedy.
Then came the phone calls.
Working on his Hearst biography in the late 1990s, Nasaw contacted Amanda Smith, daughter of Jean Kennedy Smith and niece of Edward Kennedy, who at the time was editing “Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy,” published in 2001. Nasaw hoped that Smith might have correspondence between Hearst and Joe Kennedy. In 1937, the bankrupt publisher had called on Kennedy for help in arranging a bond issue.
“I discovered that Amanda knew of an amazing amount of material that no one had seen, that was uncataloged in the Kennedy papers,” Nasaw said by telephone from New York. Sometime later he met Jean Smith at a dinner and suggested that Amanda write a biography of her grandfather.
In January 2004, Nasaw said, “Jean called me and asked me if I would like to do the book,” but he was immersed in his Carnegie book. Later, Kennedy called him and repeated the request.
Nasaw flew to Washington to meet with the senator, prepared for some candid talk.
As a senior professor in the CUNY graduate school, Nasaw had no interest in an “authorized biography.” His children have objected to some previous books. In 1992, Sen. Kennedy and his sisters – Smith, Eunice Shriver and Patricia Lawford – wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times angrily refuting the depiction of their father as tyrannical, possibly even sexually abusive, and their mother as cold, in Nigel Hamilton’s best seller, “JFK: Reckless Youth.”
In his meeting with Kennedy, Nasaw said he asked, “‘Are you sure this is what you and the family wants?’ I would have to write the full story as I found it. I wouldn’t be surprised to find something that the family wouldn’t be happy to discover – it’s bound to happen. I told him I would undertake this project if I had guarantees to see all the documents at the Kennedy Library and elsewhere, and if I were free to write whatever I wanted, with no censorship or interference of any kind. He said, ‘Absolutely. That’s why we got in touch with you. We loved and admired our father, and we want his story to be told.”‘
When he met later with Kennedy’s sisters, Nasaw learned that they likewise were not worried. Though some materials in the library have been restricted in the past, Nasaw said the four siblings agreed “to give me unrestricted access to all the material held at the JFK Library and to additional materials that the family holds. No exceptions, no exclusions.”
Speaking about the book by telephone this week, Kennedy explained, “My father has never had a serious author look at him in the totality of his life experiences …” He said Amanda Smith’s collection, which contained many letters he had never seen, “triggered my sense that we are getting older, that it’s important to have a really first-rate examination of his life and his contributions to the country.” Kennedy had read and admired Nasaw’s Hearst book and thought he would be the right person for the job.
Asked about the possibility of Nasaw turning up unattractive truths about his father, Kennedy said, “The things that are negative have all been printed, and a lot of them are untrue. He had his failings, but as my life goes on, I don’t see many who are his equal. My sisters and I are confident that a complete, thorough, fair evaluation of his life and contributions will stand up exceedingly well.”
