![]() When gossip and tabloid attention flagged, he was not above stripping off his shirt in Central Park to launch himself back into circulation. grew older, he cultivated a pragmatic relationship with the media. Yet later, when he was mugged in Central Park, she became enraged at the agents’ incompetence.Īs John, Jr. shake his protection on more than one occasion. She alternately blamed the Secret Service for its negligence in the two Kennedy assassinations while faulting agents for consistently overprotecting her children. She tolerated JFK’s peccadilloes, which he would sometimes initiate in front of her, abandoning his wife at parties to leave with other women.Īnd while any mother might be forgiven paranoia over her children’s’ safety, and particularly one who had been through the tragedies Jackie had, Gillon’s research presents her as an irrational helicopter parent. Jackie dumped a fiancée to marry the up-and-coming Congressman Kennedy, who had no intention of changing his womanizing habits. The Kennedy marriage itself sprang from mutual ambition. Jackie does not come off well in this biography. That myth, she later realized, came to burden her own son with imperial expectations that he was never able to manage or achieve completely. Gillon reminds us that Jackie Kennedy strategically crafted an idyllic image of Camelot to secure the historical legacy of her husband’s administration. Kennedy was also ever-conscious of the heavy weight of national expectation that had landed on him. ![]() Kennedy comes across as generous, but inconsiderate as cognizant of the Kennedy recklessness, yet foolhardy himself. Gillon offers an alternately fawning and sober appraisal of a promising young dilettante, addicted to his celebrity while impatient with its superficiality. In his new book The Reluctant Prince, Gillon taps his personal interactions, interviews with other friends, and previously sealed government documents to give us a picture of a flawed man whose vanity insulated him from the course corrections of humbler people. at Brown and went on to develop an at-times-deferential friendship with him. He was destined to inherit a presidential legacy that he would never be able to live up to.īiographer and History Channel host Steven M. salute his father’s coffin, his future was set out for him. From the moment an emotionally shattered nation witnessed a 3-year-old John, Jr. Kennedy, Jr., however, was never given the choice. Trading anonymity for notoriety and privilege can be a tragic bargain. America’s Reluctant Prince: The Life of John F.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |