I recently interviewed Lawrence J. Haas via email about his new book, subtitled “How Jack, Bobby, and Ted Remade America’s Empire” (Potomac Books). The exchanges have been edited for length.

Larry, hundreds of books have already been written on Kennedys, so what inspired you to write this one?

I knew a bit about Jack and Bobby from my readings over the years, and I watched Ted up close while I worked as a journalist in Washington. I became intrigued when I noticed how involved Ted was with America’s global role because, after all, he’s known overwhelmingly for his domestic achievements (civil rights, labor, health, and so on). I became further intrigued when I took a closer look at what Ted was doing on foreign affairs, which was sometimes consistent with what Jack and Bobby did and sometimes quite different. So, I began to do some research, and I discovered a new, rich, fascinating story about all three brothers.

Everybody knows that Joe and Rose Kennedy groomed their boys for success. But what nobody seems to know is that Joe and Rose pushed them toward a particular kind of success: not just to attain power, but to look beyond America’s borders — to learn about the world, to care about the world, and, once they attained power, to shape America’s role in the world. Joe and Rose led discussions about the world with the boys over breakfast and dinner; Joe invited prominent people, like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Luce, to dine with them and enrich the conversations; Joe wrote to the boys about global events when he or they were away; Joe sent them to travel overseas when they were old enough; Joe arranged meetings for them with the world’s leading figures; and Joe secured jobs for each of them as foreign correspondents when they were overseas so they could position themselves as global thinkers.

And, over time, the brothers developed a deep understanding of the world’s different peoples, and cultures, and ideologies; a keen appreciation for the challenges they presented for the United States; and a strong desire to reshape America’s response to them. Once the brothers assumed power, they each applied what they had learned from their education about the world, and their travels, to put a distinct mark on the American empire. They each shaped broad issues of war and peace as well as America’s response to almost every major global challenge of their times.

In the prologue, you relate an obscure incident from September 1939. Just days after World War II began in Europe, a British passenger ship was torpedoed by a German sub, killing 112 people and stranding some 300 Americans in Ireland and Scotland. The U.S. ambassador to the U.K. sent his 22-year-old son to console the Americans? What was Joseph Kennedy thinking?

Well, he certainly wasn’t thinking about who was the best, or most appropriate, person to send. Jack Kennedy, who was working for his father, the ambassador, in London at the time, was just 22, he looked even younger than that, and he held no official government position. So, all he could do was listen to the survivors and promise to relay their views to his father. To them, his arrival was as much insulting as reassuring.

But, as his highest priority, Joe Kennedy wasn’t all that interested in finding the best person to greet the survivors. He saw an opportunity to continue grooming Jack, as he would Bobby and Ted, for prominent roles on the world stage. As it turned out, Jack did a nice job as his father’s emissary. He visited the survivors in hotels and hospitals, and he charmed them with his warm smile and soft touch. The London newspapers labeled him the “schoolboy diplomat” and an “ambassador of mercy” who “displayed a wisdom and sympathy of a man twice his age.” After Jack returned to the embassy, he kept working for the survivors and clashed with the bureaucrats who didn’t seem to share his sense of urgency. Eventually, Joe Kennedy arranged for the survivors to return home safely on a U.S. merchant ship.

In 1937, shortly after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second inauguration, the two youngest sons, Bobby and Ted, along with the five Kennedy sisters, met Franklin Roosevelt in the White House. Did those children grow up with an expectation of having that proximity to power?

Yes. Joe and Rose raised their children to assume a public profile and, with it, a rightful place on the world stage. Joe arranged meetings for them with leading figures both at home and abroad, and both he and Rose put them in the spotlight rather than protect their privacy. From the early 1930s through World War II, the names of some combination of Kennedy children appeared scores of times in the pages of the New York Times or the Boston Daily Globe. The coverage of their exploits ranged from the superficial to the serious — from their appearances at high-society parties to Jack’s heroic exploits aboard the PT-109. …  By the time they were young men, Jack, Bobby, and Ted were receiving opportunities to speak and write about the world to national audiences, which, at the time, reflected their prominence far more than their credentials.

Did anti-Catholic or anti-Irish prejudice common in the early 20th century play a role in the Kennedy clan’s determination to make a mark on the world stage?

Yes. Joe Kennedy deeply resented the anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice of his time, and he passed that resentment down to his sons. Jack faced deep anti-Catholic prejudice when he ran for president in 1960. As strange as it seems today, he needed to prove to millions of skeptical Protestants all over America that he would not be taking orders from the pope, and he addressed the issue — straightforwardly, and more than once — in campaign speeches that year. Like their father, though less intensely, the boys all had chips on their shoulder over the prejudice, and it helped fuel the competitive spirit and drive to excel that Joe and Rose instilled in them.

Both before and after serving as FDR’s ambassador, Joseph Kennedy Sr. was an outspoken isolationist who criticized Churchill for not negotiating with Adolf Hitler. Yet, his second son, while at Harvard, wrote a thesis, “Why England Slept,” that he turned into his first book. JFK’s younger brothers also became confirmed internationalists. Even though Jack Kennedy credited his father for his worldly outlook and minimized his mother’s contributions, I wondered while reading your book whether Rose Kennedy influenced John F. Kennedy more than he realized.

