and $500 million, one of the world's great private hoards. "I never felt the Great Depression firsthand" (Kennedy 103), Senator Kennedy said as he campaigned in 1960. "I learned about it at Harvard"(Kennedy 103). By then, the moneymaking was clearly of secondary importance in the Kennedy ambitions. None of his children showed an interest in business. The only thing that mattered to them was family. There was magic in that moment in history. Old Joe, whose methods and money were more suspect than ever, stayed out of sight while that handsome clan captivated America. Rose and her daughters gave teas and speeches; Bobby ran Jack's campaign; and Ted gallivanted across the West riding broncos and making ski jumps. And the young Senator's wife Jackie shivered in the cold blasts of Wisconsin, wearing her designer sheaths and elbow-length shell gloves, beautiful, hushed and unyielding in her honesty about where she came from and who she was. In power, the Kennedys strode over their failures--the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall--with hardly a sidelong glance. John Kennedy's popularity grew, resting on well-expressed speeches, his ravishing family and his toughness in national-security affairs and against racism as civil rights movements seized the nation. John was the luckiest kid, as his father once said one day in New York City after the dark summer of 1961. "He has learned most of the lessons of being President right at the start." (Leamer 225)But the luck ran out in Dallas at noon on Nov. 22, 1963. JFKs assassination would cut short the promise, would unleash a Niagara of probes, books and movies, and suddenly Camelot would be tarnished with crude revelations about John Kennedy's careless sexual indulgences. But oddly, the legend of the Kennedy clan would soar above it all. There was enough honest devotion to the American ideal; there was enough honor and courage to carry it beyond the failures. The legend had been seared in the Dallas death t...
