The House That Jack Built

By Lev Grossman Sunday, May 09, 2004
    • Kennedy confidant and journalist Ben Bradlee has his initials tattooed on his right buttock, with a snake wrapped around them. You can read this little fact either as part of what book reviewers like to call a "wealth of historical detail" or as symptomatic of a fetishistic interest in the most insignificant minutiae of the presidency of John F. Kennedy. Either is fine, but decide now, because there's a lot more where that came from in Sally Bedell Smith's Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House (Random House; 608 pages).

    Grace and Power begins the day after Kennedy was elected and wafts us lightly through to his assassination and its aftermath. Smith's primary focus is on the lopsided, bittersweet love story of Jack and Jackie, but she finds time to document in exhaustive detail Kennedy's many infidelities — yes, she digs up a few new ones — as well as Jackie's exceptional grasp of tactical flirtation, cutting off Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev mid-lecture by saying, "Oh, Mr. Chairman, don't bore me with statistics." Somewhere in the background, we glimpse Jack's political evolution from the hothead of the Bay of Pigs to the cool hand of the Cuban missile crisis.

    Smith is very good on the West Wing — style internal politics of Kennedy's West Wing, but otherwise there is nothing particularly revelatory or shocking here. And there's something a little surreal about the book's lack of perspective. Kennedy was a President who confronted the unthinkable in many forms, be it nuclear annihilation or Oleg Cassini dancing the twist with Robert McNamara. Grace and Power gives them equal weight.