From Rose Kennedy to JFK Jr. to Taylor Swift: a literary look at the lives of the Kennedys in Hyannis Port

It’s almost summer.

So I must be reading a new Kennedy bio … right?

As an inveterate Kennedy-phile, I will admit it: I have something of a problem. I can’t get enough. The tragedy and the mystique; the hubris and the curse. The complicated family dynamics! Gimmee. Martha Stewart may have her chicken coop, with a reported 200 fowl at her pile in Westchester. I have my book towers groaning with an ever-growing collection of Kennedy titles.

“More than a thousand books have been written about the Kennedys since the mid-1960s,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley once wrote, commenting on the publishing cottage industry that keeps suckers like me sated. And that was in 2004. JFK Jr. — the American prince who died too young — has himself inspired a whole cottage industry within a publishing cottage industry.

Ranging from the trashy to the wonkish, the books on the slain 35th president of the United States, and the generations that both preceded and followed, include tomes such as “After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family from 1968 to the Present” (one of my faves!), more rarefied looks like “Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter,” insider takes like “The Nine of Us: Growing Up Kennedy” (written by Jean Kennedy Smith, the last surviving OG Kennedy sibling before she died in 2020) and even super-focused ones like “Jackie After O” (an account of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis through the lens of one remarkable year: 1975).

Summer is when most Kennedy books seem to sprout. And I cannot remember one, in recent years, which has not included Jack and Bobby and Ethel and Jackie. Fortuitously, and all too cleverly, a publicist at Simon & Schuster Canada — when I was at their buzzy 10-year anniversary party on King Street East recently — literally put a new one in my hands. You need this, she lured, as I slipped it in the nook of an elbow while balancing a canape and a beverage. Party yoga! The soirée was a success and so, I am happy to report, was the book. In fact, I loved it.

Titled “White House by the Sea: A Century of the Kennedys at Hyannis Port,” by Kate Storey, it has managed the near impossible: find a new way into the story, by looking at it specifically through a place, the famous Kennedy compound on Cape Cod. A place where this storied American family — four generations in now and totalling 105 in all its branches — “have come to celebrate, bond, play, and also grieve.”

A tiny enclave which also happens to have had an Adirondack chair view to history: whether it be the nail-biting night when the family assembled to see John F. Kennedy beat Nixon in 1960, to the day Jackie ingeniously birthed the myth of “Camelot” when speaking with a Life mag reporter mere days after her husband’s assassination, to the maelstrom that ensued after that whole mess with Senator Edward Kennedy and the Chappaquiddick scandal.

Lighter moments, naturally, are here as well, like the super ’80s phenom that was the Hyannis Port wedding of Maria Shriver to action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger (a wedding that famously drew everyone from Andy Warhol to Oprah!).

More hedges and fences than kiss and tell, the book essentially takes the “Downton Abbey” approach: using a house (or in this case, a cluster of houses) to weave a narrative. Reading it, you can catch the waft of salt in the air. The white caps of saltwater. The click of both Polaroids and bicycles. The hydrangeas. Drawing on over 100 in-depth interviews by the author — the most fascinating being with old townsfolk in what is essentially a village — the book does not exactly reinvent the Kennedy wheel (much of the history is well known to even the casual buff), but it does reorient it in interesting ways.

Some of it? Positively cinematic: for instance, Jackie Kennedy, the avid water-skier. (Who knew?) For her to do it, however, Secret Service agents had to set up a perimeter with jet boats in the water around where Jackie and whoever she was with were skiing. She had gotten really good, in fact, when astronaut John Glenn came to visit in the summer of 1962, freshly back from his trip — oh, you know — orbiting space.

Venturing out with Jackie for a spin — from the Milky Way to the Atlantic Ocean! — together they did some graceful figure eights whilst zigzagging back and forth. “The family cheered from the boat while hundreds of on-lookers watched the show from the shore,” Storey writes. “Glenn did his best to keep up with the First Lady but toppled off his skiis twice.”

Yeah, you had to be there.

Some of the more quotidian details are the ones laden with unexpected poignance. How JFK celebrated with a daiquiri the night he became president (the book positively rattles with daiquiris). How there is a name that Cape Codders give to newcomers: people whose families don’t go back generations and do not have a handle on its mores. They are called “washashores.” That a lot of the old Cape houses had little balconies at the top, including Jackie’s house, named for the women who watched for husbands returning from sea. It is called a “widow’s walk.”

That John-John — when he’d become the most famous bachelor on Planet Earth — liked to ride around in a sporty Karmann Ghia convertible which he named Orange, and from which he often blared Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin.

The — I had almost forgotten! — rush of paparazzi and renewed public interest in 2012, when Taylor Swift showed at Hyannis Port, seen playing volleyball with Conor Kennedy, whom she was dating at the time (part of a burgeoning new gen). Swift, as we are reminded, even bought a house next door, from Kennedy friend Nancy Tenney. For a cool $4.9 million! (Three months later, after Taylor and Conor had broken up, she sold it for $6 million.)

As an exploration of wasp-dom, the book largely succeeds. Almost like a companion piece to that ’80s classic “The Official Preppy Handbook,” this is a thesis on the too-rich-to-care, holey-sweater set. It is also remarkable reading about the metamorphosis of a sleepy community into a Kennedy fishbowl. His first July Fourth weekend as president, Jack welcomed his Secret Service agents, serving them — what else? — cartons of his fave clam chowder with bacon and potato chunks from Mildred’s Chowder House, a hole-in-the-wall near the airport. (Mildred’s became such a hangout that a special red phone was installed in the restaurant, just for Secret Service!)

Adding this book to my dynastic pile, I was particularly riveted by Rose Kennedy, the template for durable matriarchs: the woman who had lost half her children and herself lived to be 104. And mesmerized — yup, all over again — by the picture that Storey paints of the day the plane carrying JFK Jr., his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren, went down en route to the compound in 1999. The bodies recovered, their ashes were eventually taken on a navy destroyer, along with 17 members of the family. Into the choppy waters near Hyannis Port they went.

Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

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