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The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power
From one of America's foremost historians, The Kennedy Imprisonment is the definitive historical and psychological analysis of the Kennedy clan. The winner of a Pulitzer Prize, Garry Wills reveals a family that enjoyed public adulation but provided fluctuating leadership, that experienced both unparalleled fame and odd failures, and whose basic values ensnared its men in their own myths of success and masculinity. In the end, Wills reveals that the the Kennedys' crippling conception of power touched every part of their public and private lives, including their relationships with women and world leaders. Sometimes gossipy, sometimes philosophical, The Kennedy Imprisonment is a book that is as true, insightful, and relevant as ever.
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
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711 people want to read
About the author
Garry Wills
153 books251 followersGarry Wills is an American author, journalist, political philosopher, and historian, specializing in American history, politics, and religion, especially the history of the Catholic Church. He won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1993.
Wills has written over fifty books and, since 1973, has been a frequent reviewer for The New York Review of Books. He became a faculty member of the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is an Emeritus Professor of History.
Wills has written over fifty books and, since 1973, has been a frequent reviewer for The New York Review of Books. He became a faculty member of the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is an Emeritus Professor of History.
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October 19, 2021
…they ran their ops until the wind changed and the ops got run back on them. (Michael Herr)
I love “Camelot” because it’s such a meretricious fantasy, a cunning compact of sleaze and style, one of the most vulgar political dreams the country has entertained, and one perfect for a society then at the apex of its power and prosperity, but at the same time uneasy, immature, and already overstimulated by electronic mirages. To cautious counselors President Kennedy bragged: “They can't touch me while I'm alive. And after I'm dead, who cares?”—so it’s appropriate that this elaborately cynical PR fiction began to stink and spoil so soon after the end of the career—the life—it was intended to advance. Jackie did her best to extend the romance, raise a durable myth; and Americans were, for a suitable time, hushed and reverent round the flame; but by the 70s “Camelot” was a byword for sordid hubris. The Kennedys endure as historical soap opera. Their story pushes the same buttons, excites the same dreams of luxury and looks, the same dread of curse and delectation of downfall, as the most outlandish daytime drama. It’s a shame, then, that the stilted, self-important miniseries has been the favored mode of representing the Kennedys. They deserve so much worse, as we deserve to be better entertained.
To say “Camelot,” though, is to give disproportionate credit to Jackie. She gave a cultured and later funereal arrangement to the images of wealth and power and winning Joseph P. Kennedy had been feeding the public since the 1930s. I could read about Joe Kennedy all day. He’s a familiar American type, the self-created mogul, a monster of ruthless ambition and vast contempt, with the difference that he never tamed himself for admission to the gentler clubs. To Wills he is a rootless raider (of Hollywood, of Wall Street) rather than a stable member of a business community—“a predator on other businessmen, not their partner”—and a kind of postmodern social climber whose goals vis-à-vis “Old Money” were not acceptance and assimilation but usurpation, transcendence, and virtual displacement. His sons would play aristocrats to an audience of voters. Amassing the fortune that would fund so many campaigns (worth $500 million in 1969), Kennedy realized that a new reality was opening up, an arena of electronic dreams whose hologram aristocrats—celebrities—might wield the same power as “real” ones. In the 1920s, Wills writes, Kennedy was
Captivating the general public’s debased cinematic notions of aristocracy was easy and represented a lesser prize than the seduction of the chattering classes. My favorite parts of this book were those devoted to the selling of JFK as an Intellectual, and darling of “educated” taste. Joe Kennedy had the New York Times columnist Arthur Krock substantially re-write Jack’s callow undergraduate thesis, and, with the aid of Henry Luce’s Time-Life promotional machine, was able to package Why England Slept (1940) as a daring eve-of-war meditation on preparedness in peacetime. A crack team of ghostwriters and Krock’s secret lobbying delivered Profiles in Courage and the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for History. War hero, rakish stunner, and historian of heroes, JFK was a major saint (Hemingway being God) in the Hefner-Mailer era of upper-middlebrow masculine self-fashioning. Everyone worshiped the “existential” hero—the gunslinger, the jazzman, the astronaut orbiting earth in his lonely little pod—but even the working stiff might, under the tutelage of Playboy and Esquire, seduce a woman with apposite quotation from Nietzsche and Freud while Ravel revolved on the Hi-Fi; might nonchalantly explain a canvas of forbidding abstraction, appreciate Hard Bop as a strenuous spiritual wager, and be at ease with hip Negroes (Wills: “It is easy to forget that the Sinatra ‘rat pack’ was considered a liberal phenomena in the late fifties. After all, it admitted one black performer to its carousing”).
Kennedy’s affinities with Reagan, Wills argues, go much deeper than the cheesy surface histrionics (“Camelot,” “Morning in America”) of the “Appearances Presidency.” Wills traces the demise of the Rooseveltian “liberal consensus” to Kennedy’s glamorous personalization of the office; to his campaign claim that Eisenhower’s cautious bureaucracy had hampered America’s ability to combat the spread of communism in the globe’s far corners; to his redefinition of the president as a “charismatic” figure who to accomplish anything (protect us from Communism/terrorism, eliminate Castro/Saddam) must concentrate power in himself and deploy it outside of, or even against, the inherited procedures and bureaucracy of “big government.” This “delegitimation” of the idea of government is now central to both parties and a fact of the terminal decline of our political instutitions. Domestically, it has allowed politicians in the pay of various poisoners and exploiters to make “regulation” a dirty word—as if regulation isn’t what keeps the feces out of your Happy Meal—and to brand as tyrannical services and infrastructure that most voters, if they could stop and think for a minute, if they could put aside their cinematic nostalgia for simpler self-sufficient times, might understand as essential to the civil society they wish to live in. In foreign affairs Kennedy’s charisma also casts a shadow. The Kennedy Imprisonment was first published in 1982, so there are no Iraq parallels, but reading Wills on the Bay of Pigs (and on the opening moves in Vietnam), one fills them in: the bureaucratic fractiousness, the governing against government; the Joint Chiefs and traditional intelligence heads sidelined or browbeat by secret planners; the caution innate in generals dismissed as lethargy or spinelessness; the “lean” forces that turn out to be skeletal, inadequate; the promised “flexible response,” the delivered overreach and quagmire. And I wasn’t surprised to read that Kennedy’s men had no plan for a post-Castro Cuba, should the invasion have succeeded.
I really, really like this:
I love “Camelot” because it’s such a meretricious fantasy, a cunning compact of sleaze and style, one of the most vulgar political dreams the country has entertained, and one perfect for a society then at the apex of its power and prosperity, but at the same time uneasy, immature, and already overstimulated by electronic mirages. To cautious counselors President Kennedy bragged: “They can't touch me while I'm alive. And after I'm dead, who cares?”—so it’s appropriate that this elaborately cynical PR fiction began to stink and spoil so soon after the end of the career—the life—it was intended to advance. Jackie did her best to extend the romance, raise a durable myth; and Americans were, for a suitable time, hushed and reverent round the flame; but by the 70s “Camelot” was a byword for sordid hubris. The Kennedys endure as historical soap opera. Their story pushes the same buttons, excites the same dreams of luxury and looks, the same dread of curse and delectation of downfall, as the most outlandish daytime drama. It’s a shame, then, that the stilted, self-important miniseries has been the favored mode of representing the Kennedys. They deserve so much worse, as we deserve to be better entertained.
To say “Camelot,” though, is to give disproportionate credit to Jackie. She gave a cultured and later funereal arrangement to the images of wealth and power and winning Joseph P. Kennedy had been feeding the public since the 1930s. I could read about Joe Kennedy all day. He’s a familiar American type, the self-created mogul, a monster of ruthless ambition and vast contempt, with the difference that he never tamed himself for admission to the gentler clubs. To Wills he is a rootless raider (of Hollywood, of Wall Street) rather than a stable member of a business community—“a predator on other businessmen, not their partner”—and a kind of postmodern social climber whose goals vis-à-vis “Old Money” were not acceptance and assimilation but usurpation, transcendence, and virtual displacement. His sons would play aristocrats to an audience of voters. Amassing the fortune that would fund so many campaigns (worth $500 million in 1969), Kennedy realized that a new reality was opening up, an arena of electronic dreams whose hologram aristocrats—celebrities—might wield the same power as “real” ones. In the 1920s, Wills writes, Kennedy was
giving aristocracy a new definition from the jazz age. After his rejection by the Brahmins of Boston, he oriented his world around New York and Hollywood, around the sports and journalism and cinema stars of the roaring twenties. A starlet would have disgraced the better Boston families; but Kennedy displayed his actresses as so many decorations, as signs that he was looking to new centers of power and of popular acclaim. The Boston gentry were exclusive. He would be expansive, open and racy. He was steering his family down the course that made them staples of the tabloids. As he told Gloria Swanson: “The Cabots and the Lodges wouldn’t be caught dead at the pictures, or let their children go. And that’s why their servants know more about what’s going on in the world than they do. The working class gets smarter every day, thanks to radio and pictures. It’s the snooty Back Bay bankers who are missing the boat."
