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Sunday, November 11, 2001

By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

There are at least nine new books on the Kennedy myth this fall, for reasons not clear beyond the fact that, decades after the tragic deaths of Jack and Bobby became burned into the American imagination, such books still sell.

	Book & Author Dinner Join Laurence Leamer and novelists Richard Paul Evans, David Baldacci and Joseph Kannon at 6 p.m. Wednesday for the Post-Gazette's Book and Author Dinner at the Westin Convention Center, Downtown. Tickets are $35 plus $2.50 visiting www.proartstickets.org., or are available at the door the night of the dinner.

But Laurence Leamer, author of the "The Kennedy Men, 1901-1963" (Morrow, $35), insists that there is something new to be said about the family, and his book is the one that says it.

"It's the first multigenerational epic take on this family, and that's what makes it different," said Leamer in a telephone interview from his Palm Beach, Fla., home.

Leamer travels to Pittsburgh on Wednesday to speak at the Post-Gazette Book and Author Dinner.

Well, not necessarily. Doris Kearns Goodwin's "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys" certainly was the first to truly mine the psychological origins of the clan's rise to power.

But Leamer says his book contains reams of new material -- in particular on John Kennedy's presidency, which, despite the title of the book, is really its focus.

So much material, in fact, that there will be a second volume of "The Kennedy Men," mostly about Robert F. Kennedy but also the youngest, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.

Besides using interviews, oral histories, diaries, letters and tapes, "The Kennedy Men" is the first book to "make full use" of secretly recorded telephone conversations and meetings by Kennedy from the summer of 1962 to his death. Some of those tapes were destroyed by the Kennedy family before they were given to the presidential library; others were secreted away by Kennedy's secretary, Evelyn Lincoln.

By phone, Leamer seems every bit the savvy, smooth-talking writer who spent years in Washington, D.C. (and still keeps a home there). His work has appeared in Esquire, Newsweek and other publications, and he has written books on Ingrid Bergman, Johnny Carson and Nancy and Ronald Reagan.

Perhaps his most notable is "The Kennedy Women," which was a best seller that was made into a television miniseries.

And while he may be justly accused of authoring "tell-all" books, there's no doubt that Leamer is a thorough researcher who is expert at unearthing telling details about his subjects.

Some of Leamer's new material is serious history, the rest more fuel for voyeurs: There's new detail about the extent of JFK's involvement in the secret war against Cuba, and more about family patriarch Joseph Kennedy's career as a bootlegger.

On the salacious side, there are interviews with Janet Des Rosiers Fontaine, who was Joe Kennedy's secretary and longtime mistress. There's new original material about Gunilla Von Post, the sensual Swedish aristocrat JFK met just weeks before his wedding to Jacqueline Bouvier while on a last bachelor trip to the Riviera.( "If I had met you one week before, I would have canceled the whole thing," Gunilla recalls him telling her.)

Leamer believes Kennedy, while certainly an active philanderer, wasn't the hopeless sex addict depicted in other books and was able to forgo extramarital sex during crises for weeks at a time. In fact, Leamer's downplaying of JFK's liaison with Mafia moll Judith Campbell Exner in his previous book, "The Kennedy Women," prompted Exner to sue him.

Leamer is tough on JFK's private physician Dr. Janet Travell, "a militant proponent" of the use of Novocaine injections to ease Jack's physical agony from a deteriorating back, and who actively blocked the president from receiving other medical advice. Leamer cites critical letters from other doctors, including one from Dr. Eugene Cohen to Kennedy warning him "that the entire future of the world was at stake and he had better stop taking these amphetamines."

In fact, Leamer believes that JFK was "a very sick man," who would have been in a wheelchair by the end of his second presidency, but who was determined to survive the grind of the presidency out of patriotism and a sense, strongly instilled by Joseph Kennedy in all his sons, that they were privileged and therefore required to serve their country.

"The father is the key figure in the family," Leamer says, a man who avoids war service himself and makes millions in bootlegging, "yet teaches his sons about the values of character and love of country, and that they must live out these values and give something back."