The Myth Machine

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The poor you will always have with you," the new Testament teaches, but it neglects to mention that the rich can be pretty hard to avoid too. Consider the Kennedys. The family has been internationally famous since the 1930s, when F.D.R. named Joe the U.S. ambassador to Britain, and it still commands attention today, even when Joe's heirs decide not to run for office. How to account for the never failing presence of Kennedys in American life? Cynics point to an apparatus of publicists, friendly journalists and starry-eyed academics, all inspired by the family's wealth and charm and by our own seemingly inexhaustible curiosity--a "myth machine," in short, that for three generations has promoted a carefully nurtured image of public service, sophistication, vitality and glamour. Even the Kennedy myth machine has taken on the status of myth. Which doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

The evidence is manifest. Last week "Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years," an exhibition of the former First Lady's clothes and artifacts, ended a three-month run at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was one of the most popular shows since "Treasures of Tutankhamen" in 1978. It now moves to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, and a national tour will follow. The publishing industry is launching yet another flotilla of books about the Kennedys, to take their place on shelves already crowded with books by them. The season's biggest--and oddest--Kennedy seller may be The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, edited by Caroline Kennedy. These poems are not, please note, written by Jackie but merely loved by her--elevated to book form by the fact of her admiration.

The myth machine chugs and rumbles, yet many old Kennedy hands deny that it exists--or that it ever did. "I've heard about this well-oiled machine for 40 years or more," says Myer Feldman, who first went to work for Senator John Kennedy in the late 1950s and remains close to the family. "Trust me, there's no such thing." Biographer Laurence Leamer (The Kennedy Men 1901-1963, due in October) sees the myth machine as a journalistic contrivance. "It's a useful way to sell books, to pretend that this thing exists," he says. "A writer gets to say, 'I am the first to break through the myth machine and bring you the real story.' But the closer you get to it, the more you realize it just doesn't exist." But even Leamer acknowledges that it once did. If you want to know why the Kennedys occupy large stretches of American culture, you have to trace the workings of the machine. They lead back to the patriarch.

Of all the shadows around the family tree, the one cast by Joseph P. Kennedy is the most paradoxical. The son of an Irish saloon keeper, Joe was driven to succeed in Wasp America. He was a master of manipulation, in both business and public relations. "You would be surprised," he wrote to Jack, "how a book that really makes the grade with high-class people stands you in good stead for years to come." And so in 1940, Joe enlisted his friend Arthur Krock, a columnist for the New York Times, to edit Jack's senior thesis from Harvard into a book--Why England Slept--and shop it to a publisher. Joe quietly bought up more than 30,000 copies of the book, which not coincidentally became a best seller.