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In the end, Joe Sr. not only beat the Brahmins, he joined them and established the Kennedy style: an irresistible fusion of the parvenu with a parody of the old-shoe aristocrat. As a movie-industry wheeler-dealer in the '20s, he introduced a bit of Harvard to Hollywood. But back East it was show business as usual, especially when he introduced his mistress Gloria Swanson to Rose. The high point of his social climb was undoubtedly the * ambassadorship to the Court of St. James's in 1938. "This is a helluva long way from East Boston," he told his wife during a weekend with the King and Queen at Windsor Castle.
The distance to the White House from the Hub was even greater. Biographer Goodwin navigates it swiftly. Like other historians, she finds the elder Kennedy's fingerprints all over the political controls. "It was like being drafted," J.F.K. later told Columnist Bob Considine. "My father wanted his eldest son in politics. 'Wanted' isn't the right word. He demanded it." He also molded the Kennedy image by promoting J.F.K.'s essentially ghostwritten Profiles in Courage and having his friend New York Times Columnist Arthur Krock lobby the Pulitzer board of advisers. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1957.
Goodwin registers maternal disapproval rather than disgust about the incident. She takes a similar tone when dealing with J.F.K. the philanderer. His compulsive womanizing, says Goodwin, was a symptom of his dread of intimacy and his fear of early death. He suffered from Addison's disease. But previous accounts of Kennedy hanky-panky portray an insensitive Regency buck claiming sexual entitlements.
The author overextends herself when she tries to occupy the high critical ground. She judges J.F.K. as deficient in the kind of courage celebrated in Profiles: "the willingness to risk position, power, career for the sake of some abiding conviction." But she also argues that Kennedy was a strong leader because he was "unobstructed by ideological preconception." She is on much firmer ground when sticking to her own preconception, an alluring vision of history as romance.