Captivating the general public’s debased cinematic notions of aristocracy was easy and represented a lesser prize than the seduction of the chattering classes. My favorite parts of this book were those devoted to the selling of JFK as an Intellectual, and darling of “educated” taste. Joe Kennedy had the New York Times columnist Arthur Krock substantially re-write Jack’s callow undergraduate thesis, and, with the aid of Henry Luce’s Time-Life promotional machine, was able to package Why England Slept (1940) as a daring eve-of-war meditation on preparedness in peacetime. A crack team of ghostwriters and Krock’s secret lobbying delivered Profiles in Courage and the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for History. War hero, rakish stunner, and historian of heroes, JFK was a major saint (Hemingway being God) in the Hefner-Mailer era of upper-middlebrow masculine self-fashioning. Everyone worshiped the “existential” hero—the gunslinger, the jazzman, the astronaut orbiting earth in his lonely little pod—but even the working stiff might, under the tutelage of Playboy and Esquire, seduce a woman with apposite quotation from Nietzsche and Freud while Ravel revolved on the Hi-Fi; might nonchalantly explain a canvas of forbidding abstraction, appreciate Hard Bop as a strenuous spiritual wager, and be at ease with hip Negroes (Wills: “It is easy to forget that the Sinatra ‘rat pack’ was considered a liberal phenomena in the late fifties. After all, it admitted one black performer to its carousing”).
Later, under the dreaded Nixon, celebrators of the New Frontier began to express misgivings about the Imperial Presidency. Schlesinger himself then traced the growth of presidential power, admitting faults in his heroes, Jackson and Roosevelt and Kennedy. But Kennedy’s short time in office was not just an acceleration of prior trends. It added something new—not so much the Imperial Presidency as the Appearances Presidency. The man’s very looks thrilled people like Mailer: “If the nation voted to improve its face, what an impetus might be given to the arts, to the practices, to the lives and to the imagination of the American.” Kennedy was able to take the short cuts that he did, command support for rash acts, because he controlled the images that controlled the professional critics of our society. They had been recruited beforehand on minor points of style. He was not Eisenhower—and that was sufficient achievement for the “eggheads” who had been mocking Eisenhower for years. Kennedy was the Steerforth who flattered and tamed the schoolboys by standing up to their master. He was their surrogate, their dream-self, what all the old second lieutenants from World War II wished they had become. Through him they escaped their humdrum lives at the typewriter, on the newspaper, in the classroom. From OSS to MLA is a rude descent.
Kennedy’s affinities with Reagan, Wills argues, go much deeper than the cheesy surface histrionics (“Camelot,” “Morning in America”) of the “Appearances Presidency.” Wills traces the demise of the Rooseveltian “liberal consensus” to Kennedy’s glamorous personalization of the office; to his campaign claim that Eisenhower’s cautious bureaucracy had hampered America’s ability to combat the spread of communism in the globe’s far corners; to his redefinition of the president as a “charismatic” figure who to accomplish anything (protect us from Communism/terrorism, eliminate Castro/Saddam) must concentrate power in himself and deploy it outside of, or even against, the inherited procedures and bureaucracy of “big government.” This “delegitimation” of the idea of government is now central to both parties and a fact of the terminal decline of our political instutitions. Domestically, it has allowed politicians in the pay of various poisoners and exploiters to make “regulation” a dirty word—as if regulation isn’t what keeps the feces out of your Happy Meal—and to brand as tyrannical services and infrastructure that most voters, if they could stop and think for a minute, if they could put aside their cinematic nostalgia for simpler self-sufficient times, might understand as essential to the civil society they wish to live in. In foreign affairs Kennedy’s charisma also casts a shadow. The Kennedy Imprisonment was first published in 1982, so there are no Iraq parallels, but reading Wills on the Bay of Pigs (and on the opening moves in Vietnam), one fills them in: the bureaucratic fractiousness, the governing against government; the Joint Chiefs and traditional intelligence heads sidelined or browbeat by secret planners; the caution innate in generals dismissed as lethargy or spinelessness; the “lean” forces that turn out to be skeletal, inadequate; the promised “flexible response,” the delivered overreach and quagmire. And I wasn’t surprised to read that Kennedy’s men had no plan for a post-Castro Cuba, should the invasion have succeeded.
I really, really like this:
If bureaucratic “big government” gets defined, permanently, as a doddering old sheriff, then each presidential election becomes a call for some new gunfighter to face the problems “government” cannot solve. Kennedy’s successors have drifted, steadily, toward this conception of their role. But their appeal to Roosevelt as a model in unjustified. It is true that crises gave Roosevelt quasi-dictatorial power, and that dictatorship in the old Roman sense became respectable again in the thirties. A widespread disillusionment with parliamentary procedures, combined with a fear of the radical Left and with economic breakdown, led to a call for strong leaders—for Hitler and Mussolini, Franco and Salazar. This mood even gave a momentary glamour of menace to American figures like Huey Long and Father Coughlin or an Englishman like Oswald Mosley. But Roosevelt’s achievement, like Washington’s, was to channel his own authority into programs and institutions. In that sense, Roosevelt resisted even while exercising “charisma,” relegitimating institutions at a time when other strong leaders were delegitimating them. This made Roosevelt differ not only in historical moment from the Kennedy period, but even more basically from Kennedy’s conception of power. Theorists of “deadlock” in the Eisenhower fifties felt that the lethargy of the public, the obstructionism of Congress, the external menace of communism made it imperative for a President to seize every margin of power available to him: he was facing so many hostile power centers that only the glad embrace of every opportunity could promise him success. No internal check upon one’s appetite for power was needed; the external checks were sufficient—were overwhelming, in fact, unless the President became single-minded in his pursuit of power. But Roosevelt did not have this ambition of seizing power to be used against his own government. He sought power for that government, and set up the very agencies and departments that Neustadt and his followers resented. He created subordinate power centers, lending them his own authority. He began that process of “routinizing” crisis powers that is the long-range meaning of the New Deal. There is something perverse about the “liberal” attack on Eisenhower’s bureaucracy in the nineteen-fifties, which simply revived the Republicans’ first response to the New Deal.
July 23, 2017
Garry Wills, who has been described as “a sort of intellectual outlaw” by the New York Times, has written many books related to politics, including Reagan’s America, Nixon Agonistes, Lincoln at Gettysburg (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize), and The Kennedy Imprisonment, originally published in 1982. This 2017 edition of The Kennedy Imprisonment includes an updated preface, but is still essentially Wills taking on the myths surrounding the Kennedy clan and disabusing people of the popular vision of the Kennedy image as viewed through the lens of Camelot.
For Kennedy fans who haven’t done much reading about the reality, this book may be unsettling as it pulls back the curtain and reveals a corrupt and opportunistic political family who valued image over reality, flattering myths and stories over truth,
and a world of “almost-Kennedys” and hangers-on who gave up their own integrity for the privilege of basking in the reflected glory of the Kennedy clan.
Wills covers the PT-109 story and the expert manipulation of it in print and film, the question of actual authorship of Profiles in Courage, the story that was presented as historical fact about the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the notorious womanizing of Joe Sr., John, and Teddy (with Bobby allegedly being the faithful one).
The book is divided into five sections, each devoted to a particular aspect of the Kennedy family: Sex, Family, Image, Charisma, and Power. But even before we get to these, the prologue tells us the particular slant of the author: “Because of privilege of various sorts, bad behavior does not have consequences, which means that it continues and becomes more pronounced.” The heavy weight on each of the brothers following the deaths of their siblings culminates in Teddy’s sad comment: “After Robert was killed, he told his aide Dun Gifford: “I can’t let go. We have a job to do. If I let go, Ethel will let go, and my mother will let go, and all my sisters.”” Yikes, what a heavy load he carried…and his dysfunctional, doomed campaign for the Presidency in 1980 is covered in depth, including a good look at poor Joan, who never really made it into the insular inner circle of the clan.
Wills says there was a palpable energy between and among the Kennedys that excluded all outsiders: “When the nurse took the Kennedy children swimming at Taggert’s Pier, back in the thirties, they all wore the same color bathing hats, so they could be distinguished from the other children…Ever since they have been wearing invisible caps that signal to each other on a radio frequency no one else can use.”
