Book On Joe Kennedy Goes Beyond Biography

“Seeds Of Destruction: Joe Kennedy And His Sons” By Ralph G. Martin (Putnam, $35, 704 pages)

Joe Kennedy was just a father trying to help his three sons find good jobs - in the U.S. Senate, the Cabinet and the White House.

Call him ruthless and unprincipled. The patriarch was too successful to mind. In 1957 he predicted that John would be president, Robert attorney general and Ted a senator. At the same time. Five years later, it all happened - in no small part because of him.

The flood of books on the Kennedys, America’s favorite dysfunctional dynasty, shows no signs of abating, and Ralph Martin’s “Seeds of Destruction” is a fair, balanced account that strings together some fresh anecdotes, old reminiscences, restrained judgments and shaky pop psychology. Just how ambitious and meddling was Joseph Kennedy? Martin describes how he had amassed a fortune of $400 million by 1960, and spent freely to help John win. After the election, he was still the unseen force.

Evelyn Lincoln, the president’s secretary, recalled how he asserted himself: “I had a separate telephone line for his father on my desk … I’d go in and put on a little 3x5 card, ‘Your Dad.”’

Martin, author of a previous Kennedy book (“A Hero for Our Time”) and several other biographies, has known the family since the late 1950s and apparently has the confidence of its members, friends and staff.

The result is much more than a biography of “the old man.” About the time Joe saw his sons achieve success and power, he suffered a massive stroke. Doctors predicted he would die quickly, but - paralyzed and mute - he lived nine more years and watched as two sons were struck down and the third lost at Chappaquiddick any real chance at the White House. Some of Martin’s revelations and observations fall into the gee-whiz category, but there are a few intriguing additions to Kennedy lore:

In the chaos right after JFK’s assassination, the Secret Service locked a near-hysterical Lyndon Johnson in a Dallas hospital room because he kept repeating, “They’re going to kill us all … they’re going to kill us all.”

The relationships among the Kennedy brothers are both a strength and weakness of this book.

There is good reporting on how the brothers’ pride and ambition drove them to compete fiercely with each other and to take chances. The first son, Joe Jr., was so concerned that younger brother John had become a war hero before him that he flew extra missions in World War II - until one killed him.

Otherwise, “Seeds of Destruction” is an often disjointed weave of personal and political history with a breathless style that sometimes undermines Martin’s judgment.

But his portrait of Joe Kennedy in his last years rings true: “He had been a ruthless, bigoted man, overwhelmed by personal ambition and pride, but he also had been a loving, loyal father.”