THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, April 12, 1995 TAG: 9504120032
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: BY RUTH WALKER
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
JOHN F. KENNEDY said that his mother, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, was the glue that held the family together.
Was he right? Maybe, but readers won't be able to answer yes or no on the basis of ``Rose: The Life and Times of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy'' (Pocket Books, 454 pp., $23). Author Charles Higham, known as a biographer of Hollywood personalities and of the Duchess of Windsor, gives us a mass of information (and no index) about the stylish matriarch's activities.
Unfortunately, the essential character of the subject rarely comes through. Sometimes she is a shadow at the edge of the narrative; at other times the author ignores her altogether as he lays out stories about the business and political exploits of her buccaneering husband, Joseph P. Kennedy.
In discussing the couple's life together, Higham rebuts allegations that Joseph and Rose Kennedy were anti-Semitic. He points to their numerous Jewish friends and associates and comments, ``More than any Jewish mogul in Hollywood, the upstart gentile Joe Kennedy made picture after picture designed to make the American public aware of the fine qualities of Jewish family life at a time when there were powerful anti-Semitic forces operating at all levels of American society.''
After having tried to clear the Kennedys of charges of anti-Semitism, however, the author casually mentions many pages later that Joseph Kennedy often made anti-Semitic remarks ``in the general manner of the time.''
The Kennedys endured prejudice as Irish Catholics. Higham tells us that when Rose and Joseph spent their honeymoon at the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., they ``could mingle with society figures, including the Boston elite, who so definitively snubbed them at home.'' He doesn't explain how or why the Brahmins became more sociable in West Virginia.
When the Kennedys moved into Hyannis Port, Mass., he says, their exclusion was not so much because of their Catholicism as because ``they did not belong to the accepted top level of society either locally or internationally.'' Higham explains that those who excluded them were members of Pittsburgh's Protestant ruling families, who had taken over from the Brahmins.
Higham makes a point of Rose Kennedy's tolerance for her husband's infidelities. Those who have followed the Kennedy saga probably will be surprised (and skeptical) on being told that Joseph Kennedy's involvement with actress Gloria Swanson was not romantic.
At times, Higham is almost stultifying in his presentation of material, but then he can also leave us feeling shortchanged. For example, he tells about Joseph Kennedy's ``astonishing decision'' to send son Joe Jr. to study under the socialist Harold Laski at the London School of Economics. Readers who would like to learn the effect of this radical experience on young Kennedy will be disappointed.
The vivacious Kennedys had considerable success in England, where they went just before World War II for the patriarch to assume duties as ambassador from the United States. Eventually, he was to be excoriated for his defeatist remarks in respect to Britain. Higham says that Rose Kennedy was not comfortable with her husband's explosive statements, which often were contradicted by others he uttered. ``His lack of stability, emotional or intellectual, was a burden to her that she bore as gracefully as she could,'' Higham writes.
It was during the Kennedys' ambassadorial days that daughter Kathleen met William Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington and heir of the Duke of Devonshire. To Rose's dismay, Kathleen married Cavendish, who belonged to one of England's noted Protestant families.
After the death of Joe Kennedy Jr. in action over Europe, Kathleen went from England to Hyannis Port. According to Higham, whose sources aren't always discernible, ``Rose was still so angry with her that even in this extremity of grief she could not embrace or kiss her renegade daughter and refused even to talk to her.'' Soon, Kathleen was to receive news that Cavendish had been killed in action; she was to die in a plane crash.
The meeting with Kathleen at Hyannis Port may be considered a telling episode about Rose Kennedy. Then there was the occasion of her husband's stroke. She was on a golf course when Frank Saunders, a minion, arrived with the news.
``She was annoyed at this interruption of her favorite game and furious that Saunders had made a spectacle of himself in front of the golfers,'' Higham writes. She yielded to Saunders' insistence that she go home, where she ordered that paramedics be summoned. Then, according to this account, ``she drove herself back to the country club to finish her game.'' MEMO: Ruth Walker is a retired book editor of The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo
The Kennedy clan, including Rose and Joe, gathered at the time of
John's election as president.
by CNB