I have vivid memories of JFK’s inauguration (when a TV was wheeled into my elementary school classroom so we could watch and hear his speech) and the assassinations, including the televised coverage of the aftermath each time another tragedy unfolded. I admit it was a bit disconcerting to learn the level to which coverage and myth protection was managed and manipulated, but I was still pleased to have the opportunity to read a copy of this edition (thanks to Open Road Integrated Media and NetGalley).
For me, the problem is that this book, written as it was in the early 1980s, assumed a familiarity with many of the people and events that was likely appropriate 30+ years ago, but for many of us, memories fade – and for others, there is complete cluelessness about who these people are and what their significance was to the Kennedy story of the 1960s-80s.
In addition to needing to figure out the characters and their roles, the author’s writing became annoying. I appreciate a strong vocabulary, but in several instances, it seemed like a simpler word might have served the purpose: for example, “jansenist,” “circumnambient, ””orotundities,””thurible,” and “perdured’ seem a bit over the top (while the less puzzling “circumlocutious,” panegyric,” and “simulacra” seem to adequately demonstrate the author’s fine vocabulary). Or maybe it’s just me, and everyone else is completely familiar with the over-the-top examples listed above? In any case, that detracted from my appreciation of the book. (And spellcheck was equally puzzled by 7 of the 8 words listed above!)
In any case, it is a fine history of the clan and their impact on U.S. history and, while it may provoke a certain level of disappointment for readers to learn about both the human frailties and downright corrupt actions of their heroes, it is hugely entertaining. Political junkies in particular will love this. Four stars.
For Kennedy fans who haven’t done much reading about the reality, this book may be unsettling as it pulls back the curtain and reveals a corrupt and opportunistic political family who valued image over reality, flattering myths and stories over truth,
and a world of “almost-Kennedys” and hangers-on who gave up their own integrity for the privilege of basking in the reflected glory of the Kennedy clan.
Wills covers the PT-109 story and the expert manipulation of it in print and film, the question of actual authorship of Profiles in Courage, the story that was presented as historical fact about the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the notorious womanizing of Joe Sr., John, and Teddy (with Bobby allegedly being the faithful one).
The book is divided into five sections, each devoted to a particular aspect of the Kennedy family: Sex, Family, Image, Charisma, and Power. But even before we get to these, the prologue tells us the particular slant of the author: “Because of privilege of various sorts, bad behavior does not have consequences, which means that it continues and becomes more pronounced.” The heavy weight on each of the brothers following the deaths of their siblings culminates in Teddy’s sad comment: “After Robert was killed, he told his aide Dun Gifford: “I can’t let go. We have a job to do. If I let go, Ethel will let go, and my mother will let go, and all my sisters.”” Yikes, what a heavy load he carried…and his dysfunctional, doomed campaign for the Presidency in 1980 is covered in depth, including a good look at poor Joan, who never really made it into the insular inner circle of the clan.
Wills says there was a palpable energy between and among the Kennedys that excluded all outsiders: “When the nurse took the Kennedy children swimming at Taggert’s Pier, back in the thirties, they all wore the same color bathing hats, so they could be distinguished from the other children…Ever since they have been wearing invisible caps that signal to each other on a radio frequency no one else can use.”
I have vivid memories of JFK’s inauguration (when a TV was wheeled into my elementary school classroom so we could watch and hear his speech) and the assassinations, including the televised coverage of the aftermath each time another tragedy unfolded. I admit it was a bit disconcerting to learn the level to which coverage and myth protection was managed and manipulated, but I was still pleased to have the opportunity to read a copy of this edition (thanks to Open Road Integrated Media and NetGalley).
For me, the problem is that this book, written as it was in the early 1980s, assumed a familiarity with many of the people and events that was likely appropriate 30+ years ago, but for many of us, memories fade – and for others, there is complete cluelessness about who these people are and what their significance was to the Kennedy story of the 1960s-80s.
In addition to needing to figure out the characters and their roles, the author’s writing became annoying. I appreciate a strong vocabulary, but in several instances, it seemed like a simpler word might have served the purpose: for example, “jansenist,” “circumnambient, ””orotundities,””thurible,” and “perdured’ seem a bit over the top (while the less puzzling “circumlocutious,” panegyric,” and “simulacra” seem to adequately demonstrate the author’s fine vocabulary). Or maybe it’s just me, and everyone else is completely familiar with the over-the-top examples listed above? In any case, that detracted from my appreciation of the book. (And spellcheck was equally puzzled by 7 of the 8 words listed above!)
In any case, it is a fine history of the clan and their impact on U.S. history and, while it may provoke a certain level of disappointment for readers to learn about both the human frailties and downright corrupt actions of their heroes, it is hugely entertaining. Political junkies in particular will love this. Four stars.
April 28, 2019
This book is primarily about the men in the Kennedy Family and their strengths and weaknesses and now they addressed the use of power in a family steeped in money and influence. Each of the males in the family had different personalities and strengths and weaknesses of character. While I learned some new things about them (I have read a number of biographies on all of them), it was concerning that there were some glaring inaccuracies in the book. At times the book bogged down in what is little more than gossip which I am sure engages some readers, but I find somewhat boring.
Overall, this is simply an okay book, but not one that I would bother purchasing and rereading.
I received a free Kindle copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my fiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook and Twitter pages.
Overall, this is simply an okay book, but not one that I would bother purchasing and rereading.
I received a free Kindle copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my fiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook and Twitter pages.
September 5, 2025
Gary Wills is an unusual student of the Kennedy legacy. Wills was working for William Buckley at NATIONAL REVIEW during the height of JFK mania, and undergoing a crisis of conscience over Vietnam and civil rights when Bobby ran for president in 1968. Kennedy charisma held no sway with him. THE KENNEDY IMPRISONMENT looks at how family heritage, in this case the sons of Joseph Kennedy, whom Franklin Roosevelt cursed as "a fascist", destiny, "Kennedys are expected to serve", and machismo, JFK and RFK were disciplined by the family to show manliness on the touch football field and the bedroom, furnished America with two politicians whom Wills feels polluted the landscape with charm, a substitute for moral and political leadership, and a hunger for power without principle. THE KENNEDY IMPRISONMENT ends with a hymn to the man Wills takes for the conscience of his generation of Americans, Martin Luther King.
December 12, 2023
I read this after an episode about it on the Know Your Enemy podcast, which had recommended Wills' earlier book "Nixon Agonistes", and, in a similar fashion, really was astounded by the author's insight in breaking down the Kennedy aura and era. The imprisonment of the title goes both ways in how he shows America was trapped (and continues to be trapped) with many of the ideas and ideals formulated by the so-called best and brightest and, equally, the Kennedys were imprisoned by their legend, manufactured by the odious Joseph Kennedy.
The pleasure in this book isn't in this thesis, but instead by watching Wills methodically break this down in tightly argued chapters. It truly was a pleasure to read and I look forward to copping the next Wills book I see.
The pleasure in this book isn't in this thesis, but instead by watching Wills methodically break this down in tightly argued chapters. It truly was a pleasure to read and I look forward to copping the next Wills book I see.
June 13, 2018
Garry Wills tries applying his expansive, culturally astute mode of analysis to the Kennedy clan and can't pull it off. Compared to Nixon Agonistes and Reagan's America, sociopolitical surveys masquerading as biographies, The Kennedy Imprisonment is lightweight. He depicts the Kennedys as image-obsessed, forcing themselves to match a glorified image of masculinity, toughness, vigor and intellect that they only fitfully matched; excoriates the media's complicity in crafting that image; puts their every flaw, failing and foible under the microscope. None of this was new in 1982, when Wills published this book, and it's remarkably insubstantial. He has little to offer about JFK's presidency (aside from assuring us that the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam were self-inflicted wounds) but much to say about his womanizing and health problems; he has no interest, apparently, in exploring Bobby's evolution from Red-baiting ruffian to progressive idealist (even if cast as insincere, surely worth examination); has nothing to say about Ted Kennedy aside from recapitulating Chappaquiddick and painting him as a gauche pretender to a false throne. Here, Wills' penchant for florid, grandiose prose, cultural prodding and learned literary references (he compares JFK, at different points, to figures from Shakespeare, Buchan and Dickens, not to mention Montaigne and various Greeks) seems more fatuous than insightful, a show of knowledge to elevate a tabloid expose to highbrow political analysis.
August 27, 2017
An insightful, enthralling and provoking analysis of the Kennedy Clan under each aspect: Sex, Family, Image, Charisma and Power. The dark side of an ambitious family that changed the American politics.
October 5, 2024
A good book if you want to get familiar with the case against the Kennedy family. Very well written and great storytelling. Sometimes verges on too gossipy.
