'When Lions Roar': Thomas Maier untangles Churchill-Kennedy family ties

WHEN LIONS ROAR: The Churchills and the Kennedys, by Thomas Maier. Crown, 767 pp., $30.

The Kennedy and Churchill files are full to bursting. JFK remains a national obsession -- his sex life and his assassination, in particular -- and the cult of Winston is still going strong. Both men are fixations for historians, who have picked over and parsed nearly every aspect of their careers.

Thomas Maier's "When Lions Roar: The Churchills and the Kennedys" is another addition to a crowded field, a kind of historical 2-for-1 that traces the tangled links between the families of both leaders. Maier's narrative is a merry-go-round of gossip, party-going, politics, backroom deals, romance and tragedy; you'll need a flowchart to keep track of who knew whom. Maier, a Newsday writer and author of "Masters of Sex," basis for the Showtime series, fulsomely documents all the collisions and collaborations from the 1930s through the '60s.

Winston Churchill had a big personality, but the scion of the Kennedy clan, Joseph Kennedy Sr., gave him a run for the money. Joe Sr. survived the Depression, worked connections with the Roosevelts to secure exclusive rights to import British liquors (a murky business deal that Maier carefully describes), and made a mint after Prohibition ended, all the while tending to his large family. As Roosevelt's ambassador to Britain, Kennedy ardently spoke in favor of appeasing Hitler, which put him on a collision course with Churchill and FDR.

Maier's chronicle is a study in strong men and their sometimes baleful influence on their children. While Joe Sr. proudly clucked over his brood -- Joe Jr., not Jack, was poised for a bright future in 1940 -- Churchill was a distant father whose relationship with his son, Randolph, was tortured and strained. Maier too easily slips into reverent cliche mode when writing about Winston, but his passages on Randolph's attempts to please his father are touching. "I do so very much love that man," Randolph said, "but something always goes wrong between us." The Churchill name, Maier writes, "seemed only to imprison him."

Joe Kennedy's children had their father's endorsement, but it did not spare the family tragedy. Joe Jr., an aviator, died on a risky mission in a war that his father thought was unnecessary and blamed on Churchill. Maier writes of how Jack carefully distanced himself from his father's polarizing isolationism: "Jack didn't see the death of his older brother and others as senseless, but rather as the price for liberty against tyranny. ... " Indeed, JFK's own politics and rhetoric were deeply influenced by Churchill, the son finding a bond where the father could not.