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Over the past 40 years, how many American fathers with great ambitions for their sons have not spent at least a moment or two pondering the paternal methodology of the late Joseph P. Kennedy of Boston, Massachusetts: three sons (four, if one includes the eldest, killed in World War II), each of whom in turn he seems to have slated to become nothing less fulfilling of a classic father’s dream than president of the United States? How does one go about daring so high as this man? For one of these sons did, of course, achieve his father’s ambition for him—albeit for too shockingly short a time—after which a not insignificant proportion of the public came to believe that each of the other two in turn was almost certainly slated, as well as entitled, to follow. What did follow the original horror of assassination in Dallas, of course, was all but unimaginable: a very public act of cowardice on the part of the younger son and a second assassin’s bullet for the elder, who would almost certainly have become that year’s Democratic candidate for the presidency and very likely the second Kennedy occupant of the White House.

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