David Nasaw's Reading List

"Yes, it did! It’s a great book; it’s a collection of letters to and from Kennedy, most of them from his children (though there are a lot of other letters in there as well). When I was doing a biography of William Randolph Hearst, I got in touch with Amanda Smith, the editor of Hostages to Fortune , to see if she had any correspondence between Hearst and Kennedy; so I was originally introduced to Kennedy through this Hearst project. It was in his correspondence with Hearst that I discovered that, rather than being this predatory vulture who was swooping down on the Hearst empire, Kennedy really took a liking to the old man, and tried to rescue him from bankruptcy. So that was my introduction, through Amanda, and through Hearst, to Kennedy. One of the things that comes across so clearly in this book is the family’s extraordinary sense of humour. This is a family – I mean, if they didn’t go into public life, they could have been performers and comedians, humourists! One is more hysterical than the next. It’s really a terrific book, even just for diving in and diving out. Nobody except lunatics like me is going to read it all through. Listen – I tell this to my students as well – every archive is constructed. There is no archive in the universe that has not been constructed, either by the subject or by the subject’s followers or family. So this archive, and these letters – there’s stuff left out. Nonetheless, you will never find a book or a collection of letters as honest as this one. It is absolutely extraordinary. Yeah! There’s stuff in here that really does not put various members of the family in the best light. It’s frank, it’s direct; it’s quite an honest and full selection. That’s why it’s an amazing book. Amanda is a Kennedy granddaughter [by adoption], and yet she did an extraordinary book – and the family let her do it. The family is very smart about that kind of thing. I spent a lot of time negotiating the terms of my book with Senator [Ted] Kennedy, and he knew full well that, unless he chose someone who had some standing as an academic historian to write this book, and put no restrictions on the research or the writing, nobody was going to believe the book. So I have no restrictions whatsoever on what I can look at or what I can write about, and I think Amanda – as far as I can see in this book – also had a free rein. Anybody who dives into this collection thinking that they’re just going to get a love-feast, that this is put together to add to the greater glory, and only the glory, of Joseph P. Kennedy… they’re going to find something else there."

"I chose Bradlee for two reasons. One, you see Bradlee struggling to be a journalist and a friend at the same time; two, you see Jack Kennedy struggling to have a journalist as a friend. Given that, Bradlee – who only writes this book after Kennedy’s death – is privy to secrets and situations that no one else could have experienced, seen or heard. And you really get a sense of the Kennedy administration and of Kennedy’s personality that you don’t get anywhere else. You get a sense that this is the real Kennedy. The book is warm, the book is personable; you see a Kennedy who has a temper, who uses language he shouldn’t, who is struggling with an impossible job, and who’s smart as can be in attempting to manage his job and his public image. I think it offers both. One of the reasons I like the book is that Bradlee is very clear, right from the beginning, that the two of them are great friends, and they’re both using each other. And each knows that the other is using him. There are times when you feel that you’re almost in a Pinter play, with web of suspicion built on web of suspicion. Nonetheless, given the fact that they both recognise that they’re using each other, Bradlee writes with a degree of intimacy and is granted a view of Kennedy that is not available anywhere else, and I think both men knew that this book would not be written until the Kennedy political career was over. And I don’t think it was written until ‘75."

"I think he does. You know, this is a very different book from A Thousand Days. A Thousand Days is Schlesinger’s big, fat book about the Kennedy administration and his life in it; in that book, he writes from the inside. In Robert Kennedy and His Times, Schlesinger writes from the outside, and he does a remarkable job. You see the brilliance of Schlesinger as a historian that is evident in his books about the New Deal and Roosevelt. You know that Schlesinger worked for Kennedy, and admires him; nonetheless, the advantages of being an insider and trying to write from the outside I think outweigh the disadvantages of reading a book by an insider. With this book. This is rarely the case – but then, rarely do historians come along as talented as Schlesinger was. Yes, I think so. You know, Schlesinger himself always said that history is written to be re-written. If you ask me to do this ten years from now, and I’m still around, I doubt very much that I will choose this book as the best one. But right now, it’s a rather remarkable book."

