(2 of 5)
Beyond Crackpots. By last July, the whole affair had become a subject for widespread conversation—and speculation —throughout the U.S. It had gone far beyond crackpots. U.S. journalists were in a dilemma: if they did not check and it was true, they would look foolish; if they checked too hard on an obvious phony, they were running the risk of smearing the President. British newsmen, perhaps recalling how they had been criticized for suppressing the news about Edward VIII's romance with Wallis Warfield Simpson, now privately chided the U.S. press for staying silent. Last Sept. 2, recognition in a mass U.S. publication was given for the first time to the fact that the question even existed. The Sunday supplement Parade (circ. 10 million) published a reader's letter asking about the truth of the Blauvelt genealogical item; Parade's answer was a flat refutation. London's huge Sunday papers, including the respectable Sunday Telegraph and Observer, promptly picked up the Parade question-and-answer as a way of getting the story into print.
By this time, it was plain that the lid would not stay on much longer—if, indeed, it was still on at all. And it was natural that the White House might want the "official" version to break in the friendliest possible fashion. As it happened, Philip Graham, proprietor of Newsweek and the Washington Post, is a good Kennedy friend. Last week, just after Graham returned from a trip to Europe, his publications broke the story. It denied, on its own responsibility, that Kennedy and Durie Malcolm had ever been married.
The Beginnings. The whole story, however, had its fascinating aspects from the very beginning, combining a dry-as-dust search through records along with the discovery of some eminently flesh-and-blood personages, especially Durie Malcolm.
The Blauvelt genealogy, printed under the auspices of the Association of Blauvelt Descendants and sold at $30 a copy, was the work of a quiet and patient man named Louis L. Blauvelt. By occupation he was a skilled General Electric toolmaker in Bloomfield, N.J. By preoccupation he was the family historian—and he spent 35 years compiling his tome. He recognized the possibility of error in his preface. Wrote he: "There no doubt will be errors in this work. For the most part these will be the fault of imperfect information that has come to me from one source or another. For this I cannot be blamed, unless it is for accepting it at all."
Louis Blauvelt died in 1959, at the age of 79, just two years after his genealogy was published.
Surviving Blauvelt family members say that "Uncle Louis" was a meticulous researcher and record keeper. For each entry in his genealogy, he kept an index card that referred to the source of his information. The card on Durie Malcolm cites only a letter from Howard Ira Durie of Woodcliff Lake, N.J. Howard Durie says his letter was "conversational," merely stated that he had seen a society column which noted that Durie Malcolm and Jack Kennedy had attended football games together in Miami in 1947.