David Nasaw, The Patriarch

 

- On every level, this is a remarkable book. It was first published in 2012. It’s been many years since I've read such a brilliant and engrossing biography. Despite being just under 900 pages long, towards the end I was wanting it to go on for another few hundred. I was that absorbed.

- Celebrated historian David Nasaw, a distinguished professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, was granted unrestricted access to the Joseph P. Kennedy papers in the John F.  Kennedy Presidential Library.

- What makes the book so interesting is that it is not just a story of the immensely wealthy entrepreneur Joe Kennedy. It’s a story of American and world politics from the Depression in the early 1930’s to the Vietnam War years in the 60’s. It’s an examination of the remarkable Kennedy family, their political dramas, successes and tragedies, but it’s also a detailed analysis of all the global tensions of the time - Hitler’s rise in Germany and his persecution of the Jews; his threat to Europe, Russia and Britain; the radically different approaches of UK prime ministers Chamberlain and Churchill; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s major economic agenda, the New Deal - and so many other critically important issues of the twentieth century. 

- Here’s a few quotes from the dust jacket: Nasaw tracks Kennedy’s astonishing passage from East Boston outsider to supreme Washington insider. Kennedy’s seemingly limitless ambition drove his career to the pinnacles of success as a banker, World War 1 shipyard manager, Hollywood studio head, broker, Wall Street operator, New Deal Presidential advisor, and founding chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. His astounding fall from grace into ignominy did not come until the years leading into the Second World War, when the antiwar position he took as the first Irish American ambassador to London made him the subject of White House ire and popular distaste. Was he an appeaser and isolationist, an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathiser?….Why did he oppose the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, and American assistance to the French in Vietnam? 

- During that time period politics was very much characterised by the Catholic/Protestant ‘wars’. JFK was the first Catholic president and he was constantly defending his faith as a private matter. He believed the political realm was secular and his religion private. Senior bishops in the church disagreed and rallied against him. Ironically a large swathe of Protestants voted for him, and without them he would not have won. 

- I was struck by the relevance of the issues and political debates of those years to today’s, particularly the huge post-war investments in social services and infrastructure that were necessary, and had to be funded by large tax increases on the wealthy and on corporations. 

- Finally, what was so refreshing was the civil debates between Republicans and Democrats on domestic and foreign policy issues. It was democracy at its best. The Republican party had not become rotten as it is now. Trump would have been confined to an asylum. 

- So read this magnificent book to be inspired.