Raffish royalty.

The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings, by Thomas Maier (Basic, 676 pp., $29.95)

THE author, a biographer of Dr. Spock, describes the Irish Catholicism of five generations of Kennedys, whose influence on American religion paralleled Spock's influence on American children. Maier had full access to the Joseph P. Kennedy papers, and his book is fascinating, if neither novel nor edifying, in linking the "emerald thread" of ethnic and religious attitudes to various political matters. For the first time, an author was granted use of private photographs, among them "swims along the Cape" and "kissing the Blarney Stone," both of which activities would be engaged in by the Kennedys in later life, with varying results.

This book could have been good at half the length, but, like Madame Recamier, Maier does not seem to have had the time to write something shorter. Six hundred pages allow for a lot of compelling, if sometimes speculative, material along with redundancy and misinformation. A history as dramatic and important as that of Ireland deserves more freedom from cliche; also, the historian should know the difference between Plantagenets and Tudors, and not be under the impression that Oliver Cromwell lived during the reign of Charles II.

A long and volatile tradition of oppression and opportunity informed the confrontation between Boston Brahmins and immigrants. The old story renews itself through different faces and races in every cycle of the American experience, but Maier incants the word "bigotry" so often that he tempts the most sympathetic reader to respond as Oscar Wilde did to the death of Little Nell. Principals in the Kennedy history carry ethnic grudges to the level of an Olympic sport, and were whining a form of architecture, these chapters would be Perpendicular Gothic. Joseph Kennedy, for example, could not understand the resentment of the duke of Devonshire, whose uncle was cut to pieces in Phoenix Park. On a pilgrimage to the spot, John F. Fitzgerald taught his daughter Rose to revere the assassins as martyrs. Later, like Bill Clinton remembering the burning of black churches in his Arkansas childhood, Robert Kennedy would describe his father fleeing a Boston placarded with "No Irish Need Apply" signs. Maier admits that Joe fled on a private railway car. He is unaware of Richard Jensen's study in the Journal of Social History proving that such signs were mostly a legend with legs.

Correspondence records a lot of dealing with the Vatican, but this reviewer knew Count Galeazzi and doubts that the alleged "eminence grise" of the pope was the pawn of the "Emerald Kings" who had trouble pronouncing his name. In Boston, the Kennedys and the clergy made unlovely music playing each other like pianos. Current distress in that archdiocese may be traced in part to defective spiritual chromosomes in Joe Kennedy and Cardinal O'Connell. A generation later, an obsequious Cardinal Cushing greased the slide from the solid piety of the work-worn 19th-century Patrick Kennedy to a latter-day "I never worked a (!!**!#!) day in my life" Patrick Kennedy accusing the pope of bigotry. Maier's frail theology incorrectly assesses John F. Kennedy's sell-out of his ancestral Faith to the Protestant ministers in Texas. Fast forward, and now we have Edward Kennedy subjecting Catholic judicial nominees to religious tests. Joseph Kennedy Jr. emerges as a figure of probity and integrity; heroic death in World War II cut off a life that just possibly might not have suffered the dissolution of some of his siblings.

Joseph Sr., like Lord Melbourne, decided that things come to a sorry pass when religion interferes with the practice of one's private life. His wife's accommodation of his ways was longsuffering but hardly heroic. Rose's favorite Scripture text, Luke 12:48, provides a theme for the book, and Maier cites it often, even prefacing a chapter with it--unaware that Rose consistently misquoted the verse, in her evident disdain for prepositions. Maier also fails to realize that Shaw's line about seeing things that are not, which both Robert and Edward made into a heroic mantra, was actually the illusory temptation of the Devil in Back to Methuselah. Jacqueline's reputation as an editor is harmed by Maier's unwise use of her poem about the president: "The lilt of that green land danced in his blood / Tara, Killarney, a magical flood / That surged in the depth of his too proud heart / And spiked the punch of New England so tart."

The decay of the Kennedy dynasty now is marked not so much by the hypocrisy of more colorful earlier generations, whose vice paid tribute to virtue, as by a dull humbug whose virtue pays tribute to vice. P. J. Kennedy dancing on tables and Honey Fitz singing "Sweet Adeline" are more splendid figures in their corruption than Kathleen Kennedy Townsend delivering confused animadversions on Galileo. Maier's "emerald thread" breaks before the end of the book in "puzzlement" and "surprise" when he cannot reconcile his wistful reveries with the coruscating anti-Semitism and manic priapism that disfigured "America's Emerald Kings." Unresolved tensions are symbolized by high-kitsch images, like little Teddy Kennedy bouncing on the knee of the future Pius XII. It is reminiscent of Shirley Temple on the knee of Abraham Lincoln in The Littlest Rebel, but it is sadder because Cardinal Pacelli tells Teddy at his first communion always to be a good boy. Maier has described a saga realistically enough for the reader to want to take a shower after watching Joe Kennedy plotting with Cardinal O'Connell, and other such deep darknesses.

Fr. Rutler is a Catholic priest in Manhattan.