First, can you tell us about the Joseph Kennedy biography you’re working on at the moment, and how that project got started?

I’m drawn to big, American moguls, like Hearst and Carnegie and Kennedy. I guess I’m drawn to them in large part because we think we know who they are, and there’s been a lot written about them, but they’re such big characters that they become polarising, and most of the people who’ve written about them have done so with the purpose either to condemn or celebrate. These are extraordinary people to write about, because there’s a lot out there, and what you really have to do is start all over again from the beginning. I did that with Hearst and with Carnegie, and I’m doing it with Kennedy now: throwing out every preconception, every anecdote, every comment that X has made to Y, having heard from C, that Kennedy or Hearst or Carnegie did this, and just starting from the beginning. When one does that, one finds that some clichés are clichés because they speak the truth, and that one of the truths here is that truth is much more interesting than fiction – at least I think so. So I’ve discovered all sorts of remarkable things about Kennedy, again by not trusting anything anybody else had said or written about the man, but looking at his own words and at testimony that I thought was reliable about him (done at the time – not 20 or 30 or 40 years later).

Since Joseph Kennedy was such a family man, does studying him give you a lot of insight into his children, too?

Yes, absolutely. One of the reasons I wanted to do this (and one of the tricky parts about this book) is that Kennedy was so committed to being a good father, that he involved himself heavily in his children’s lives – and not necessarily in a bad way; they welcomed that involvement. He was a remarkably good father. He wanted all of his children to do public service; he wanted all of his children, boys and girls, to find jobs. When they were younger, he let Rose put the girls in school, but when they got older, he took a direct interest in what they were all doing. Eventually, he also effectively retired from public life, in large part because he didn’t want his reputation to hold back his children in any way as the boys entered politics. So the latter part of his life – certainly the last decade – was spent in the shadows, though he was active nonetheless, as a father.

He was very ill toward the end of his life, right?

Well, when I say the last ten years, I’m really talking about up until the stroke. From the moment of the stroke on, he is totally incapacitated. You really can’t make this stuff up! This most dominant of men, who enters the room and is the centre of all attention – he loses his ability to speak and walk, so he can understand everything, but the only word that comes out of his mouth, no matter how hard he tries, is ‘No’.

I get chills up my spine whenever I read about that!

It is chilling. So, my biography is effectively going to end in late 1961, when Kennedy has the stroke. But from ’52, when Jack decides to run for senator, there’s almost a family agreement made that Joe is going to stop speaking, and Joe is going to spend a lot more time in the south of France – certainly around campaign time and election time. And if he had not had a stroke, you would not have seen him at the White House at all, or very rarely.

The other remarkable thing, I find, is that the boys go off in political directions very different from their father, and that’s ok with him; he supports them, he loves them, he pushes them forward. At one point he says – he said this twice, once to William O. Douglas, Supreme Court justice, and once to Ted Sorensen – he said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me; the people I love most in the world, my boys, disagree with me on everything!’