The Last Brother.

Aware of the fusillade of abuse that has been aimed at this latest book about the Kennedys, I approached it cautiously, hoping, frankly, to find in it some redeeming features, if only out of sympathy for an author who had captured me in the past and now seemed to be the victim of an ambush. Even a thrice-familiar tale, well retold, can be instructive (I was prepared to say).

Alas, the book is simply awful: sinfully second-hand; juvenile, rhetorically and psychologically; grossly overweight; noxious in its invention of purported thoughts and motives; sneaky in its evasions of responsibility for outrageous insinuations; ignorant; and, more than occasionally, ridiculous.

Mr. McGinniss seems to have learned exactly nothing beyond what he has repeated from other people's books and has mislearned some of that. (He doesn't even know, for example, what time President Kennedy was assassinated - it was 12:30, not 12:40.) Much has been made of his unattributed borrowings and his unverifiable embellishments on that material, and indeed one could cite many egregious instances. Copying William Manchester, for instance, he tells the story of Edward Kennedy finding himself without formal trousers just before the President's funeral and needing to wear a pair of his dead brother's pants. Manchester reports that a tailor was hastily called and the pants enlarged until they fit the heftier youngest Kennedy perfectly. McGinniss makes the story his own by guessing, in several painfully padded pages, that while the fit may indeed have been perfect in the physical sense, Edward nonetheless squirmed and fretted during the funeral worrying that his brother's patched-up pants would somehow fail him, or he them. Do you get it? He feared that he couldn't fit into his brother's pants!

But worse than what McGinniss purloins without attribution and inanely embellishes is what he does with attributed gossip and accurately cited conspiracy claims concerning the lives and deaths of the Kennedys. McGinniss's assumption seems to be that if someone has said something ugly or stupid about the Kennedys and you refer to the source, you may repeat it as if it were plainly true. No further judgment, no supportive evidence, no intelligent defense of the item is required.

Thus we are invited to entertain the possibility that Joseph Kennedy sexually molested his daughter Rosemary, shattering her psychologically in the process, and then had her lobotomized and permanently removed to an institution to prevent her from revealing that dangerous intelligence. His wife and his many other children may have known of this primal atrocity and may have become accomplices by remaining silent and by repeating the mendacious cover stories which were created over the years to explain the fate of the missing daughter. (She was finally said to have been hopelessly retarded from birth.) From this incident, says McGinniss, in a typical non-sequitur, the sons learned the dreadful consequence of failure. The evidence McGinniss offers for this ghastly insinuation? Jack's biographer Nigel Hamilton said that someone else said that this might have happened. Joe was a shameless rake who frequently pawed his sons' female companions and therefore may have been capable of raping and lobotomizing his daughter. Don't blame me, blame Hamilton's informants, McGinniss seems to be saying. And as further extenuation: "the documentation that might resolve the question remains sealed to researchers." The motto here and throughout the book is: If you can't know what you are talking about, talk about it.

In McGinniss's telling, Kennedy pere is the "unforgivably immoral" first cause of all Kennedy effects. Even eight-year-old Teddy's pneumonia, in the fall of 1940, he says, "might" have been caused by a weakening of his immune system by news of his father's latest public disgrace. The sons imitated Joe sexually and psychologically, protected his notorious reputation, and one another's, from constantly looming scandal, obeyed his commands, made good on his outlandish promises, and in every manner tried to enact his limitless ambitions for them.

Crucially, when Jack needed a primary victory in West Virginia during the 1960 campaign, Joe approached old associates in the Mob, specifically Sam Giancana, who, according to McGinniss, was signally responsible for that victory and perhaps for the narrow triumph in the presidential election as well. In return, Joe may very well have promised the Mob that the new President would rid Cuba of Castro, enabling them to return to that highly profitable venue. Or, at least they may have thought that he promised that, McGinniss confidently asserts. As a result, Jack, true to his father's promise, or, rather, true to the Mob's possible understanding of such a promise, eagerly embraced the disastrous assault at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, recklessly and needlessly brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster during the missile crisis in 1962, and plotted with the Mafia to assassinate Castro. (McGinniss seems ignorant of the fact that it was the Eisenhower Administration that first approached the Mafia in this regard.) Anyone who thinks these events had something to do with the context of the Cold War, be disabused; we learn from this book that they were a payoff to the Mob pure and simple.