June 20, 2017
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garry Wills first investigated the Kennedy phenomenon when Ted Kennedy was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980, and ‘The Kennedy Imprisonment’ was first published in 1982. It was clearly intended for the general reader, as it is unburdened by the scholarly apparatus of footnotes, or even a bibliography.
This is a new edition with a very brief new Preface, entitled ‘The View from 2017’, added to the 2002 Introduction to the Mariner edition and the original text. There seems to have been no effort to update the latter by incorporating any of the insights arising from the primary or secondary literature on the Kennedys which has appeared since 1982.
The imprisonment referred to in the title is the gilded cage of privilege, with Wills arguing that thus cocooned the bad behaviour of JFK, Bobby and Ted - apples that didn’t fall far from the morally diseased patriarchal tree - simply grew worse.
With Ted Kennedy having died in 2009, Wills uses his new Preface to be a little more forgiving in his judgment of the youngest of the Kennedy brothers. Whether he sees the Senator as retarding or assisting the Irish peace process by his support for Sinn Féin we cannot tell though, as although a chapter is devoted to the Kennedys’ Irish ancestry and the political use they made of it, the brothers’ actual relationship with the politics of Ireland is not discussed at all.
This book is, moreover, unlikely to tell the reader anything new, if they’re even moderately well versed in the plentiful literature on the Kennedys but it is nevertheless thoroughly deserving of a new print run and readership because it represents such a well-sustained broadside against the way in which the Kennedys are still often eulogised, fuelled by the author’s distaste for such idolatry.
It somewhat resembles ‘The Dark Side of Camelot’ by Seymour Hersh but whereas Hersh employs prose like a fish-eye lens to magnify Kennedy tackiness, Wills prefers to paint a comparable picture of moral turpitude by deploying a well-turned phrase or apt quotation with all the forensic exactitude of a well-briefed barrister.
In short, this is an entertaining representation of a morally corrupt political dynasty.
This is a new edition with a very brief new Preface, entitled ‘The View from 2017’, added to the 2002 Introduction to the Mariner edition and the original text. There seems to have been no effort to update the latter by incorporating any of the insights arising from the primary or secondary literature on the Kennedys which has appeared since 1982.
The imprisonment referred to in the title is the gilded cage of privilege, with Wills arguing that thus cocooned the bad behaviour of JFK, Bobby and Ted - apples that didn’t fall far from the morally diseased patriarchal tree - simply grew worse.
With Ted Kennedy having died in 2009, Wills uses his new Preface to be a little more forgiving in his judgment of the youngest of the Kennedy brothers. Whether he sees the Senator as retarding or assisting the Irish peace process by his support for Sinn Féin we cannot tell though, as although a chapter is devoted to the Kennedys’ Irish ancestry and the political use they made of it, the brothers’ actual relationship with the politics of Ireland is not discussed at all.
This book is, moreover, unlikely to tell the reader anything new, if they’re even moderately well versed in the plentiful literature on the Kennedys but it is nevertheless thoroughly deserving of a new print run and readership because it represents such a well-sustained broadside against the way in which the Kennedys are still often eulogised, fuelled by the author’s distaste for such idolatry.
It somewhat resembles ‘The Dark Side of Camelot’ by Seymour Hersh but whereas Hersh employs prose like a fish-eye lens to magnify Kennedy tackiness, Wills prefers to paint a comparable picture of moral turpitude by deploying a well-turned phrase or apt quotation with all the forensic exactitude of a well-briefed barrister.
In short, this is an entertaining representation of a morally corrupt political dynasty.
October 6, 2017
“The Kennedy Imprisonment,” is a reissue of Garry Wills’ intriguing 1982 analysis of how the trappings of privilege – including power and corruption – have both propelled and derailed the Kennedy family. Written in the wake of Sen. Edward Kennedy’s floundering 1980 presidential campaign, which Wills seems to see as the inevitable outcome of two generations of moral failing.
Reissued in 2017 after the election of another son of privilege, the story of the Kennedys’ turpitude seems almost quaint, but Wills’ analysis of how the Kennedys’ corruption led to Teddy’s flameout remains a compelling read.
The details in this book – the family dynamics, the women, the politicking, the ruthlessness – will be familiar to anyone who has followed the news (or read the tabloid headlines while standing in the grocery-store checkout line) over the past 50 years. Yet Willis builds a case that makes the path from Joe Kennedy’s early ambitions to Teddy Kennedy’s scandals seem inevitable.
Readers who are fans of Kennedy family will probably be dismayed to see these issues rehashed, but Wills’ analysis of how morality (or the lack of) provides both a convenient way to clear a path to success and a weakness that haunts a generation.
“The Kennedy Imprisonment” is a thoughtful and interesting read.
Reissued in 2017 after the election of another son of privilege, the story of the Kennedys’ turpitude seems almost quaint, but Wills’ analysis of how the Kennedys’ corruption led to Teddy’s flameout remains a compelling read.
The details in this book – the family dynamics, the women, the politicking, the ruthlessness – will be familiar to anyone who has followed the news (or read the tabloid headlines while standing in the grocery-store checkout line) over the past 50 years. Yet Willis builds a case that makes the path from Joe Kennedy’s early ambitions to Teddy Kennedy’s scandals seem inevitable.
Readers who are fans of Kennedy family will probably be dismayed to see these issues rehashed, but Wills’ analysis of how morality (or the lack of) provides both a convenient way to clear a path to success and a weakness that haunts a generation.
“The Kennedy Imprisonment” is a thoughtful and interesting read.
June 17, 2015
The author shows how the Bay of Pigs lead to the Cuban Missile Crisis and to the Viet Nam War; he shows the mistakes and burdens of Ted Kennedy and argues successfully that Dr. Martin Luther King left behind a much braver,and much greater legacy of social change than the Kennedys. The author tends to be wordy, and repetitious in parts, but this is a good book for those interested in the Cold War history and the social upheavals of the late 20th century.
September 28, 2023
“DECONSTRUCTING THE CAMELOT MYTH”
‘The Kennedy Imprisonment’ was published in 1981. The esteemed Mr. Wills took the approach of analyzing the Kennedys’ approach to power. Their attitudes were complex, contradictory, self-entitled, and marketed to the public by using heaping amounts of bull manure. I was born in 1960, have lived in Maine all my life, and well into the 1990s, it was almost viewed as a mortal sin by many older Mainers for me to even slightly criticize the martyred president and his family. You’d think I was taking a whiz on the Pope’s feet. I was too young to have any emotional attachment to the assassinated Kennedys and was curious about their family because of their tragic losses as well as the glaring misdeeds. I also observed that there seemed to be a cadre of powerful people who quickly came to the defense of the Kennedys at the mere whiff of family skullduggery. Add to that, I had huge ethical concerns about some reporters, publishers, and powerbrokers pandering to and partying with the Kennedys. It was a good ole boys club of infidelity and male entitlement. The Kennedys exemplified it.
Mr. Wills’s forty-year-old assessment of the Kennedys and their use of power shocked me on how much their tactics were very similar to ex-President Foghorn Leghorn Trump’s blatant unethical and dangerous shenanigans. Both believed there were only winners and losers in life; cheating was part of their DNA; they used and discarded people for their own self-aggrandizement; John and his dad Joe were not religious but faked that they were purely for political gain; craved acceptance by “upper-crust” society; were enamored of aristocratic systems of government as well as famous celebrities in the entertainment business; and loyalty to them overruled anything else including a person’s personal life. Both the Kennedys and Trump have followers that are blind to reality and bend over backwards to make excuses for their inappropriate behavior. Neither political party (or any organization for that matter) is immune to the seductive nature of power. ‘The Kennedy Imprisonment’ does a good job of addressing how it attracts people eager to be near power and encourages sexual infidelity, risk taking, habitual lying, and makes them willing to take part in illegal immoral behavior.
‘The Kennedy Imprisonment’ is not a biography. Mr. Wills analyzes important events in the Kennedy clans’ lives and how it colored their perceptions and actions. The Founding Fathers were right when it came to their distrust of concentrated power. Even the most ethical people can be seduced by and rationalize themselves into doing horrible things to attain or maintain power. It also encourages greater heights of arrogance. The book touches upon the Kennedys’ attitudes about sex and women; the burden Joe and Jack Kennedy’s actions left upon Robert and Ted; the myriad of excuses given by the women and glorified gofers that were in their cult; journalists’ inappropriate cozy relationships with the Kennedys; Ted Kennedy’s moribund run for the presidency and his as well as his acolytes’ actions during the Chappaquiddick; Robert’s job as his older brother’s political enforcer; hiding from the public Jack’s extensive medical problems; the PT109 event; JFK’s ghost writers and his undeserved reputation as a writer including the travesty of him winning the Pulitzer Prize for ‘Profiles in Courage;’ the Civil Rights Movement; Vietnam War; the CIA and the Bay of Pigs fiasco; the Cuban Missile Crisis; and President Kennedy’s obsession with removing Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
Many of the events covered are still impacting today’s policies. The mindset of Pax Americana, that President Kennedy and his administration very much embraced, is still a major part of Americans’ perspective where we view ourselves as near-religious advocates of democracy and expect other cultures will embrace our so-called forceful altruism. It arrogantly resorts to war or espionage and either diminishes or completely disregards a country’s history and the nation’s public attitudes. It is one of the major flaws of people and countries with a great deal of power. The book does not include any photos.
