Book gives a new look at Kennedy’s family history

It’s almost summer.

So I need to read another Kennedy biography…right?

As a die-hard Kennedy fan, I admit it: I have a problem. I can not get enough of it. Tragedy and Mysticism; the hubris and the curse. The Complicated Family Dynamics! Give in. Martha Stewart may have her chicken coop, with reportedly 200 chickens in her Westchester stack. i make my book towers groan with an ever-growing collection of Kennedy titles.

“More than a thousand books have been written about the Kennedys since the mid-1960s,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley once wrote, commenting on the publishing house industry that keeps suckers like me satiated. And That was in 2004. JFK Jr. – the American prince who died too young – himself inspired an entire cottage industry within a publishing house.

Ranging from the trashy to the wonkish, the books about the slain 35th president of the United States, and the generations that both preceded and followed, include volumes such as “After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family from 1968 to the Present” (one of my favorites!), more thin looks like “Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter”, insider takes like “The Nine of Us: Growing Up Kennedy” (written by Jean Kennedy Smith, OG Kennedy’s last surviving brother before she died in 2020) and even super-focused ones like “Jackie After O” (a Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis account through the lens of a remarkable year: 1975).

In the summer, most of the Kennedy books seem to germinate. And I can’t remember one over the years that didn’t include Jack and Bobby and Ethel and Jackie. Coincidentally, and all too cleverly, a publicist at Simon & Schuster Canada – when I was recently at their bustling 10th anniversary party on King Street East – literally handed me a new one. You need this, she coaxed, slipping it into the corner of an elbow as I balanced a snack and drink. Party yoga! The soirée was a success, and I’m happy to report that the book was too. In fact, I loved it.

Entitled “White House by the Sea: A Century of the Kennedys at Hyannis Port”, by Kate Storey, it has done the almost impossible: to find a new path in the story, looking at it specifically through a place , the famous Kennedy compound on Cape Cod. A place where this legendary American family – now four generations and a total of 105 in all its branches – “have come to celebrate, to bond, to play, and also to mourn.”

A small enclave that also happened to have an Adirondack chair view of history: whether it was the unnerving night when the family gathered to watch John F. Kennedy defeat Nixon in 1960, to the day Jackie ingeniously debunked the myth of ‘ Camelot’ when I spoke to a Life mag reporter several days after her husband’s assassination, to the maelstrom that followed that whole mess with Senator Edward Kennedy and the Chappaquiddick scandal.

Of course, there are lighter moments too, like the super ’80s phenomenon that was Maria Shriver’s Hyannis Port wedding to action star Arnold Schwarzenegger (a wedding that attracted everyone from Andy Warhol to Oprah!).

More hedges and fences than kiss and tell, the book essentially follows the “Downton Abbey” approach: using a house (or, in this case, a cluster of houses) to weave a story. If you read it, you can catch the gust of salt in the air. The white caps of salt water. The click of both polaroids and bicycles. The hydrangeas. Based on more than 100 in-depth interviews by the author – the most fascinating being with old townspeople in what is essentially a village – the book doesn’t exactly reinvent the Kennedy wheel (much of the history is even with the casual enthusiast known), but it refocuses it in interesting ways.

A bit of it? Positively cinematic: for example, Jackie Kennedy, the avid water skier. (Who knew?) However, in order to do it, Secret Service agents had to set up a perimeter with jet boats in the water around where Jackie and whoever she was with were skiing. In fact, she had gotten really good when astronaut John Glenn came to visit in the summer of 1962, just back from his trip—oh, you know—in orbit.

Take Jackie for a ride — from the Milky Way to the Atlantic Ocean! — together they did some graceful figures of eight as they zigzagged back and forth. “The family cheered from the boat as hundreds of spectators watched the show from shore,” Storey writes. “Glenn tried his best to keep up with the First Lady, but fell off his skis twice.”

Yes, you should have been there.

Some of the more mundane details are the ones loaded with unexpected poignancy. How JFK celebrated with a daiquiri the night he became president (the book rattles positively with daiquiris). How there is a name that Cape Codders gives to newcomers: people whose families do not go back generations and have no hold on the morals. They are called “washashores”. That many of the old Cape houses had small balconies at the top, including Jackie’s House, named after the women who looked out for husbands returning from the sea. It’s called a “widow’s walk.”

That John-John—when he’d become the most famous bachelor on the planet—liked driving around in a sporty Karmann Ghia convertible he called Orange, from which he often blared Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin.

The – I almost forgot! — rush of paparazzi and renewed public interest in 2012, when Taylor Swift performed at Hyannis Port, watched play volleyball with Conor Kennedy, whom she was dating at the time (part of a burgeoning new generation). Swift, as we are reminded, even bought a house next door, from Kennedy girlfriend Nancy Tenney. For a cool $4.9 million! (Three months later, after Taylor and Conor broke up, she sold it for $6 million.)

As an exploration of waspendom, the book largely succeeds. Almost like a companion piece to that ’80s classic “The Official Preppy Handbook,” this is a dissertation on the too-rich-to-carry holey sweater. It is also remarkable to read about the metamorphosis of a sleepy community into a Kennedy fishbowl. During his first Fourth of July weekend as president, Jack welcomed his Secret Service agents and served them – what else? — boxes of his favorite clam chowder with bacon and potato chunks from Mildred’s Chowder House, a hole-in-the-wall near the airport. (Mildred’s became such a hangout that a special red telephone was installed in the restaurant just for the Secret Service!)

When I added this book to my dynastic pile, I was particularly fascinated by Rose Kennedy, the model for enduring matriarchs: the woman who lost half her children and lived to be 104 herself. Floor paint of the day the plane carrying JFK Jr., his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren, crashed in 1999 en route to the compound. family members. They entered the choppy waters off Hyannis harbor.

Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist on culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

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