November 9, 2000

JFK author plans to do 'Full Monty'

By Alex Beam,
Globe Staff

NIGEL Hamilton's back in town. Hamilton, you will recall, is the author of the 1992 bestseller "JFK: Restless Youth" who fled Boston six years ago after a cataclysmic dust-up with the Kennedys. Following a series of clashes at the Kennedy Library -- Hamilton spoke of a "fascistic spirit at the library which is deeply uncomfortable for a serious researcher" -- Nigel was declared more or less persona non grata in the archives. Then the children of family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy -- Eunice Shriver, Pat Lawford, Jean Smith, and Teddy the K -- penned an extraordinary New York Times op-ed piece trashing "Restless Youth," which detailed Jack's many sexcapades and was especially unflattering to their father. "Mother and Dad made our home a wonderfully happy and loving one," the siblings wrote. "Any so-called biography that ... gets this basic fact about our family wrong, is not worth the paper it is printed on."

To this day, Hamilton calls their father an "ogre," and worse, on his Web site: a "WWI draft-dodger, Prohibition bootlegger, disastrous would-be movie-maker, outrageously dishonest stock and share manipulator, treacherous ambassador, wild fornicator, and yet passionate father." Don't sugarcoat it, Nigel; say what you think! It almost goes without saying that Hamilton's projected three-volume life of JFK has been put on indefinite hold. So now Nigel has set up shop at the University of Massachusetts's McCormack Institute. He's a professor of biography, the same post he held at the University of London, and he is working on a book about . . . Bill Clinton, for Random House.

"He's a man of my generation, says the 56-year-old Briton. "This will be an opportunity to write about my own lifetime." What has Nigel been up to? He's been teaching, and he started the British Institute of Biography, which has an American Web site, Real-lives.com. The author of a highly praised three-volume biography of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, he plans to release a sequel next year called "The Full Monty," which will examine the famous general "from the perspective of Montgomery's strange sexuality." "Even though he was married and had a son, Monty's affections were almost entirely devoted to young men," Hamilton says. "There was never any suggestion of it being physical, but in a strange way that made it almost the more passionate."