Image courtesy of Pesky Librarians under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Edward Klein has written THE KENNEDY CURSE (St. Martin’s Press) and it is currently ranked number 7 on this week’s NEW YORK TIMES bestseller list.
Mr. Klein has granted ETHERZONE an exclusive interview about his fascinating book – and about his many years covering the Kennedys:
1) JLeB: Is there a real ‘Kennedy Curse’ or is it just a turn of phrase?
Ed Klein: The Kennedy Curse is real, and can be measured in lives lost and lives ruined–at least 20 in the past 40 years. The Kennedys have an obsession with power and a lust for dominance over others. They act as though they are not governed by the rules of God and men, and their fantasy of omnipotence puts them on a fatal collision course with reality.
2) JLeB: What role did Rose Kennedy play in the formation of her sons’ characters? What about their serial infidelity?
Ed Klein: The home of Joseph and Rose Kennedy–with its harsh, authoritarian father and cold, rejecting mother–was the perfect hothouse for nurturing narcissists. Jack, Bobby, and Teddy were full of longing for a warm and tender mother. They had an overpowering craving to be close to a woman, and yet they hated this feeling because they feared it meant that they were weak as men. As a result, they put on a tremendous show of Don Juanish behavior to demonstrate they were really strong, powerful men.
3) JLeB: Mr. Klein, this is your third book on the Kennedys. How much cooperation have you had from the Kennedy Family? And how much interference?
Ed Klein: Whenever I write anything the least bit critical about the Kennedys, I can always be sure of one thing: the empire will strike back. The media attacks on The Kennedy Curse have been orchestrated in Senator Ted Kennedy’s Washington office by his press secretary, Melody Miller. Her smear campaign has been conducted through liberals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who has told his friends in the mainstream media that if they want access to the Kennedys in the future, they had better get on the team and attack the author of The Kennedy Curse. And they have.
4) JLeB: What drove Joe Kennedy? What was he trying to overcome? Was it class warfare with him, an Irish immigrant, versus the Boston Brahmin Establishment?
Ed Klein: Joe Kennedy harbored deep feelings of worthlessness. In The Kennedy Curse, I trace these feelings back to the Kennedys’ early history, which left an indelible scar on their psyche. Among America’s immigrant groups in the nineteenth century, the Irish were the only people who suffered the soul-searing experience of colonialism. Before coming to this country, they lived under the heel of cruel English oppressors for several centuries. Although the Kennedys achieved financial security early in their American sojourn, they were denied social acceptance and status by the Protestant Establishment. Joe and his sons never forgot this slight and they sought revenge all of their lives.
5) JLeB: Was Jackie’s life an extension of the Kennedy Curse? How?
Ed Klein: Jackie certainly thought so. Jackie had an almost pathological obsession with the safety of her children. She worried that John and Caroline were in constant danger of losing their lives. Her anxiety was understandable: She had lost three other children (a stillbirth, a miscarriage, and her two-day-old son Patrick), two husbands (John Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis), a step-son (Onassis’s son Alexander), and a brother-in-law (Robert Kennedy). She had come to the conclusion that in some mystical way she was personally responsible for these tragedies. “I sometimes feel as though I’m a kind of Typhoid Mary,” Jackie once told me. Another time, she said: “If I had known Jack was going to be killed, I would never have named our son John F. Kennedy Jr.” I never knew how to respond to these jawdropping remarks. “Surely,” I would tell Jackie, “you don’t believe in a family jinx or curse.” But Jackie was deadly serious about her premonitions of disaster.