While ‘The Kennedy Imprisonment’ could easily be misconstrued as a hatchet job about the Kennedys, the reader would be missing the central point of the book. It is about power, how it changes people, and causes many to do terrible things for it or maintain it. These characteristics are ageless and still very much with us today. It can be seen throughout the world in politics, business, and even people’s mundane lives. Fortunately, the brainy Mr. Wills has a mostly easy-to-read writing style. He does, however, have a few chapters that are arguing in abstractions that take a bit more concentration. ‘The Kennedy Imprisonment’ is a fine example of power’s dynamics and he tried to place the Kennedys in proper context instead of the nonsensical Camelot myth. It’s a template that you can use to assess today’s powerbrokers. The book is still very relevant and well worth reading.
‘The Kennedy Imprisonment’ was published in 1981. The esteemed Mr. Wills took the approach of analyzing the Kennedys’ approach to power. Their attitudes were complex, contradictory, self-entitled, and marketed to the public by using heaping amounts of bull manure. I was born in 1960, have lived in Maine all my life, and well into the 1990s, it was almost viewed as a mortal sin by many older Mainers for me to even slightly criticize the martyred president and his family. You’d think I was taking a whiz on the Pope’s feet. I was too young to have any emotional attachment to the assassinated Kennedys and was curious about their family because of their tragic losses as well as the glaring misdeeds. I also observed that there seemed to be a cadre of powerful people who quickly came to the defense of the Kennedys at the mere whiff of family skullduggery. Add to that, I had huge ethical concerns about some reporters, publishers, and powerbrokers pandering to and partying with the Kennedys. It was a good ole boys club of infidelity and male entitlement. The Kennedys exemplified it.
Mr. Wills’s forty-year-old assessment of the Kennedys and their use of power shocked me on how much their tactics were very similar to ex-President Foghorn Leghorn Trump’s blatant unethical and dangerous shenanigans. Both believed there were only winners and losers in life; cheating was part of their DNA; they used and discarded people for their own self-aggrandizement; John and his dad Joe were not religious but faked that they were purely for political gain; craved acceptance by “upper-crust” society; were enamored of aristocratic systems of government as well as famous celebrities in the entertainment business; and loyalty to them overruled anything else including a person’s personal life. Both the Kennedys and Trump have followers that are blind to reality and bend over backwards to make excuses for their inappropriate behavior. Neither political party (or any organization for that matter) is immune to the seductive nature of power. ‘The Kennedy Imprisonment’ does a good job of addressing how it attracts people eager to be near power and encourages sexual infidelity, risk taking, habitual lying, and makes them willing to take part in illegal immoral behavior.
‘The Kennedy Imprisonment’ is not a biography. Mr. Wills analyzes important events in the Kennedy clans’ lives and how it colored their perceptions and actions. The Founding Fathers were right when it came to their distrust of concentrated power. Even the most ethical people can be seduced by and rationalize themselves into doing horrible things to attain or maintain power. It also encourages greater heights of arrogance. The book touches upon the Kennedys’ attitudes about sex and women; the burden Joe and Jack Kennedy’s actions left upon Robert and Ted; the myriad of excuses given by the women and glorified gofers that were in their cult; journalists’ inappropriate cozy relationships with the Kennedys; Ted Kennedy’s moribund run for the presidency and his as well as his acolytes’ actions during the Chappaquiddick; Robert’s job as his older brother’s political enforcer; hiding from the public Jack’s extensive medical problems; the PT109 event; JFK’s ghost writers and his undeserved reputation as a writer including the travesty of him winning the Pulitzer Prize for ‘Profiles in Courage;’ the Civil Rights Movement; Vietnam War; the CIA and the Bay of Pigs fiasco; the Cuban Missile Crisis; and President Kennedy’s obsession with removing Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
Many of the events covered are still impacting today’s policies. The mindset of Pax Americana, that President Kennedy and his administration very much embraced, is still a major part of Americans’ perspective where we view ourselves as near-religious advocates of democracy and expect other cultures will embrace our so-called forceful altruism. It arrogantly resorts to war or espionage and either diminishes or completely disregards a country’s history and the nation’s public attitudes. It is one of the major flaws of people and countries with a great deal of power. The book does not include any photos.
While ‘The Kennedy Imprisonment’ could easily be misconstrued as a hatchet job about the Kennedys, the reader would be missing the central point of the book. It is about power, how it changes people, and causes many to do terrible things for it or maintain it. These characteristics are ageless and still very much with us today. It can be seen throughout the world in politics, business, and even people’s mundane lives. Fortunately, the brainy Mr. Wills has a mostly easy-to-read writing style. He does, however, have a few chapters that are arguing in abstractions that take a bit more concentration. ‘The Kennedy Imprisonment’ is a fine example of power’s dynamics and he tried to place the Kennedys in proper context instead of the nonsensical Camelot myth. It’s a template that you can use to assess today’s powerbrokers. The book is still very relevant and well worth reading.
March 2, 2024
The author goes into good detail and, perhaps, reveals some facts unconsciously.
He, albeit honestly, gets some things horribly wrong, but with good intent. He is not deliberately trying to decieve the reader and had no means at his disposal to gather his facts better than he has done in his book.
To someone who knows the truth of the 'how and why' the Kennedy's were popped, this book can raise some indignant rancor, at it's innocent ignorance.
However, again, the author has not committed the sin of deliberately misleading the reader and the amount of research he has done is to be celebrated as an honest scholarly endeavor.
Camelot was Jackie's invention. J.F. Kennedy's call sign was Lancer. King Arthur was NOT Kennedy's father.
In the fairytale, Lancelot turns on King Arthur, and attempts to kill him to steal his wife. Yes, Arthur's wife, not Lancelot's.
In Jackie's fairytale, King Arthur was her best friend, since the days of skinned knees and hide and seek. Her true husband. A Korean War Hero, who enlisted at 14, and came back with General's Stars.
Jackie was on loan, from this King Arthur, to provide America with an idyllic, wholesome, role model Presidential family to liftup the American Spirit.
The author has mentioned Kennedy's frequent "back pains" and the "bed rest" it required to "heal". This is one of the facts the author has unconsciously revealed and these "back pains" are also the reason Kennedy needed a "loaner" wife.
Jackie was the first black, First Lady of the modern era, second only to Abigail Adams, during America's founding period. No, Harvard losers, they didn't call her father Black Jack because he had a black heart.
The Bay of Pig's. The author is to be commended for his honest telling of the buffoons at Harvard and the cavalier indifference J.F. Kennedy displayed while throwing the participants lives away.
What the author didn't know is just how stupid the Kennedy's were to go to the Godfather to ask for help, regarding Castro. Soon, because I have established myself on several top shelf News Outlets, the extent of Kennedy's ignorance will be revealed, and when everyone knows just how stupid they were and continue to be, no one in the world will think of them the same.
The Space Center and the Airport will have to be renamed. The Kennedy name will be stricken from America.
I am one of Jackie's five miscarriages. I enjoyed reading the book but parts made me angry.
I have a Facebook with the same pen name as on this review and I am still fighting the same war, the Kennedy's started when they raped and mutilating my sister in Alabama back in the 60's. I know my Mother and King Arthur would be proud.
How much more I know now, than I did growing up.
The Kennedy bloodline died with Teddy Kennedy. King Arthur made sure of that. The Kennedy's have to be the most ugly, stupid, people to have ever lived on this earth.
He, albeit honestly, gets some things horribly wrong, but with good intent. He is not deliberately trying to decieve the reader and had no means at his disposal to gather his facts better than he has done in his book.
To someone who knows the truth of the 'how and why' the Kennedy's were popped, this book can raise some indignant rancor, at it's innocent ignorance.
However, again, the author has not committed the sin of deliberately misleading the reader and the amount of research he has done is to be celebrated as an honest scholarly endeavor.
Camelot was Jackie's invention. J.F. Kennedy's call sign was Lancer. King Arthur was NOT Kennedy's father.
