A few weeks ago, our colleague Gene Healy asked for an end to the Camelot movies, a noble idea that is not going to happen. The story and themes are simply too powerful, the characters too eternal and too enigmatic, the appeal too universal to fade.
The Cold War centrism of Kennedy’s politics may bore today’s think tanks, but in his life and the complications of it the student of the great social novels of the 19th and 20th centuries knows he has come on familiar ground.
Ambition and power and business and money, good works and dark deeds, filial struggles, sibling affection and sibling rivalry, gifted people not quite fatally flawed by interesting sins such as lust and avarice — Jack and Joe, Jack and young Joe, Jack and Jackie — John Kennedy is the great American novel, one of the best of all time.
Themes recur, not just from Trollope and Tolstoy and Elliot, but from those peculiar American novelists concerned with the movements of power and money in a fluid class structure. Thus we meet, as part of the drama, the crass millionaire from an immigrant background, hungry for power and social acceptance, and the more refined son who attains it, the Irish Catholic who wins our affection by seeming so much like a WASP.
Raised penniless in the midst of big money, already addicted to beauty and luxury, trained to marry rich by her shrew of a mother, Jacqueline Kennedy is Lily Bart, with an iron will and much more intelligence, who will not only triumph in the House of Mirth, but have the last laugh in it.
Lily Bart will meet Jack Kennedy, son of Jay Gatsby, at a dinner in Georgetown arranged by Joe Kennedy as part of his plan to find a Catholic woman with “brains, beauty, and breeding” to help his son become president. The marriage unfolds like a Henry James novel, sometimes maintained by Joe and Jackie, around the marginal, almost indifferent, figure of Jack.
There is Jack, who remains an enigma; a prudent public figure and a risk taker in private; a playboy, and serious student of politics; a bad husband who was a good son, father, friend, and brother; a proponent of vigor who was often in pain and always in danger, whose daily routine involved a staggering array of pills, tests, baths and injections simply to function, who had faced death four times before he was 40, and had been told to expect to die young, which he did.
The attempt to explain him will continue until it succeeds, which will be never. And so it will always go on.
Then there is Jackie, a book in herself. Your all-purpose classical fictional heroine is beautiful, willful, luxury-loving, and spoiled; but brave and resourceful, and someone who in a crisis will stand up and do the right thing.
This describes Scarlett O’Hara, the prototype fictional heroine. It also describes Jacqueline Kennedy, whose husband once said that she, if put in the ocean with a boat and one paddle, would nonetheless come out all right.
Does anyone doubt that in Scarlett’s shoes she would have gone back to Tara with Melanie and her baby, shot the Yankee who was stealing the jewelry, and made drapes into a dress to charm a rich man into paying the taxes on Tara? Jackie did the same thing with Ari Onassis, when she needed some time to be out of the country.
She went, didn’t like it, came home to New York — and went to work in a office, where at last she found happiness. If that isn’t a novel, what is?
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
