Now it isn't entirely said in just that language, that Klein believes that curse to have taken effect. But he encourages something of the sort as he recounts the macabre fate of the Kennedys. He doesn't stop at the especially accursed children of Joe Kennedy. Here of course were the two most conspicuous casualties of the curse, a president of the United States shot dead, and an aspirant president shot dead five years later. Then there is Teddy's behavior at Chappaquiddick, where he left the girl, and in Palm Beach, where he roused his own son and a libidinous nephew late on Good Friday to go with him to forage for sexual bait, resulting in a widely covered rape trial.
The curse is visited in many ways as it diffuses through cousins and grandchildren. Robert Kennedy's nephew is found guilty of killing a girl in Greenwich, Conn., 25 years after the deed. One's patience wears thin when, included in the chronicle of the curse, we see listed, "In 1955 Ethel Kennedy's parents are killed in a small plane crash in Oklahoma while on vacation." That would be some curse. A truly fissiparous incubus.
Well, count us out on that. The incidence of tragedy for the Kennedy clan is interestingly chronicled by Klein without any necessary reliance on Freud or on Cain. He is convincing in relating a daredevil streak in the Kennedys, and perhaps it was an outgrowth of ethnic resentment over discouragements visited on the Irish community when first they arrived in large numbers in the 19th century and were treated as a servile class by the dominant Protestants.
The conflict was nicely joined when JFK's sister Kathleen became engaged to William Cavendish, eldest son of the Duke of Devonshire. Mother Cavendish was keeper of the queen's wardrobe, or some such thing, and there was strong resistance to any notion of high British Protestant aristocracy marrying a Catholic girl. So Kick, as they called JFK's dashing, endearing sister, compromised on a civil marriage. The curse was very attentive to these proceedings and killed off the heir in battle a short time later, and soon Kick too would die in an airplane crash.
What to make of it all? The book is engrossing to read, because it tells above all of Joseph Patrick Kennedy, a truly abominable man who made his way in business, politics and, finally, clanship, fostering an incandescent string of Kennedys, strikingly engaged in myriad activity. Klein suggests that the story is hard to get out, because the protective barriers surrounding the Kennedys are militantly there. And it is true that Teddy survived mishap after mishap, but true also that naysayers get to write their protests.
Richard Reeves and Thomas Reeves have written very good books challenging the immunities of the Kennedy myth, and here is another one. It is unreasonable to suppose that the doctrine of lese-majeste will keep it from springing forward to wide public attention, even if its readers reject the imposture of one great curse having it out on Kennedy blood.