The Kennedy Imprisonment: Meditations on Power - Garry Wills. 1982.
I started this book in December of 2023, and finished it just two days into 2024. It felt appropriate, somehow - the new year always feels like a hopeful time for me but the world at large feels less hopeful than ever. This book fits that mood. There’s a sense of things rapidly changing, and of people reaching for a future, but of the future looking just like the past did. John F. Kennedy loved the story about the man throwing his hat over the wall and thereby forcing himself to find a way forward. It seems lately like we keep throwing our hats over the wall and we just find more walls, and they all look the same. This is also, evidently, what Wills thought of the Kennedys. They seemed fresh and new; they weren’t. They were just the same patricians we’d always had.
I’ve never read a book about the Kennedy family as cynical as this one, written by someone who I gather had sympathy with many of their stated political aims. That’s only as far as I can gather, though. Garry Wills is one of the most fascinating political writers I’ve ever read, in that his personal politics are difficult to pin down - I think he liked it that way. He had long associations with the right, of course - he worked for William F. Buckley, and frequently referred to himself as a conservative. But he rejected the conservative movement as a political project. He was generally in favor of social change, but not if it was radical or violent or too fast. He loved old things: old history and ritual and traditions. He was a distributist but not a socialist - he thought rich people should give their wealth away, mostly, and he was suspicious of corporate power, but he was probably equally suspicious of a dictatorship of the proletariat. He thought (thinks, he’s still around even if he hasn’t published a book in a few years) that the American project is fundamentally good, even if it fails more often than it succeeds. He admires people as diverse as Jefferson and Lincoln and King, and I don’t think that admiration is blind or comes from a simple patriotic fervor for his country’s greatest men: he has studied these men, knows their strengths and flaws. Wills is never lazy.
His cynicism about the Kennedys then is interesting. What I think colors it most is disappointment, the kind that only comes from intimacy. Wills seems to have an idea of what the Kennedys - mostly Jack and Bobby, but Ted too - should have been, what maybe they could have been. Maybe it’s a Catholic thing. I couldn’t help but think that he compared their shallowness and laziness with his own intellectual rigor and work ethic. It’s not that he doesn’t value the qualities people think they had, it’s just that he thinks they get credit for qualities they didn’t have. In the last season of Mad Men, a character says to Don Draper “you don’t have any character, you’re just handsome. Stop kidding yourself.” I think Garry Wills would say that to Jack Kennedy, if he could.
All of this means that this is not a book for Kennedy fans, or even really for people who find them fascinating: Wills emphatically hates them and is hilariously obvious in his frustration at their continued hallowed place in American culture. I read it because I’m a Wills fan. What you do get out of it is right there in the subtitle: a meditation on power. This is a portrait of a family who pursued political power and prestige relentlessly, through the generations, but failed at exercising that power in any way that meaningfully left the world better. The explicit contrast is made with others: LBJ, but especially Martin Luther King, to whom Wills dedicates most of the epilogue. The epilogue might be the best part of the book, if only for the beauty of Wills’ prose as he praises King.
So, I’m admittedly Wills-pilled, I love him, which means I recommend this but maybe not to people who really believe Bobby Kennedy would have saved America if only he’d lived. If you believe that, and take this book seriously, you’ll likely come away from it feeling like a fool. But it’s good, like all Wills books, at using a single figure or idea as an entry point into talking about American politics at a particular historical moment. Is it as good as Nixon Agonistes? No, but what could be? It’s good. It’s Gary Wills.