The World Was His Oyster

The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy, by Richard J. Whalen. New American Library —World, $6.95 Only willful children want things too hard. Elizabeth Taylor wants things, and Clyde Griffiths did, and came to grief. So we are taught. Good children share their toys, dissemble in the presence of that which they covet; learn early that if the Lord is to be their shepherd they should not want, in any way we understand the word. We have a literature which illustrates the fate of those who perceive too late the vanity of wordly drives: I am dying, Egypt, dying, and Kate Croy brushed irrevocably by the wings of the dove, and lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate.

It is against this ethic that the figure of Joseph P. Kennedy springs forth in such theatrical relief—for what we see is a figure in certain ways morally alien to us, an organism pulsing with visceral want, a spirit which might almost have transmigrated to us out of the Renaissance, out of the world of the Medici, so untempered are its ambitions by the ambiguities and second thoughts which cloud the resolves of most of us. Joseph Kennedy “stepped from a circumscribed world and opened a limitless one to the next generation,” Richard J. Whalen observes in his biography, The Founding Father, “yet he seemed always in midpassage, fired by old passions even as he seized new opportunities.”

JD

About the Author

Joan Didion

Featured Tags

The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy, by Richard J. Whalen. New American Library —World, $6.95 Only willful children want things too hard. Elizabeth Taylor wants things, and Clyde Griffiths did, and came to grief. So we are taught. Good children share their toys, dissemble in the presence of that which they covet; learn early that if the Lord is to be their shepherd they should not want, in any way we understand the word. We have a literature which illustrates the fate of those who perceive too late the vanity of wordly drives: I am dying, Egypt, dying, and Kate Croy brushed irrevocably by the wings of the dove, and lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate.

It is against this ethic that the figure of Joseph P. Kennedy springs forth in such theatrical relief—for what we see is a figure in certain ways morally alien to us, an organism pulsing with visceral want, a spirit which might almost have transmigrated to us out of the Renaissance, out of the world of the Medici, so untempered are its ambitions by the ambiguities and second thoughts which cloud the resolves of most of us. Joseph Kennedy “stepped from a circumscribed world and opened a limitless one to the next generation,” Richard J. Whalen observes in his biography, The Founding Father, “yet he seemed always in midpassage, fired by old passions even as he seized new opportunities.”