Doug Wead
Monday, Aug. 11, 2003

One would think that Edward Klein is a right wing, extremist, Kennedy-hater to hear all the fuss that is being reigned down on him. Nice try, but no, he is a liberal Democrat and former editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine. The “extremist” publication that broke his story is the snobbish Vanity Fair, not exactly a bastion of traditional values and good old, middle-American, virtue.

The first week, Kennedy friends and allies, including some television producers, scoured the guest lists looking for people who would denounce the new book. As author of my own New York Times bestseller, All the President’s Children, I got some of those calls.

“Isn’t it outrageous that they would attack young Kennedy after he is dead?” I was asked by a producer. Of course, if he had been living one could have opined, “They should at least have the decency to write this sort of thing after he is gone?”

“Is this journalism?” another asked. She was attacking Vanity Fair magazine for the featured article with excerpts from the book. A Kennedy historian was trotted out. He told a national television audience that he would never write anything so repulsive, that the Kennedy’s trusted him, dubious credentials indeed for a man who is supposed to be a Kennedy historian.

He was particularly outraged that the author had tapped sources such as a manicurist. He wanted it known that he would never stoop to such levels. Presumably all of his historic sources are blue bloods with Ivy League educations and thus trustworthy. Imagine what he would write about Abraham Lincoln, minus all those trashy, colorful sources such as Mary Lincoln’s black maid, Elizabeth Keckley.

Most Successful

The most successful argument in favor of this latest Kennedy cover up was that the beloved presidential son, the one who as a little boy had saluted his father’s casket, deserved some respect and privacy and if his wife had a problem – which was an absolute lie from the pit of hell – then it was still nobody’s business anyway?

Actually, I took this tack myself in the writing of the living presidential children. But I was writing a book of history not a tell-all. I had to cover 170-plus children from George Washington’s rascally stepson who tried to cheat him on a cattle deal to the Bush twins.

I had plenty of ammunition to prove my thesis and to show how normal or troubled presidential kids can be. I could write about the dark and foreboding Robert Todd Lincoln, one of the richest men of his day and like JFK, Jr. always a threat for higher office.

How the young Lincoln was estranged from his father and after the assassination turned his inner rage on his poor mother, using her own money to hire the doctors who would declare her insane. None of them would even interview her. I had sons sneaking prostitutes in to the White House.

I had a First Lady stealing the affections of her step-daughter’s husband. I had the five children of FDR with their nineteen marriages, including Anna Roosevelt’s husband jumping out of a hotel to his death. I didn’t need Kennedy’s wife sniffing cocaine.

When word was out that I was writing a book on presidential children I had literally hundreds of stories coming in over the transom. They were about Chelsea Clinton, The Bush twins, the Carters and Johnsons and yes the hot, young, Kennedy couple too.

Sources

The sources were former lovers, agents, fashion models, bodyguards, public relations people, events coordinators, hotel managers, travel agents, classmates, school officials and a major network producer who turned over his notes from a spiked story.

I had to make up my mind. Do I write a tell-all or a book of history? I chose the latter but thank God somebody, sometimes chooses the former from time to time or else there would be no books of History at all.

It is the tell-all books and tracts and propaganda from Washington and Lincoln’s age that allow modern historians to track down the truth. To be sure, such material are often laced with lies and exaggeration but without them one could not stumble onto those rare finds. And the truth, my friends, matters, even when it is difficult, and even when it is about public figures we love and revere.

We know more about our president’s dogs than we do their children. And that is a tragedy. For presidents and first ladies love their children and are influenced by them just like the rest of us. Our perspective of our leaders changes dramatically when we step into the shoes of their offspring.

It is really hard to understand the Monroe Doctrine without knowing about Liza Monroe and her ongoing feud with the Washington diplomatic corps. Or how can we plumb the depths of Lincoln’s greatness and his ability to empathize with the nation, without understanding his sorrow as his favorite son Willie died in his arms in the White House. We think we know everything about Bill Clinton.

WTMI, (way too much information) as my daughter, Chloe, would say. But then there is Chelsea, with all her poise and academic brilliance, and circumspection, and we know that there is more to the Clintons than the caricature we now hold in our hands.

The Theodore Roosevelt public relations machine was the closest thing we have seen to the Kennedy machine. They portrayed a dynamic man, a perfect father, playing on the floor with his kids. But in 1980, when Alice Roosevelt finally died, the public learned that all the history books were wrong. Kermit Roosevelt, TR’s son had not died of uremic poisoning. He had committed suicide. R was revisited, reluctantly and sadly, in a new light.

No Secret

There was no secret that Theodore Roosevelt had pushed his children. TR, Jr.’s near death experience was attributed to a pushy father and his expectations. The doctor finally asked the sitting president to back off. Quentin, the youngest was accused of being “soft.” His father had once written a brother complaining of his brother’s cowardice in a family pillow fight.

Young Quentin, with something to prove, flew to his death in his second mission over Germany in World War One. The Germans sent back a note saying that the young Roosevelt was brave but stupid. Theodore Roosevelt, who confided to a reporter that “it is a terrible thing to think that one has contributed to the death of one’s own son,” died six months later.

The Kennedy cover-ups are much more sinister and selfish than anything the Roosevelt family could have envisioned. After the assassination of the president, when the nation needed healing and answers, when national security was at stake and rumors abounded of a communist connection to the killing of an American head-of-state, they put the reputation of their family ahead of the needs of the nation. The Warren Commission, intimidated by the Kennedy’s, was compromised and refused to do its job and so the conspiracy theorists hijacked history.

Years later, when all the tawdry stories emerged anyway, the Kennedy’s ridiculed each one, every step of the way, knowing that they were true. Judith Campbell Exner was vilified and trashed. Who could believe that the president shared a girlfriend with Chicago mobster Sam Giancano? When years later, history began to confirm the unthinkable, and a cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy wrote an account, documenting the truth, they rushed to print another Kennedy tome to compete in the bookstores and dilute sales or trick the public into thinking that they had bought the tell all when they had only bought another piece of vetted propaganda.

Theodore Roosevelt, dynamic, brilliant, loveable as he was, was a flawed parent, much like the rest of us. He had tried to love unconditionally and without favoritism but had not succeeded. His sons were driven to earn his approval and they all knew that he favored his namesake.

Grown Woman

Alice Roosevelt as a grown woman maintained that “he never loved me one seventh as much as the other children.” Can we really know this president outside the context of his son Kermit’s suicide? Can we really know the whole Kennedy saga, minus the biography of the little boy who saluted that casket years ago? Will anyone really love John, Jr. any less because his wife had trouble coping with the painful public life he led?

Psychologist Chet Sunde speaks of children who search for their biological parents. They have a need to know the truth no matter how ugly or terrible it may be. It is part of the process of their healing. Whatever is out there, it must be resolved one way or the other, the greatest pain is in ignorance, in the “not knowing.” In a sense, this is the work of history as well.

The Soviets or Iraqi’s or even the American’s have a need to know the truth about their leaders and yes, their families, for nothing is more telling than how these presidents and kings and prime ministers and dictators relate to their own children.

History has had a way of finding the Kennedy’s out, just as it has brushed aside so many others who have mounted efforts to manipulate it. They might find more peace in helping the process along rather than assassinating the characters of those who are only turning another page for the rest of us to see.

To find out about Doug Wead's "All the Presidents' Children: Triumph and Tragedy in the Lives of America's First Families,"

CLICK HERE.

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