The Economist - USA (2020-10-17)

72 Books & arts The EconomistOctober 17th 2020

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a shy, cerebral figure rather than a back-

slapping pol in the Irish-American mould

that was his inheritance. “There was a basic

dignity in Jack Kennedy,” a friend said, “a

pride in his bearing that appealed to every

Irishman who was beginning to feel a little

embarrassed by the sentimental, corny

style of the typical Irish politician.”

What did it matter to him?

He was more than just a rich kid with a sil-

ver spoon in his mouth. Mr Logevall

doesn’t hide the fact that his father’s mon-

ey and connections helped: the Ambassa-

dor played a vital part in getting “Why Eng-

land Slept”—an expanded undergraduate

thesis—into print. But Jack was also his

own man. He displayed genuine bravery

commanding a boat in the Pacific during

the war (though it was his family name that

ensured his exploits were celebrated in the

pages of the New Yorker). He also endured

more than his share of tragedies. Two of his

siblings—his elder brother, Joe junior, and

his beloved sister, Kathleen, known as

Kick—died before he was 40. He was the

victim of a mysterious illness, later diag-

nosed as Addison’s disease, that put him in

hospital for months and left him with al-

most permanent back pain.

In recounting Jack’s childhood, Mr Lo-

gevall also tells a story of ethnic ambition

and cultural assimilation. The Kennedys

had every reason to hate America’s wasp

elite. Their ancestors fled from British-

ruled Ireland during the famine and, on ar-

riving in Boston, encountered a Brahmin

class that hogged power and privilege. But

the clan’s response was not to luxuriate in

resentment but to get ahead. First they beat

the wasps at everything they held dear,

from politics to money-making. JFK’s

grandfather, P.J. Kennedy, transformed

himself from saloon-owner to state sena-

tor; the Ambassador made a fortune in the

traditionally waspworld of Wall Street be-

fore consolidating it in Hollywood.

Then they joined them. Jack attended a

waspy boarding school, Choate, and the

Brahmins’ favourite university, Harvard,

developing into a thorough Anglophile

when his father became ambassador. That

he admired Winston Churchill is hardly a

surprise; but he also made a cult of Lord

Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first prime

minister, on account of his charm, noncha-

lance, poise and female conquests. His sis-

ter Kick married a British aristocrat. The

Kennedys’ set-up at Hyannis Port was very

similar to the Bush family’s compound up

the coast at Kennebunkport, down to the

sports-packed daily schedule and rough-

and-ready domestic arrangements. They

were rightly called the first Irish Brahmins.

The most important thing they shared

with the old waspelite was a sense of pub-

lic duty. At first this may have contained a

soupçon of revenge: Joe undoubtedly liked

the fact that he, a child of the Irish diaspora,

was representing the world’s most power-

ful country at the Court of St James’s. But

for Jack that matured into something

broader and deeper. One of his favourite

political aphorisms was a line from Rous-

seau: “As soon as any man says of the affairs

of state, ‘What does it matter to me?’, the

state may be given up as lost.”

His belief that America needed to take

responsibility for policing the global sys-

tem, first awakened by reading Churchill,

was powerfully reinforced by his extensive

travels, including visits to Hitler’s Ger-

many, and his wartime experiences. His

second book, “Profiles in Courage” (1956),

reflected on the role of leadership in a de-

mocracy, particularly how statesmen

should respond if their constituents and

parties were bent on doing something dan-

gerously foolish. The oft-quoted lines from

his inaugural address, “Ask not what your

country can do for you. Ask what you can

do for your country”, may seem a bit over-

wrought today, but they expressed the es-

sence of his political philosophy.

One of America’s great tests in the com-

ing years will be whether the elite can re-

cover the sense of public duty that animat-

ed JFK. Mr Logevall shows that political

careers could take a heavy toll even when

politics was less polarised and the press

tamer. Jackie in particular blanched at the

“crazy pace of politics” and her husband’s

relentless work schedule. But recent Amer-

ican history is a testimony to what happens

if the talented ignore politics for the quiet

life and rich rewards of the private sector,

and leave the public sphere to carnival

barkers and clowns. 7

A

t thebeginningofthe19thcentury,

Egypt’s wondrous heritage was ne-

glected. Ancient mud bricks were turned

into fertiliser and temple stones repur-

posed in factories as the country’s indus-

tries developed. Within 100 years, all that

had changed. Children learned about the

pharaohs; politicians visited their tombs.

“Our nation today does not exist indepen-

dently from the nation of our past,” an

Egyptian journalist wrote. “The nation is a

single unbroken, unbreakable whole.”

As Toby Wilkinson makes clear in his

fascinatingnewhistory,thistransforma-

tion was riddled with ironies. For if Egyp-

tians ultimately came to love their phara-

onic past, they had often been coaxed to do

so by outsiders. Finally abandoning occult

myths and medieval stereotypes about

Egypt, Western academics and adventurers

had scrabbled for the truth. In 1822 Jean-

François Champollion, a French scholar,

deciphered hieroglyphics, at last letting

the pharaohs speak in their own tongue. By

the 1920s his successors were reading let-

ters by Heqanakht, a farmer who lived

4,000 years ago.

An exquisite bust of Nefertiti showed

that the ancient Egyptians could produce

stunning sculpture. Vivid tomb paintings

suggested a dynamic people. No wonder

that the Westerners who came to Egypt of-

ten fell in love with it. “It is so difficult to

tear myself away from this place,” ex-

claimed John Gardner Wilkinson, a British

Egyptologist, in 1832—and he was not

alone. Born into a comfortable family,

Amelia Edwards was captivated by Egyp-

tian landscapes; she wrote two books about

the country and exhorted other Egyptolo-

gists to visit. Champollion adopted local

dress and proudly drank Nile water, despite

the risk of plague.

At the same time, some of the foreigners

saw in Egypt and its treasures an occasion

Egyptology

Pyramid schemes

A World Beneath the Sands.By Toby

Wilkinson. W.W. Norton; 528 pages; $30.

Picador; £25

Foreign enthusiasts uncovered, pillaged and helped save ancient Egypt’s glories

In the Valley of the Kings