Great Expectations

Noemie Emery

Description

From John Adams’s sons two hundred years ago to the Bush brothers today, America has witnessed a long line of dynastic sons who have been forced into political roles by their ambitious relatives. Great Expectations examines the burden of being born into one of America’s royal families, where the choice is between achieving the pinnacle of political power—or failing miserably trying.
Preface.

Introduction.

1 Adamses.

2 Roosevelts.

3 Kennedys: Rise.

4 Kennedys: Decline and Fall.

5 Their Three Sons.

6 Bush versus Gore versus Bush.

7 2001.

Epilogue.

Selected Sources.

Index.

Sujets

• Political
• Lettres et linguistique
• Culture of the United States
• Biography
• Politics of the United States
• Autobiography
• John Adams

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 24 août 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780470256237
• Langue: English

Extrait

Great
Expectations
Also by Noemie Emery
Washington: A Biography
Alexander Hamilton: An Intimate Portrait
Great Expectations
THE TROUBLED LIVES OF POLITICAL FAMILIES
Noemie Emery

John Wiley Sons, Inc.
For Trude Lash
Copyright 2007 by Noemie Emery. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
Design and composition by Navta Associates, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Emery, Noemie, date.
Great expectations : the troubled lives of political families / Noemie Emery.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-13 978-0-471-23489-0 (cloth)
ISBN-10 0-471-23489-3 (cloth)
1. Politicians-United States-Biography. 2. Politicians-United States-Family relationships. 3. Politicians-Mental health-United States. 4. Family-United States-Case studies. 5. Fathers and sons-United States-Case studies. 6. United States-Biography. 7. United States- Politics and government-Miscellanea. I. Title.
E176.E54 2007
973.09 9-dc22
2006010288
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface
Introduction
1 Adamses
2 Roosevelts
3 Kennedys: Rise
4 Kennedys: Decline and Fall
5 Their Three Sons
6 Bush versus Gore versus Bush
7 2001
Epilogue
Selected Sources
Index
Preface
This is a book that defies definition, in a genre few words can explain. It is a social, political, and family history, but it is not the tale of a man, a movement, or a family. Rather, it is a story about a phenomenon-the pressures placed on young men in a specialized setting-as it works its way out over time. It is an eccentric, even tangential, approach that views many lives from one unique angle and tends to downplay, while understanding, the rest. Many things of great interest are therefore left out. The redemptive tale of Alice Roosevelt Longworth and her daughter and granddaughter is omitted completely, and the epic philandering of John Kennedy, itself the subject of endless conjecture, is mentioned only in terms of the additional pressure it put on his brother Bob s life. This is not the place to go for the definitive view of these men and their families, or of their views or their impact on history. Nor is it the place to go for political arguments. Most of the time, parties are not even mentioned, and policies are addressed only when weighted by family matters. Not every politician starts off his career with a ringing attack on the policy views of his ambassador father, as did John Kennedy, or has the words of his president father quoted against him while running for president, as did the younger George Bush.
This book has percolated through a lifetime of viewing politics as a great human drama, where complex, driven people vie for huge stakes. It was my luck as a child to have met Trude Lash, who died in 2004 at age ninety-five after an epic life that took her from pre-Hitler Germany to the FDR White House, to politics and education concerns in postwar Manhattan, where she became my mother s friend, and then mine. It was in the townhouse on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village that she shared with her husband, Joseph, (the author of Eleanor and Franklin and numerous histories) that I first saw another dimension to history: I learned what it was like to be close to a president s family, and to see large figures as human and unhappy people, with secrets and strains of their own. Trude and her husband read everything that I wrote, did not turn against me when I stopped being a Democrat, and were the best of friends and most helpful of tutors. I am deeply sorry I could not discuss this book with them, and miss them each day that I live.
I am grateful to Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes, and John Podhoretz, who conceived the idea of a center-right weekly and got Rupert Murdoch to fund it, and in September 1995 unleashed the Weekly Standard on a helpless and terrified universe. There I found a home, a hangout, the friendship of many remarkable writers, an ideal venue for my preferred form of writing, and the original outlet-in features and book reviews-for some of the words in this book. Among the Standard s many exceptional features is its proximity in several ways to the American Enterprise Institute, a farm team and resource to some administrations, but to me a free university offering courses in government, only with much better food. On nearly any day, one can find people munching away on various foodstuffs as they absorb verbal sparrings among pundits, presidential advisers, and would-be prime ministers, enlivened by protests and/or armed security. It was there that I heard presidential biographers discussing their subjects, campaign managers discussing their candidates, and participants on a panel on terrorism on October 6, 2000, predict a calamitous attack on the American mainland within the next one or two years. The sustenance offered is not always ephemeral. At the AEI there is not only free lunch, there are also free coffee and cookies, and often free cheese and free wine.
I am grateful too to the numerous people whose efforts supported my own. I was inspired by books by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, who refined and defined the family saga; by Richard Brookhiser; and by Paul C. Nagel, whose book I was reading when it occurred to me that the death of Charles Adams in a Manhattan hovel in 1800 at age twenty-nine of acute alcoholism was not unlike that in 1984 of David Kennedy at age twenty-eight of a drug overdose in a motel in Palm Beach, and might be related to it in curious ways.
It was shortly after this that Karlyn Bowman led me to Deborah Grosvenor, who helped shape this thought into a proposal, who led me in turn to Hana Lane at John Wiley Sons, who helped shape the proposal into a book. Advice, support, and encouragement came from other writers and friends, among them Fred Barnes, Jeffrey Bell, Karlyn Bowman, Jody Bottum, Danielle Crittenden, Stephanie Deutsch, David Frum, Bill Kristol, Michael and Barbara Ledeen, Michael Novak, Richard Starr, James Woolsey, and Claudia Winkler, who delighted us all by becoming Claudia Anderson and bringing her husband, Bill, into our midst.
In 2004, I wrote a piece that compared President Bush to the great racehorse Seabiscuit (both misunderestimated by uppity critics), which led to an e-mail friendship with Laura Hillenbrand, a spectacular writer, a generous friend to human and equine good causes, and the reason I now read Bloodhorse and Thoroughbred Times every morning, along with Instapundit , the Corner , and Powerline . You can t write a book without a dog, Michael Ledeen once told me, and knowing this (and that one needed a dog for a true friend in Washington), I took two with me when I moved down from New York. They-and their heirs-have been loving companions. There are other friends in other places who have also been stalwarts. You know who you are.
Introduction
On the afternoon of November 20, 2001, on what would have been the seventy-sixth birthday of Robert F. Kennedy, the building that housed the Department of Justice was renamed in his honor, before a large crowd of his friends and relations and the current president of the United States. It was a festival of the well connected and the genealogically privileged, among them George W. Bush, the forty-third president, a son of George H. W. Bush, the forty-first president, and a brother of Governor Jeb Bush of Florida; Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a brother of the late Robert Kennedy and of John F. Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president, the father of Rhode Island congressman Patrick J. Kennedy; and some of Robert Kennedy s numerous children, including ex-Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II, once thought a shoo-in for much higher office, and his older sister, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, then considered an oncoming governor. All listened as Joe Kennedy II read aloud the account that his father once gave of how he had managed to rise at age thirty-five to the position of attorney general from his humble start as a low-ranking lawyer in the Department of Justice. I worked hard, I studied, I applied myself, and then my brother was elected president of the United S