President Kennedy had a long and reckless affair with Judith Campbell, who was also sleeping with Sam Giancana at the time. The affair with Miss Campbell, who transmitted packages of what may have been money from Jack to Sam, gave the Mob further purchase on his policies, for he was, like his father, in this and many other matters, ripe for blackmail.

Enter now the figure of Joe's old friend J. Edgar Hoover, notorious racist and blackmailer. McGinniss repeats the familiar gossip that Hoover controlled all the Kennedys with the filth he had amassed about them. (And adds the familiar gossip that the Mob controlled Hoover with their knowledge that he was a secret homosexual.) Fearing revelations, Joe promised Hoover his job as head of the FBI in perpetuity, and also that Jack would do nothing to abet the civilrights movement. Again, loyal to his father's promises, and fearing the revelations that Hoover was always on the verge of leaking, Jack and Bobby, his attorney general, did everything they could to frustrate the goals of the black demonstrators.

Apart from its ridiculously truncated explanation for major events in American foreign and domestic history, these arguments suffer from obvious contradictions which McGinniss blithely ignores. If Joe had such influence on his sons, why did Bobby fanatically pursue and harass the Mob, and Giancana in particular - presumably with Jack's permission - long after his father's promises and his brother's affair with Giancana's mistress? And why did President Kennedy, with the advice of his attorney general, introduce the monumental civil-rights bill of 1963, risking Hoover's vengeance? And if the Mob was so powerfully efficient, capable of arranging landslide primary victories by last-second interventions, why couldn't it assassinate Castro?

McGinniss simply stipulates that the Mob arranged to have the President killed because they were irritated by his failures in Cuba (which were partly their own) and infuriated by Bobby's relentless campaign against them. How they connected with Oswald, an inexperienced gunman, who, in my studied view, single-handedly shot the President, with a faulty rifle, from a building in which he had been working since before the presidential route in Dallas was chosen (by Kenneth O'Donnell, the President's friend), he does not deign to say. But the point, to McGinniss, is that Bobby must have felt responsible for his brother's death, and Teddy must have learned of his next older brother's complicity in his oldest living brother's assassination. True to their tribal habits, the two covered up their knowledge of the President's real assassins (and, in this reading, they include Bobby) and were further corrupted by their retroactive complicity in not revealing what they knew. They accepted the conclusions of the Warren Commission without reading its report, fearing that a real investigation would reveal what only McGinniss and now the entire world know about the sins of the Kennedys.

Actually, Bobby had even more to be guilty about before he too was assassinated by "them." According to McGinniss, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was caused by the "climate" that was created by J. Edgar Hoover's secret pursuit of King. (Typically, McGinniss does not feel the need to explain how Hoover's secret campaign against King could have influenced James Earl Ray, his assassin, who did not know that secret.) Since Bobby obediently and fearfully coddled Hoover, he therefore mist have felt personally responsible for King's death as well as his brother's. His latter-day liberalism can be explained by sublimated guilt. You probably never knew all these amazing things, but Teddy did, and was kept from finding his true "identity" by the burden of knowing these and many other secrets in the history of this vicious, pathological family.

Indeed, this purported treatment of Edward, the last brother, has really very little to say about him except, over and over again, that he suffered monumentally from having to observe, comply with, cover up, and somehow continue the traditions of his vicious, guilt-drenched clan. His many falls and humiliations since the Sixties may be seen as pathological forms of rebellion against his fate.

If this noxious book had not been announced with such fanfare, and commanded such an enormous price; if it had not been written by such a celebrated author, it probably would not have received the pummeling it has. Nonetheless, it is getting what it deserves.

Mr. Cohen is chairman of the Department of American Studies at Brandeis University. His essay "Yes, Oswald Was the Lone Assassin" will appear in the forthcoming Best Essays of 1992 (Ticknor).