THE MEN WE BECAME

Hagiographic and flatly written portrait of the author’s 20-year friendship with JFK Jr.

Littell and Kennedy met as classmates at Brown University. We learn that “John worked hard to be a ‘regular guy.’ . . . As easily as he moved about in the aristocratic world he’d grown up in, he was never intrigued by it.” They enjoyed an easy friendship, the author tells us. “From the start, we were each other’s best audience. We knew the other to be hilarious, brave, and brilliant. That’s one of the key conditions for male bonding—deep, unconditional admiration.” As that quote suggests, Littell is a traditional kind of guy, always ready to say the honorable thing about his pal. “He had an enthusiastic libido but almost always resisted the sexual opportunities that came his way.” (Well, almost.) When Littell isn’t ladling on the plaudits about “John’s star power,” or telling us his buddy was “always smooth,” he rages from protective (“So much has been written about John and Carolyn and their marriage. And so much of it is wrong . . . they were two good people who loved each other”) to downright banal (“Both of us valued our sleep, which precluded constant clubbing”). The author seems to think that he has to parry the gossipmongers’ bilge, which most people don’t believe anyway, by presenting a sanitized version of Kennedy—which no one will believe either. Affection shines through, but Littell never really gets to the nub of their friendship. “Ours was a bond forged in activity, though it was more than that too, and we enjoyed each others’ company most when we were wholly engaged in something physical,” he writes—meaning, apparently, that they didn’t talk much. And when he comments on Kennedy’s guiding theory for George magazine—“if you get people interested in politicians, you’d get them interested in politics. Time has proven him right, of course”—readers can only assume he’s kidding.

Even Kennedy devotees will be disappointed. (35 b&w photos, not seen)