In the fairytale, Lancelot turns on King Arthur, and attempts to kill him to steal his wife. Yes, Arthur's wife, not Lancelot's.
In Jackie's fairytale, King Arthur was her best friend, since the days of skinned knees and hide and seek. Her true husband. A Korean War Hero, who enlisted at 14, and came back with General's Stars.
Jackie was on loan, from this King Arthur, to provide America with an idyllic, wholesome, role model Presidential family to liftup the American Spirit.
The author has mentioned Kennedy's frequent "back pains" and the "bed rest" it required to "heal". This is one of the facts the author has unconsciously revealed and these "back pains" are also the reason Kennedy needed a "loaner" wife.
Jackie was the first black, First Lady of the modern era, second only to Abigail Adams, during America's founding period. No, Harvard losers, they didn't call her father Black Jack because he had a black heart.
The Bay of Pig's. The author is to be commended for his honest telling of the buffoons at Harvard and the cavalier indifference J.F. Kennedy displayed while throwing the participants lives away.
What the author didn't know is just how stupid the Kennedy's were to go to the Godfather to ask for help, regarding Castro. Soon, because I have established myself on several top shelf News Outlets, the extent of Kennedy's ignorance will be revealed, and when everyone knows just how stupid they were and continue to be, no one in the world will think of them the same.
The Space Center and the Airport will have to be renamed. The Kennedy name will be stricken from America.
I am one of Jackie's five miscarriages. I enjoyed reading the book but parts made me angry.
I have a Facebook with the same pen name as on this review and I am still fighting the same war, the Kennedy's started when they raped and mutilating my sister in Alabama back in the 60's. I know my Mother and King Arthur would be proud.
How much more I know now, than I did growing up.
The Kennedy bloodline died with Teddy Kennedy. King Arthur made sure of that. The Kennedy's have to be the most ugly, stupid, people to have ever lived on this earth.
July 9, 2017
Americans who lived in the 1960s believed in the Camelot image of the Kennedy family. Garry Wills joins the troupe of political analysts who demythologize the Camelot image. This particular account is the reissue of his 1982 book; an introduction to the text is a look back from 2017, suggesting that we have something to compare with the current government. You decide whether there are parallel elements!
Power was the byword for the Kennedy family, beginning with Jack Kennedy’s father. Money and connections were the ingredients of success that bought political office, connections with famous people, and deals that turned out to have major and minor significant in American history. But those elements that guaranteed success also, according to Wills, encased the Kennedy family in a downward spiral that almost finished off the family until Teddy Kennedy finally got his act together to dismantle the destructive family patterns and dedicated the latter part of his life to “service” to the people he represented as a Senator.
While some may be intrigued by the aspects of sex, family, image, charisma, and power, others will be revolted. Everything is relative to one’s point of view and priorities. Ironically, every one of these aspects in which the book is outlined had potential for greatness. The “prisoner” aspect of sex, for example, shows Jack Kennedy, despite his serious physical ailments, as a nymphomaniac who seemed unable to control his need for conquering women sexually. Ignoring him was tantamount to a desperate campaign to win while the Kennedy women seemed to ignore Jack’s randy ways. The other fascinating aspect is Jack’s obsession with famous people like Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, etc., etc. The trashier the gossip, the more Jack loved to hear and share it.
Bobby Kennedy seems to have been the exception as far as women but his notorious temper and exertion of power on domestic and international issues cannot be denied.
On and on it goes. American strength separated us from everyone else and allowed us to threaten and challenge from that position when the reality was we were no different than weaker nations (Russia, Cuba, etc.) in insisting on dominating international politics.
There are some interesting portions of this analysis but for those very familiar with the Kennedy era, there’s not much new to learn herein. The Kennedys certainly personalized the image of the American government, but Wills ultimately includes American citizens in his critique. For we love the power, glamor, naughtiness, and machinations as much as we say we decry them. The fact that Gary Wills’ book is being published anew says volumes about America’s fascination. The question we are left with is, “Do we see the immense consequences of such worship and enablement?” Reader, analyze and decide!
Power was the byword for the Kennedy family, beginning with Jack Kennedy’s father. Money and connections were the ingredients of success that bought political office, connections with famous people, and deals that turned out to have major and minor significant in American history. But those elements that guaranteed success also, according to Wills, encased the Kennedy family in a downward spiral that almost finished off the family until Teddy Kennedy finally got his act together to dismantle the destructive family patterns and dedicated the latter part of his life to “service” to the people he represented as a Senator.
While some may be intrigued by the aspects of sex, family, image, charisma, and power, others will be revolted. Everything is relative to one’s point of view and priorities. Ironically, every one of these aspects in which the book is outlined had potential for greatness. The “prisoner” aspect of sex, for example, shows Jack Kennedy, despite his serious physical ailments, as a nymphomaniac who seemed unable to control his need for conquering women sexually. Ignoring him was tantamount to a desperate campaign to win while the Kennedy women seemed to ignore Jack’s randy ways. The other fascinating aspect is Jack’s obsession with famous people like Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, etc., etc. The trashier the gossip, the more Jack loved to hear and share it.
Bobby Kennedy seems to have been the exception as far as women but his notorious temper and exertion of power on domestic and international issues cannot be denied.
On and on it goes. American strength separated us from everyone else and allowed us to threaten and challenge from that position when the reality was we were no different than weaker nations (Russia, Cuba, etc.) in insisting on dominating international politics.
There are some interesting portions of this analysis but for those very familiar with the Kennedy era, there’s not much new to learn herein. The Kennedys certainly personalized the image of the American government, but Wills ultimately includes American citizens in his critique. For we love the power, glamor, naughtiness, and machinations as much as we say we decry them. The fact that Gary Wills’ book is being published anew says volumes about America’s fascination. The question we are left with is, “Do we see the immense consequences of such worship and enablement?” Reader, analyze and decide!
January 2, 2024
My other end-of-2023 read, alongside Willa Cather, and another mind-blowing book. One of the best books about American politics that I've ever read. Wills moves seamlessly between religion, sex, gender, money, war, power, and politics -- everything that made the Kennedies what they were. He begins with their views on family and sex, especially, before moving into reflections on power/politics/war, making an implicit argument that this was about Joe Kennedy's family project all along. It definitely makes the Kennedies look bad and reckless: he tells a story that's basically like this. Joe Kennedy was not a Boston brahmin at all, he was a grasping and ruthless climber who understood that power did not lay in Harvard, really, but in New York and LA, with Hollywood and celebrities and Wall Street. He cultivated his sons for genuine power, which was expressed largely through women and sex, and Joe and JFK do seem truly revolting in this regard. JFK served with Joe in London, where he was ambassador, and imbibed two things: a love for the British aristocracy, and a suspicion of democracy. He had an idealized view of a playboy brain trust elite. He served in WWII, with some bravery, which his dad helped turn into a political career. An unexceptional congressman, he ran for the presidency and got lucky. His whole schtick was guts+brains against the mindless bureaucracy of Eisenhower. Wills sees the procession like this: Bay of Pigs was a seamless outgrowth of his ideas of power and brains. It was a CIA mission, operated in contempt of actual military expertise (an amphibious landing at night!). It failed, but did lead Castro to bring in the weapons. He was justified in doing so, because the Kennedies were obsessed with killing him and were running all kinds of ops. JFK hid all that and caused the Cuban Missile Crisis unnecessarily. His victory there led to an overconfidence that led him to ramp up Vietnam, which he thought could be won with strategic hamlets and special advisers. That's the gist of his read on the presidency. The whole thing was originally a book about Ted Kennedy's failed 1980 campaign, and Chappaquidick and that campaign hang like a shroud over the whole book, as the moment when all of the sins and ghosts of the Kennedy family came home to roost (Chappaquidick, GW wants to show, was the culmination of everything about the Kennedies).
Just a beautifully written, ambitious, erudite book. They don't make them like this anymore!
Just a beautifully written, ambitious, erudite book. They don't make them like this anymore!
Read
May 7, 2023“Hampton, New Hampshire, February, 1980: This night seems made to vindicate Frank Capra’s version of democracy.”
This is subtitled “A Meditation on Power” and was published in the early years of the Reagan years. One of the things I think about Garry Wills is how much he seems to believe in the idea of America, and how much he seems to disdain the elements of America that tarnish that idea. I don’t mean that he’s blind to problems of America or looking to deny or explain them away, but that he’s a moralist about the failings. Almost like he expects America to exactly deliver on its promises. One of the issues of America is political dynasties. In 1981, from the view of this book, he doesn’t know yet with one oblique reference to Bill Clinton, that he’s almost accidentally hinted at the next one. The issue with political dynasties is that they very rarely rely on sound, consistent policies or even a more fluid set of policies built on principles (where the policies might change so long as the principles don’t).
He doesn’t seem to have much affection for the Kennedys. He almost is sympathetic with Ted Kennedy, as he watches him lose not only staggeringly in 1980, but disastrously and even embarrassingly. From the introduction to this book from 30 years later, he seems to think that this defeat allowed Kennedy to have an actual shot at being a good public servant because his failure acts as a kind of death, through which the Kennedy dynasty finally dies.
He’s less sympathetic to John, not because he died, but because he never should have been president. He didn’t really have a lot of ideas, he lied about writing his book, and worse insisted on getting the Pulitzer (pulling strings t0 do so), and in trying to prove himself as president made disastrous choices (like the Bay of Pigs and even, as Wills argues, in the Cuban Missile Crisis), and of course in charting the course in Vietnam. Bobby is less clear because he seemed to be on the cusp of potential greatness, perhaps being the politician his brothers never were.
The book takes a pin to the balloon of the Kenendys. This is not a cheap Conservative hitpiece either. It’s decidedly pro-democratic, but it’s specifically meant to dispel some notions.
This is subtitled “A Meditation on Power” and was published in the early years of the Reagan years. One of the things I think about Garry Wills is how much he seems to believe in the idea of America, and how much he seems to disdain the elements of America that tarnish that idea. I don’t mean that he’s blind to problems of America or looking to deny or explain them away, but that he’s a moralist about the failings. Almost like he expects America to exactly deliver on its promises. One of the issues of America is political dynasties. In 1981, from the view of this book, he doesn’t know yet with one oblique reference to Bill Clinton, that he’s almost accidentally hinted at the next one. The issue with political dynasties is that they very rarely rely on sound, consistent policies or even a more fluid set of policies built on principles (where the policies might change so long as the principles don’t).
He doesn’t seem to have much affection for the Kennedys. He almost is sympathetic with Ted Kennedy, as he watches him lose not only staggeringly in 1980, but disastrously and even embarrassingly. From the introduction to this book from 30 years later, he seems to think that this defeat allowed Kennedy to have an actual shot at being a good public servant because his failure acts as a kind of death, through which the Kennedy dynasty finally dies.
He’s less sympathetic to John, not because he died, but because he never should have been president. He didn’t really have a lot of ideas, he lied about writing his book, and worse insisted on getting the Pulitzer (pulling strings t0 do so), and in trying to prove himself as president made disastrous choices (like the Bay of Pigs and even, as Wills argues, in the Cuban Missile Crisis), and of course in charting the course in Vietnam. Bobby is less clear because he seemed to be on the cusp of potential greatness, perhaps being the politician his brothers never were.
The book takes a pin to the balloon of the Kenendys. This is not a cheap Conservative hitpiece either. It’s decidedly pro-democratic, but it’s specifically meant to dispel some notions.
January 19, 2018
A bit of a companion piece to Wills's book on Nixon, although he focuses less on broader American society, giving us a more insular view American leadership instead.
Wills takes a very dim view of the Kennedys, particularly John, who he portrays as a political grasper perhaps even greedier for power than Nixon, his eternal foil. However, Kennedy was blessed with the grace and the perks attendant to being born into immense wealth, whereas Nixon could never wash off the mark of his birth into the station of a lower-middle-class hustler.
However, John, dying young, avoided feeling the consequences of his disastrous foreign policy and personal life, leaving the fallout for his younger brothers, who get a slightly more sympathetic portrayal (including a fair interpretation of Ted's self-immolating disaster at Chappaquiddick.)
Ultimately, Kennedy's obsessions with intrusive counter-insurgency abroad and an imperial executive branch at home created the grounds for some of the greatest American political dilemmas of the past 50 years. Wills draws a convincing through-line from the New Frontier to Vietnam, Watergate and Reagan's deregulation. We can perhaps see the seeds of Trump's assaults on the "deep state" bureaucracy in JFK's jousting with the FBI, CIA and State Department during the Bay of Pigs preparations.
Wills argues that power becomes a cage, in which you are trapped by the necessities created by the decisions you once made so easily. What proves fascinating is how all of America could become trapped by the decisions made by one man, John F. Kennedy, in his efforts to gain and hold power.
Wills takes a very dim view of the Kennedys, particularly John, who he portrays as a political grasper perhaps even greedier for power than Nixon, his eternal foil. However, Kennedy was blessed with the grace and the perks attendant to being born into immense wealth, whereas Nixon could never wash off the mark of his birth into the station of a lower-middle-class hustler.
However, John, dying young, avoided feeling the consequences of his disastrous foreign policy and personal life, leaving the fallout for his younger brothers, who get a slightly more sympathetic portrayal (including a fair interpretation of Ted's self-immolating disaster at Chappaquiddick.)
Ultimately, Kennedy's obsessions with intrusive counter-insurgency abroad and an imperial executive branch at home created the grounds for some of the greatest American political dilemmas of the past 50 years. Wills draws a convincing through-line from the New Frontier to Vietnam, Watergate and Reagan's deregulation. We can perhaps see the seeds of Trump's assaults on the "deep state" bureaucracy in JFK's jousting with the FBI, CIA and State Department during the Bay of Pigs preparations.
Wills argues that power becomes a cage, in which you are trapped by the necessities created by the decisions you once made so easily. What proves fascinating is how all of America could become trapped by the decisions made by one man, John F. Kennedy, in his efforts to gain and hold power.
July 27, 2017
Originally published in the aftermath of Edward Kennedy's lackluster run for the Democratic nomination in 1980, Wills carefully disassembles the myth of the American Camelot. While few, if any, of the facts presented here, will come as a surprise, the author weaves them together in a way that shows a side of the late President and those who surrounded him that we rarely if ever see. Working the story from the Kennedy patriarch, Joseph, Sr., through the thousand-day presidency of John, followed by the Presidential aspirations of Robert, and the burden of expectations on the youngest brother, Edward, Wills charts a fascinating tale. But it is not only the Kennedy's and their followers who are imprisoned by the mystique. Johnson would be imprisoned just as much as he attempted to lead the nation in the aftermath of the assassination. Surrounded by Kennedy appointees who had little respect for him, his presidency was hamstrung from the beginning. Nixon was imprisoned as well because of the history between the two Presidents. In fact, Wills implies that the Kennedy imprisonment wouldn't be broke at the Oval Office level until Ronald Reagan's election in 1980.
Kennedy fans will hate this book. Kennedy critics will love it. For the rest of us, it is a compelling look at a Presidency too often lost in the folds of mythology. And it presents a fascinating comparison to the politics of today.
Kennedy fans will hate this book. Kennedy critics will love it. For the rest of us, it is a compelling look at a Presidency too often lost in the folds of mythology. And it presents a fascinating comparison to the politics of today.
January 17, 2024
Garry Wills and Janet Malcolm are the great non-fiction writers of the last forty years, but Wills has the classical erudition and directs himself to "big topics" such as theology and world events. This book was fantastic and clarifies the history of the JFK administration concisely, and in a way that is oriented to Wills's thesis about power.
I decided to read this book after listening to the "Know Your Enemy" podcast, and after my one breathless reading, I feel that that discussion didn't acknowledge RFK's religiosity and his ability to rethink his positions, and as the book was written in 1981, it couldn't predict where Teddy's career will go although he portrays him as a more collaborative individual. Also, to me, Wills's book confirmed that JFK had a sharp quick mind and did take a leadership role even if he was blinded by his conviction that the family could do no wrong if they had the resources and the will. (Compare with W. who leaned on Cheney and his team.) After all, one can assume that JFK was frequently on an excessive dose of steroids.
I strongly recommend this book to learn more salacious and revealing gossip about the Kennedys, but also to understand the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis and the ongoing problems of executive secrecy and the imperial presidency.
I decided to read this book after listening to the "Know Your Enemy" podcast, and after my one breathless reading, I feel that that discussion didn't acknowledge RFK's religiosity and his ability to rethink his positions, and as the book was written in 1981, it couldn't predict where Teddy's career will go although he portrays him as a more collaborative individual. Also, to me, Wills's book confirmed that JFK had a sharp quick mind and did take a leadership role even if he was blinded by his conviction that the family could do no wrong if they had the resources and the will. (Compare with W. who leaned on Cheney and his team.) After all, one can assume that JFK was frequently on an excessive dose of steroids.
I strongly recommend this book to learn more salacious and revealing gossip about the Kennedys, but also to understand the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis and the ongoing problems of executive secrecy and the imperial presidency.