"Right. Hamilton – I disagree with him much more than I agree with him. This book is very much a book about a father and a son. The father is painted as the bad guy, and the son is the good guy, struggling to break free. I don’t accept that interpretation, or that framework of analysis. Nonetheless, Hamilton writes with a verve, an electricity, a passion, that’s rare among academic historians. As a researcher, he’s extraordinary. He did everything: he read every newspaper clip and every magazine article; he interviewed everybody he could possibly find, and read the interviews that other people had done. He’s put together a remarkable portrait of young JFK, and I think that portrait will stand. You see this most unlikely of men develop, this incredible transformation take place. Nigel and I agree that Jack Kennedy always had political ambitions; if he backed off a bit, it was because his older brother was first in line. But I think he believed, and certainly his father believed, that, just like the La Follettes had been senator and governor of Wisconsin, so the Kennedy brothers could both have high positions in politics. The reason Jack was not thought of as presidential material early on was that his health was so bad; nobody in the family thought he had the endurance to run a campaign. But when you see the way this young man develops – when you see him going from being unkempt, badly dressed, undisciplined, always late, a man who would much prefer to stay at home reading a history book than go shaking hands… When you see him become the most unlikely of war heroes – a war hero who didn’t want to be known as a war hero – and then a candidate… It’s an extraordinary story, and extraordinarily well told by Hamilton. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . That’s a great question. I don’t know. Hamilton had written a book about Montgomery before this one, and I think it gave him a fresh view and a new view on Kennedy, coming from the other side of the Atlantic. He admired Jack Kennedy no end, but I think he had a certain advantage in coming at much of this in a way that was different and perhaps more fresh than his approach might have been had he grown up an American during the Kennedy presidency. I don’t think so. I think there are advantages both ways, and I would hope that my background and my understanding of U.S. history , as a historian, are going to stand me well. And also my ‘ethics’ as a historian, if I can use a horrible word. I don’t think that any historian can be objective, but I think historians have to be fair, and they have to look at all the material out there. I think that approach will stand me well, whether I’m writing about an American or a Hungarian. I think Nigel and I disagree a little bit on this. I think he regards biography as almost a separate genre. I don’t. I am a historian, and, at least with the last couple of books I’ve written, I choose to write history from the vantage point or from the perspective of an individual. As a historian, I believe that no individual is, in and of himself or herself, a fit subject. The individual is only used as a perspective, a way to illuminate a larger truth. This is true of many great biographies. Bob Caro’s biographies of Johnson are about the accumulation and use of political power; David Levering Lewis’s books about Du Bois are about race in America. I hope my biography about Carnegie is about the role of the entrepreneur in the Industrial Revolution, and my book about Hearst is about the coming to power and prominence of the mass media. So again, I regard myself as a historian who, this time around, is writing a biography. Some time ago, the American Historical Revue did a symposium on historians writing biographies. In the beginning, I refused to take part in it, because I didn’t think I needed to defend writing biography. In the end, I decided to write the introduction to the thing. In it I said that, as a historian, I’m not interested in telling a birth-to-death story – that’s not my intent. I want to use this person’s life to talk about something else. I said that, if you look at great biographies by historians, they don’t begin, ‘X was born at such-and-such a time’, and they don’t end, ‘X died at such-and-such a time’. I think that biography is a credible and an extraordinarily useful form of history writing. And I bow to no one when I write my biographies; I am as rigorous and scrupulous with my sources as when I write something else. You know, it’s not fair – there are a lot of bad biographies written. There are a lot of bad books in other forms. And you can’t use Kitty Kelley to blame or to condemn this whole form of historical writing."

"Generally, I’m not a fan of memoirs . Maybe it’s because I’m a biographer. I don’t like it when autobiographies are confused with biographies; they’re very separate, very different. But there’s just something about the stories that Ted tells in this book that is so engaging; you get a real sense of this Kennedy mission, this Kennedy commitment to public service – and you also get some idea of what holds the family together. It’s religion; it’s love of the sea; it’s commitment to making the world a little bit different. You really get a sense, in this book, of the wit and the glamour that the Kennedys are able to combine with public service and politics in a rather unique way. This is one of these Kennedy books that is just extraordinarily honest. Ted was a remarkable mimic, and a great storyteller, and that comes across on page after page of this book. He tells such wonderful stories… There’s one about his mother sending him to school in Rhode Island with his brother Bobby. Ted’s only nine years old, and the next-youngest kid is 13. Ted gets picked on and bullied, and his only friend, the only thing he’s got going for him, is his pet turtle who comes with him – and who dies two weeks after he gets there. You just get the sense of this incredible, intense individual life, and then this life as a Kennedy. I loved it. I think you can certainly compare them to all those families. I mean, that’s how we understand people – by comparisons. But comparisons also focus on differences. The people behind this latest television series, ‘The Kennedys’, said in the very beginning that they were going to tell the Kennedy story as The Godfather. That’s just nonsense; I think it’s absurd. You can certainly compare the Kennedys to other families, but in the end I think they do stand out in a way. I mean, Franklin Roosevelt ’s children never succeeded in politics, or in any other part of life. Teddy Roosevelt’s children didn’t. The Bush family – I just don’t think it’s possible… The more you compare the Kennedys to other families, the more their uniqueness comes back. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Oh, yes – it’s incredible. It’s so incredible that you don’t need to make stuff up! There are probably more bad books about the Kennedys, and more bad television shows, and more bad movies, than about any other family, and there’s no need for it. I mean, the drama, the everyday drama… It’s there even in that story about the young Ted Kennedy and his pet turtle that I told before. Whether you love them or you hate them, I think you’ve got to respect – at least, I respect – their commitment to public service, which comes from their father and their mother. God, I don’t know. I’m not going to watch it. I’m not going to watch it because, one, I know I’m not going to learn any history from it; two, I know I’m probably going to throw things at the screen as they make up stuff; and three, from all the reviews I’ve read, it sounds like there’s no real drama to it! Tom Wilkinson is a great actor, but he has to read somebody else’s lines, and I don’t know if they work. And four, it’s just ludicrous to make the story of this family into a Godfather epic, and structure it like that. So, I’m not going to watch it. That’s all I can tell you."