Books: The Chronicles of a Dynasty in the Making

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Social note from the unreal winter of 1939, at the precipice of world war: Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy reported in his London diary that when he dined at Lady Astor's, he noticed that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had a hole in his sock.

Joe Kennedy, pirate and paterfamilias, son of a Boston Irish saloonkeeper, delighted in the company of the royals. During lunch at Windsor Castle in April 1939, Kennedy told his diary, "Somebody at table discovered a ladybug and Princess Elizabeth suggested it was good luck and sent it along to the Prime Minister. So it came along on a gold spoon, one from another, and I handed it to the Queen, and then she tried to tip it out on the Prime Minister's shoulder, most gently..."

But let American involvement end with dinners and ladybugs. Kennedy hated the idea of the U.S. being drawn into the looming European catastrophe. His patriotism was genuine but isolationist and, in the Kennedy way, tribal. Eventually, of course, he came home from London in something like disgrace, dismissed as an appeaser and defeatist.

It was in part a tribal impulse that led Amanda Smith, a 33-year-old Harvard graduate student who is a granddaughter of Joe Kennedy and daughter of Jean Kennedy Smith and Stephen Smith, to embark on the project of sifting through some 600,000 pages of Ambassador Kennedy's papers in order to produce Hostage to Fortune, The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy (Viking; 764 pages; $39.95). As Smith describes it, her search through the often crumbling documents (some uncatalogued at the JFK Library in Boston, some forgotten in a warehouse in Long Island City, N.Y., and others found in the attic above the room in Hyannis Port, Mass., where Joe Kennedy died in 1969) has a quality of the newsreel reporter's quest for Charles Foster Kane.

Smith has not found the sled with the rosebud on it. Those who thought Kennedy an odious character will not find much ammunition, although the letters are disfigured here and there by outbursts of irritable anti-Semitism. Kennedy had multiple identities, as Smith says in a lovely introduction that is both haunted and haunting: He was father, speculator, film producer, bootlegger, chairman (of the SEC and the Federal Maritime Commission), philanderer, philanthropist, kingmaker.