An intruder scales the walls of Camelot
The Boston Globe, January 27, 1993, Wednesday, City Edition
OP-ED; Pg. 11
By Alex Beam, Globe Staff

For zeitgeist grazers and flapophiles suffering temporary withdrawal symptoms from the abrupt cancellation of the Zoe Baird hearings, I have some alternative programming in mind: the overheated slanging match between British historian Nigel Hamilton and the Kennedy family.

The publication of Hamilton's unbuttoned chronicle of JFK's early years, "Reckless Youth" has prompted the late president's siblings to complain, dolefully: Stop lying about our family!

Now Hamilton has returned fire, accusing the K-people of indulging a "contempt for history" at their personal archive, the John F. Kennedy Library: "Thousands of documents have been removed or sanitized over the years to avoid the wrath of the Kennedys."

Hamilton is not the first researcher to complain about the Kennedy Library, and he will not be the last. John Davis, a relative of Jackie and author of "The Kennedys; Dynasty and Disaster," wrote that the library has a "policy of keeping much of its most important resources closed to the public." Indeed, many archives in the library are conspicuous by their absence or their inaccessibility to outsiders.

Many of Joseph and Rose Kennedy's records, as well as JFK's financial and medical reports, remain off-limits. Requests for release of sensitive documents pass through screening committees populated with family members or Kennedy loyalists.

Historians rate presidential libraries by their vintage; the deader the president, the better the library. One exception is the Lyndon Johnson Library in Texas, with which the JFK Library is often unfavorably compared. LBJ's legatees encourage archival glasnost, explains Johnson biographer Robert Dallek, because his reputation "has nowhere to go but up."

The same cannot be said for JFK, whose reputation has been in free fall since 1975, when the Senate Committee on Intelligence opened up the Pandora's box of Mafia hanky-panky and extramarital affairs.

And, unlike other presidents, Kennedy has a living legacy: a brace of young, ambitious descendants eager to carve out national careers. That the JFK Library, where the director wears a PT-109 tie clip and family members make frequent appearances, should be more protective than other libraries is hardly surprising.

Enter Hamilton, who claims to be "the most sympathetic and honest biographer JFK has ever had." For all his posturing about Kennedy-inspired coverups at the library, Hamilton's first volume benefited from an unprecedented flow of newly released documents.

After Hamilton discovered the existence of a long-lost JFK scrapbook, for instance, the library staff fished it out of Robert Kennedy's papers. Hamilton's research assistant, Stephen Corsaro, acknowledges that "the cooperation of the Kennedy Library has been the major contributor to Nigel Hamilton's success."

Until now. For his second volume, Hamilton wants to pry loose detailed medical records to investigate JFK's lifelong bout with Addison's disease and new materials concerning early political campaigns. But Hamilton says his pending requests, which number in the hundreds, are being stonewalled: "We're going to have to sit on these because the family is so furious."

Hamilton's "problems," including his many weeks on the bestseller list, are the envy of the biography biz. "Ted Kennedy attacking you on the op-ed page of The New York Times!" marvels Stephen Ambrose, who has written books about Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. "Throw me into that briar patch!"

Hamilton parries accusations of reckless commercialism by pointing out that his orginal publisher, Houghton Mifflin, rejected his manuscript as unsalesworthy - a judgment that may reveal more about the publisher than the manuscript.

Ironically, Hamilton has decided to bequeath his astonishing trove of interviews, letters and Kennedy documents to . . . the Kennedy Library. He says his archive will be open to all, which should set it apart from other library holdings for many years to come.