The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.

• Author: Peters, Charles

The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys

Doris Kearns Goodwin's recent book aboutthe Kennedys* illuminates the family legend with new fact and fresh insight, and it is a marvelous read. I would be astounded if it fails to win the Pulitzer Prize for biography.

* The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. Doris Kearns Goodwin.Simon & Schuster, $22.95.

That being said, I have two problems--oneminor, the other major.

The minor one involves the minor inaccuracies.Having been seduced by the opening pages, I was a benign reader of the remainder of the book, definitely not looking for errors. So I can't help suspecting that the four I noticed are the tip of an iceberg.

"The most celebrated architect in Palm Beach'was not Harry but Addison Mizner. The Battle of Britain began not on September 7, 1940 but a month earlier. The Homestead is in Hot Springs, Virginia, not Arkansas. FDR's victory over Willkie in 1940 was not by "a narrow margin.' Roosevelt's popular vote exceeded Willkie's by five million. He led in electoral votes 449 to 82.

The book's major flaw is its failure to understandthe Kennedy hustle and its significance for the country, although to Goodwin's credit I must concede she lays out much of the evidence needed to arrive at this understanding.

The Kennedys have been America's royal familyin the second half of this century, even more than the Roosevelts had been in the first half. They have been emulated, either consciously or unconsciously, by millions of their countrymen. And their influence continues to this day.

The Kennedy hustle was the way they acquiredthat influence. It was a manipulative approach to the media and the public, based on exploitation of the financial and social insecurities of the rest of us.

Joseph Kennedy discovered what the presscould do when he was 28 and the Hearst papers ran a feature story that billed him as "the youngest bank president.' Suddenly he was known not just in Boston but all around the country. Kennedy learned the lesson of this experience well enough so that in 1923 he seized an opportunity to win the eternal gratitude of Walter Hovey, the editor of the Boston American, by salvaging Hovey's life savings from an investment that was threatened with disaster. For the rest of his days, Kennedy sought to manipulate the press, serving as puppeteer for, among others, Arthur Krock, a dominant figure at The New York Times for more than 30 years.

In 1952 Kennedy learned that John Fox, thepublisher of the Boston Post, was...