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Good Evening. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

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Good Evening. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum THE LIFE OF JOSEPH P. KENNEDY DECEMBER 12, 2012 PAGE 1 TOM PUTNAM: Good evening. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. On behalf of Tom McNaught, Executive Director of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I thank you for coming and acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums: lead sponsor Bank of America, Raytheon, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation, and our media partners, The Boston Globe and WBUR. During the buildup to the 1960 Democratic National Convention, JFK did all he could to lock up the nomination, including an attempt to secure the support of former President Harry Truman. Truman had expressed reservations about the potential nominee's inexperience and seemed concerned about whether the country was ready to elect a Catholic. When asked publicly, Truman offered this pithy retort, based in part on his earlier interactions with JFK's father: "It's not the Pope I'm worried about, it's the Pop." [laughter] The legendary stories of Joseph P. Kennedy have over the years devolved towards easy caricature. This Library could not be a more perfect setting for tonight's conversation, unveiling a more complex and nuanced view of the man and the myth. Out of these windows we can see many of the landmarks that defined Joseph Kennedy's life and which are captured so vividly in David Nasaw's new biography, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy. First, there's the harbor through which Joe Kennedy's grandparents, Patrick and Bridget, arrived when emigrating from New Ross; then Noddle's Island, which we now know as East Boston, where his father, PJ Kennedy, prospered as a politician and businessman. Just south of us is the coastline of Quincy, where Joseph Kennedy launched his public service career at the Fore River Shipyard during World War I. And one can easily see Squantum, the site of an airbase where his oldest son, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., learned to fly before heading overseas to die in a war that his father did all in his power to try and prevent. It's also fitting to meet here as much of Professor Nasaw's research took place right in this Library, the repository of the Joseph P. Kennedy papers. He quipped earlier this afternoon that THE LIFE OF JOSEPH P. KENNEDY DECEMBER 12, 2012 PAGE 2 when he arrived, he mistakenly headed right to our fourth floor research room. For years, the JPK collection was closed until Eunice, Jean and Ted Kennedy saw the benefit of granting unfettered access to this material to a respected historian to write a no-holds-barred biography of their father. How fortunate we are that David Nasaw had the interest and independent spirit to take on such a monumental project, resulting in this magisterial new book, which is on sale in our bookstore. Abook signing will follow this evening's program. David Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Professor of History at the City University of New York and has written acclaimed biographies of Andrew Carnegie and William Randolph Hearst, the latter the winner, among other awards, of the Bancroft Prize for History. Our moderator this evening is Christopher Lydon, known for his skills in sculpting conversations with penetrating questions and historical insight. One of our most distinctive voices in journalism, Mr. Lydon founded The Connection on National Public Radio and is the current host of Radio Open Source, an American conversation with a global attitude on the arts, humanities and politics. Allow me two final observations. The first is how affecting it is to read of Joseph P. Kennedy's role as a loving and devoted father, captured humorously by JFK, who called his dad immediately after his first Presidential debate against Richard Nixon. After hanging up the payphone, JFK reported to Ted Sorensen, "I still don't know how I did. If I had slipped and fallen on that stage, my father would have said, 'Jack, the way you picked yourself up was terrific.'" [laughter] At the end of his life, and before his debilitating stroke, Joseph Kennedy stated, "The older I get, the less inclined I seem to want to write an autobiography. A lot of the so-called facts of my life have been repeated so often that they are considered true by most people, and I can't imagine adding enough to the reports to make a dent. I'll just let the history of my life stand as it stands, and I'm quite sure that nobody will care a damn." THE LIFE OF JOSEPH P. KENNEDY DECEMBER 12, 2012 PAGE 3 In this new book, David Nasaw makes more than a dent, correcting the facts as we have come to know them, and adding others in a manner that, especially for those of us who care deeply about this history, thoroughly refashions the way we think of the remarkable life and turbulent times of Joseph P. Kennedy. Please join me now in welcoming David Nasaw and Christopher Lydon to the Kennedy Library. [applause] CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Thank you, Tom, and good evening, everybody. I've been reading this book for four days in a kind of absolute panic of pleasure. David, congratulations, it's an extraordinary book. I started in the middle, got to the end, went back; I've read it twice now. It's an amazing book. Already pronounced by The New York Times one of the ten best books of 2012. This is astonishing. But there's so much fun in it. I think everybody in this room thought they knew the Joe Kennedy story; I surely did. And it's breathtakingly new and sympathetic in incredibly complex ways that we'll try to get to. But welcome. I'll try to stay out of the way, although I do have a few needles and openings I went to get in. As I say, we think we know the story. My frame in this story, very, very broadly, was the Nigel Hamilton view in Reckless Youth – that and many other things – contributing to the notion that Joseph P. Kennedy was something that JFK had to get over, get around, conquer, rise above, et cetera. There was that wonderful story buried in Arthur Schlesinger's book, A Thousand Days, in which JFK is recalling a moment in the 1960 campaign when Bobby especially had been working on keeping Martin Luther King out of jail, but they realized that Daddy King -- Martin Luther King Sr. -- had announced his intention to vote for Nixon because he couldn't vote for a Catholic. And Kennedy said, must have said to Arthur Schlesinger, "Can you imagine that? Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father." And then he said, "But we all have our fathers, don't we?" THE LIFE OF JOSEPH P. KENNEDY DECEMBER 12, 2012 PAGE 4 The point being that there had to be many, many more differences than similarities between son and father. Reading this book you realize that it's an incredibly complicated, shaded, nuanced variation on themes. But to my mind, they come out much more alike than different. Yes or no, David? DAVID NASAW: Yes! Simple answer, yes. One of the difficulties of writing a long, long book and then being interviewed – and this is why this is going to be a joy – is that 99 out of 100 people who've interviewed me so far, haven't read the book. [laughter] So the first question and the second question and the third question are all based on assumptions that I try to destroy. And it's hard to say to your interviewer, "You fool, what a stupid question. If you had read the book!" And the question is always phrased the other way; the question is always asked of me, "How did JFK get so different? He was so different in his foreign policy and this and this and this." And I have to politely nod and then try to work my way around it. I think that if we're going to look at JFK and JFK's Presidency, and certainly his candidacy, we have to look at the similarities. And we have to take into account that JFK, while he was taking his year off -- sort of playing at Stanford -- before he comes back, he becomes a journalist, then he runs for Congress in 1946. From a very early age, he becomes his father's chief speechwriter, consultant, advisor. His book, his Harvard thesis is very much a rearticulation of what his father is thinking. And there is a Kennedy foreign policy. There is a Kennedy – shared by both of these men, developed by both of these men – outlook on the world. And we forget it. Joseph Kennedy was – and stop me anytime because I can just go on forever. CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Smack on. DAVID NASAW: Joseph Kennedy was an appeaser and an isolationist. But that did not mean that he was against the military or defense. To be an isolationist meant that you keep the military budget way up, but you use all of it to protect the United States, to create a fortress America. THE LIFE OF JOSEPH P. KENNEDY DECEMBER 12, 2012 PAGE 5 During World War II, he didn't want to send any destroyers to Britain; he wanted the entire military budget to be used to protect the Western Hemisphere. He wanted ships, he wanted planes, he wanted everything he possibly could get to guard the Atlantic from any attempt of the Germans, ever, to come in this direction.
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