September 12, 2020
I wanted to like this book more than I did. As with so many, too long. The writing was stunning, and that’s what kept me reading (plus my Kennedy fascination), with really beautiful and poetic lines. The beginning of the book was a 4/5 star, the end was a 2. He would say the same thing in three slightly different ways, just dragging out a point. The best parts were when he talked about charisma, the image of the Kennedy family that they created. The worst was when he kept rattling on about the genealogy of the clan. A small quibble, but one nonetheless, was his use of “Kennedy” for whoever he was talking about, which resulted in confusion on my part when he would switch between Joseph to John to Robert.
I was disappointed Jackie didn’t get much time in the book, as she was so involved in the image making. The epilogue, where he suddenly brought in MLK, was really interesting, and I wish there had been more focus on that instead of yet another discussion about chappaquiidick (or however that’s spelled). The Castro stuff was really fascinating, Cuban missile less so. He didn’t talk as much about the symbolism of the assassination as I would’ve liked, but then again, i love read symbol analysis.
I was disappointed Jackie didn’t get much time in the book, as she was so involved in the image making. The epilogue, where he suddenly brought in MLK, was really interesting, and I wish there had been more focus on that instead of yet another discussion about chappaquiidick (or however that’s spelled). The Castro stuff was really fascinating, Cuban missile less so. He didn’t talk as much about the symbolism of the assassination as I would’ve liked, but then again, i love read symbol analysis.
July 16, 2017
The Kennedy Imprisonment by Gary Willis is a very good, in depth look at the Kennedy mystique. This work does not just gloss over the surface, or give us an empty comparison to royalty, but instead looks at the patriarch and matriarch of the clan and pulls out from their behaviors, acceptable in their times, how that affected the same for the offspring (the book primarily looks at Jack, Bobby and Teddy) in their times.
Though the work is a reprint it suffers only mildly due to when it was written. For instance in opening up on the failed primary election of Teddy against Carter, the author adeptly illustrates how Ted was in an almost no win situation at a time when he was trying to remain connected to the legacy but distance himself from the same. The author here summarizes how Ted will never be seen as anything more than the younger brother, but those of us who saw him mature into his own man, know that the author's conjecture is not the case.
Rare are those occurrences in the book, and for those who missed it the first time this work will give you a fresh open look into the Kennedy's and raise the curtain behind the continuing mystique about what made them unique.
Though the work is a reprint it suffers only mildly due to when it was written. For instance in opening up on the failed primary election of Teddy against Carter, the author adeptly illustrates how Ted was in an almost no win situation at a time when he was trying to remain connected to the legacy but distance himself from the same. The author here summarizes how Ted will never be seen as anything more than the younger brother, but those of us who saw him mature into his own man, know that the author's conjecture is not the case.
Rare are those occurrences in the book, and for those who missed it the first time this work will give you a fresh open look into the Kennedy's and raise the curtain behind the continuing mystique about what made them unique.
April 14, 2024
“Kennedy did not liberate the intellectuals who praised him; he subverted them. He played to all that was weakest and worst in them.”
“Kennedy, though he might eventually have freed himself from these illusions of total American control, helped to strengthen them in other Americans. His real legacy was to teach the wrong lesson, over and over. The attempt at total control does not merely corrupt, as Acton said; it debilitates. It undoes itself.”
I can honestly say I haven’t read a book with as trenchant of analysis of power as this. I don’t know what else I’ve read that stands with this in terms of getting at the psychology of a family. How its worst qualities can continue to ripple outward for several generations. How dark the shadows of older siblings can be for the younger ones stuck in them. For me, this is unrivaled among political books, in the manner in which it shows how desperate America can be to believe in the best and most unimpeachable version of itself even when the trumpeter of such a message is anything but. What Wills achieves in 300 or so pages is magisterial.
“Kennedy, though he might eventually have freed himself from these illusions of total American control, helped to strengthen them in other Americans. His real legacy was to teach the wrong lesson, over and over. The attempt at total control does not merely corrupt, as Acton said; it debilitates. It undoes itself.”
I can honestly say I haven’t read a book with as trenchant of analysis of power as this. I don’t know what else I’ve read that stands with this in terms of getting at the psychology of a family. How its worst qualities can continue to ripple outward for several generations. How dark the shadows of older siblings can be for the younger ones stuck in them. For me, this is unrivaled among political books, in the manner in which it shows how desperate America can be to believe in the best and most unimpeachable version of itself even when the trumpeter of such a message is anything but. What Wills achieves in 300 or so pages is magisterial.
July 8, 2017
Very good book on The Kennedys. As an avid reader of anything JFK, I found this book a good read. At times, it did seem a little over the top (in the way the material was presented), but it holds your interest. For me a book that makes me want to be reading while I am doing other things, is a good book. This book had me wanting to read while I was doing other things. This book clearly shows the influence that Joe Kennedy had on his family and how they were shaped by him. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review.Highly recommended.
June 25, 2019
A fascinating look behind the curtain of the Kennedy mystique. I'm a big fan of Robert Kennedy, and still am - this book isn't a hatchet job by any means. But I found the sections on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis especially enlightening. Wills gives credit where credit is due, but he also punctures the myths about John F. Kennedy's political style and legendary restraint. While I didn't set out to make any notes in this book, I found myself marking many passages because of their connections to other areas of American political history, like the atomic bombings of Japan or the 2003 invasion of Iraq. A compassionate, levelheaded and engrossing book, this is a must-read for any student of America in the 20th century, and beyond.
May 20, 2022
An interesting if meandering look at the Kennedy clan, mainly the convoluted psychological dynamics surrounding them.
Willis doesn't cleanly structure the book around an overarching thesis, but sort of wanders around the topics he finds interesting about John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy—their father, careers, and hive of supplicants. Manages to be both damning and sympathetic, as he recognizes the sort of strictures they were forced to operate under due to their own myths and predecessors. Even when it feels semi-aimless, Willis still manages to have an interesting observation every page or so, making the whole book very worthwhile but probably not the first book to read on the subject.
Willis doesn't cleanly structure the book around an overarching thesis, but sort of wanders around the topics he finds interesting about John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy—their father, careers, and hive of supplicants. Manages to be both damning and sympathetic, as he recognizes the sort of strictures they were forced to operate under due to their own myths and predecessors. Even when it feels semi-aimless, Willis still manages to have an interesting observation every page or so, making the whole book very worthwhile but probably not the first book to read on the subject.
January 3, 2023
I’ve read dozens of Kennedy books from the salacious to the politically sanitized. This one is borderline comically negative, fitting all the darks aspects of the Kennedy family into a neat narrative.
I still liked the book, though. There are plenty of overly sanitized Kennedy biographies that paint him as a saint. This is just an equally-weighted takedown, probably an overdue balance in the literature.
I also do like the Gatsby-esque idea of being a prisoner of your own ambition, notably exhibited through Ted Kennedy's battles with the ghosts of his family.
Wild stuff.
I still liked the book, though. There are plenty of overly sanitized Kennedy biographies that paint him as a saint. This is just an equally-weighted takedown, probably an overdue balance in the literature.
I also do like the Gatsby-esque idea of being a prisoner of your own ambition, notably exhibited through Ted Kennedy's battles with the ghosts of his family.
Wild stuff.
September 14, 2024
Can definitely apply the verb "muse" to this author's writing style. He mused about many things and dissected the Kennedys actions in the context of their approach to power. Very slow getting started. I was halfway through before it stopped putting me to sleep when I read. After halfway, I started to see applications to current politics, and that made it much more interesting. Also, I finally found out why the Soviet Union sent missiles to Cuba. I had always wondered because it seemed like such a random decision.
December 2, 2017
I received a copy of this book from NetGalley and Mariner Books in exchange for a fair and honest review. Thank you!😀
This book an interesting look into the Kennedy family, especially John and Robert. Parts of it seemed a little overly dramatic to me but I guess that’s just the authors style of writing. I learned a lot of things about the Kennedy’s I didn’t know before and I’m glad I got to read this.
This book an interesting look into the Kennedy family, especially John and Robert. Parts of it seemed a little overly dramatic to me but I guess that’s just the authors style of writing. I learned a lot of things about the Kennedy’s I didn’t know before and I’m glad I got to read this.
September 21, 2024
Extremely bold and worth praise, but suffers from a classic problem of not enough anecdotes to make the case without repeating oneself. Wills is truly a wonderful writer, maybe the greatest we have on modern American politics. This book showcases many of those strengths, weaving the analytical with the romantic seamlessly. However, in the end the book lacks focus, despite my undeniable enjoyment of it.
October 26, 2021
A thoughtful 1981 work by a serious intellectual who probed power and charisma as it was mostly misused in the Kennedy male dynasty, from old man Joe onward through Teddy. The best insight that I have read, utterly unsentimental, into the myths and mythmakers of JFK. Bobby comes off a little better than later history indicates, though.
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