Fear and loathing in Camelot

Then there's Uncle Teddy, the Kennedy brother who became family patriarch through tragedy. He was no Bobby Kennedy when it came to caring for the kids and keeping the family united around a grand mission. But he clearly did his best under Job-like travails. Christopher tells the story of a family ski trip to Saint-Moritz in the Swiss Alps, when after being driven to his limits by the 27-year-old Lawford, Teddy jumped to his feet with fists raised: "Come on, Chris Lawford, I'm gonna fight you here and now. I've had enough of your crap. Come on."

"I looked at my uncle and I had one of those brief moments of clarity," recalls Christopher. "I caught a glimpse of just how infuriating carrying the entire weight of the Kennedy legacy could be. If I had sacrificed my life for a bunch of bratty kids who didn't give a shit, I'd want to punch me in the face too."

That legacy still means something, even now, after all the humiliations and conservative counterassaults. They were not really even a dynasty, like the Bushes -- their enemies made short work of that ambition. But at least for those of us in blue-precinct America, the Kennedy name is a distant trumpet that still sounds out the best of what our country stands for. When white-maned Teddy again takes the lead in confronting a Manchurian Supreme Court nominee, when Caroline Kennedy invokes her father's legacy in her books, when Bobby Jr. rallies a crowd to stand up against the poisonous pillaging of corporate polluters, we're reminded once more of why principled progressive leadership matters. By painfully detailing the human costs of this leadership, Christopher Lawford performs a valuable service, giving us a portrait of the Kennedy family's complex humanity not seen in either the stacks of Camelot hagiography or the equally voluminous Kennedy scandal literature. The fact that it is also stuffed with bold-lettered names and juicy anecdotes will probably ensure it immediate bestseller status.

But while Lawford provides a wealth of psychological insight into his family's rise and fall and survival, he is unable to give us any political understanding of the twin traumas that befell his family in the 1960s. After Bobby's 1968 assassination, the remaining Kennedy elders apparently decided not to push for a full and honest investigation of what happened in Dallas and Los Angeles, as Martin Luther King Jr.'s family has done (but so far failed to accomplish). In this regard, Lawford continues to stick with the family program. His book does not ponder why the lone gunman theory has never been accepted by a wide majority of the American people and why the JFK assassination has deeply troubled the nation's unconscious for over 40 years.

The family's decision to stay quiet has proved deeply tragic. It clearly did not serve the country, which following the two assassinations entered a long, dark period whose politics were characterized by imperial overreach and a cult of official secrecy, reaching its zenith in the Bush administration. And, as Lawford's book strongly demonstrates, the Kennedys' silent stoicism also had ruinous emotional effects on the family.

Fortunately, for those seeking a fuller understanding of the murders of the Kennedy brothers, there is a wave of new scholarship on the subject, from Gerald McKnight's brilliant dissection of the Warren Report, "Breach of Trust" (University of Kansas Press), to Gareth Porter's "Perils of Dominance" (University of California Press), a fascinating revisionist history of Kennedy's foreign policy that documents how JFK artfully deflected the relentless pressures from his national security apparatus to escalate the war in Vietnam. Upcoming books on both Kennedy's Cuba policy and Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney lionized by filmmaker Oliver Stone for his lonely battle to crack the JFK case, also promise to shed further light on what historian Douglas Brinkley has called "the 20th century's great murder mystery." The historical portrait that is slowly emerging of JFK and his closest confidant Bobby is of an administration whose inner circle was at sharp odds with the government's national security hard-liners -- from Cuba to Laos to Vietnam to nuclear arms control and peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union.

Perhaps it is too much to expect the family that was victimized by these monumental crimes to lead the charge for justice. As Bobby said during his darkest days of mourning for his brother, "Nothing will bring back Jack." But there is a peace that comes from knowing the truth. And, though he kept his quest secret even from his own family, Bobby could not help pursuing it.

Last year, during an interview with President Kennedy's close advisor Theodore Sorensen, the man who helped give JFK's speeches their poetic vision, I delicately raised the subject of the president's assassination, which Sorensen immediately alerted me was, after all these years, still a "terribly painful" topic for him. Before he cut the discussion short, Sorensen told me in a voice heavy with melancholy that if he could "know that my friend of 11 years died as a martyr to a cause, that there was some reason, some purpose why he was killed -- and not just a totally senseless, lucky sharpshooter -- then I think the whole world would feel better. That brave John F. Kennedy, with all these courageous positions, went into Texas knowing that it was hostile territory, and he ended up dead."

This new wave of scholarly and journalistic investigation promises to finally do just that: show that President John F. Kennedy died for a cause. Perhaps this realization, once it fully sinks into the national consciousness, will bring a measure of solace to the Kennedy family and New Frontier survivors like Sorensen.

"Death is not the greatest loss in life," Christopher Lawford quotes Norman Cousins in "Symptoms of Withdrawal." "The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live." Lawford's vigorously honest book tells the story of a family in the tortuous process of coming back to life. Hopefully they -- and the rest of the nation -- will someday complete this task by coming fully to terms with what happened to the Kennedy family, and why.

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