That may be true in one sense. While Joe encouraged and often initiated his sons’ overseas trips, it was Rose who set the example of travel in her youth. And Rose inherited her own zest for travel from her father, the former Boston mayor known as “Honey Fitz.” During the summer of 1908 when Rose turned 18, Honey Fitz and his wife, Josie, took Rose and her sister, Agnes, on a two-month trip across Ireland, England, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland. The girls continued their schooling in Europe for the next year and, when Honey Fitz returned to Europe to bring them home, the three of them first toured Holland, Belgium, France, and England. After Honey Fitz, who had previously served as mayor, won back the job in 1910, Rose went with him to see the new Panama Canal and sailed with him as he led a Boston Chamber of Commerce delegation to Hamburg, Brussels, Munich, Berlin, and Paris. She was so captivated by what she saw, and so curious about what she hadn’t, that as a young woman she founded a prominent club for other young Catholic women who had traveled overseas and wanted to learn more about the world. She served as its president, and Honey Fitz arranged for dignitaries to speak before it. That Jack was the offspring of a mother and grandfather who were so interested in the world, and who traveled so widely at a time when travel was far less common, undoubtedly helped to spur Jack’s interest.

We think today of Jack and Bobby Kennedy being extremely close, but you write that this wasn’t true when they were boys. You suggest that they first truly bonded on a foreign trip.

When Jack and Bobby were growing up, they were almost polar opposites in personality. Jack was carefree and fun, while Bobby was dark and dour. In fact, when Bobby volunteered to help with Jack’s first run for the House in 1946, Jack suggested to a friend that he take Bobby to the movies or somewhere else, simply because he was worried that Bobby’s dour personality would rub off on the campaign workers. It wasn’t until 1951, the year that Jack turned 34 and Bobby turned 26, that they began to develop a special bond. Late that year, Jack was heading out on a seven-week trip across Asia and the Middle East. He turned down his father’s request that he take Bobby because he was worried that Bobby would be a “pain in the ass.” He only relented when his father insisted.

But, on that trip, Jack came to see a depth in Bobby that he hadn’t previously appreciated. And, from their meetings and conversations on that trip, the two came to agree on America’s key challenge in competing with the Soviets across the developing world, which was rising nationalism: the desire of colonial populations to free themselves from outside domination. They also became close because Bobby saved Jack’s life by arranging to fly him to a military hospital in Okinawa when his Addison’s disease sent his temperature soaring to 107. Bobby sat at his bedside as he barely escaped death.

Robert Kennedy also broke with his father on foreign policy — favoring a more active American role — but did so over events that occurred after the war, because Roosevelt acquiesced to Stalin at Yalta. Did the Iron Curtain make Bobby an internationalist?

Essentially yes, but that may be a function of age rather than any suggestion that he was somehow late in breaking with his father. That is, Jack was born in 1917, so, by the time World War II began, he was 22 and already confident and seasoned enough to break with his father and become an internationalist. Bobby wasn’t born until 1925, so he didn’t turn 20 until 1945 — the year that the war ended. As he was becoming confident and seasoned enough to break with his father, his frame of reference was less World War II and more the emerging Cold War with the Soviets.

I learned from you that Ted Kennedy’s first forays into international relations was as a foreign correspondent, first as a wire service correspondent abroad and later for the Boston Globe. As a former journalist yourself, you must have appreciated that nugget.

I greatly appreciated learning that, in fact, all three brothers served as foreign correspondents. Jack in 1945 covered the United Nations organizing conference in San Francisco, the British elections, and the Potsdam conference of Truman, Churchill, and Stalin for Hearst newspapers. Bobby in 1948 wrote long pieces from what was then Palestine for the Boston Post. And Ted in 1956 wrote dispatches from Africa for the International News Service, and he wrote lengthy pieces from Latin America for the Boston Globe. Joe Kennedy arranged for each of those jobs, and he did so to position all of the boys as global thinkers to potential electoral constituencies in Massachusetts and to broader audiences across the United States. It was an integral part of Joe’s efforts not just to groom the boys for success but to focus them on the world beyond America’s borders.

In his memoir written decades ago, JFK confidant Dave Powers said flatly that JFK would have pulled the U.S. out of Vietnam after the 1964 election. Other Kennedy loyalists have said much the same over the years. Where do you end up on this, Larry?

I’m absolutely convinced that he would have done so, for several reasons. First, he was always ambivalent about Vietnam, and that’s because Vietnam best reflected the conflicting strains of his foreign policy. He wanted to send a signal to the Soviets and “make a stand” in Vietnam against communist expansionism, but he didn’t want a big American military presence in the developing world that would ignite the anti-Western resentment that he always worried about. Second, while he was expressing public optimism about how the South was doing and vowing to provide assistance until it won the war, he was discussing privately about how to withdraw. Third, he told top aides that he planned to withdraw after he (presumably) won reelection in 1964, but that he couldn’t do so for political reasons before then. Fourth, he told Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to plan for a phased withdrawal that would extend through 1965. Fifth, by the time of his death in November of 1963, he had agreed to withdraw 1,000 of the 18,000 U.S. military advisers in Vietnam. And sixth, also by the time of his death, he had lost confidence that South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem would make the political, economic, and social reforms that would build support for the war effort in the South.

What took Bobby so long to come out against the war?

Lots of things. For starters, he was reluctant to break openly with President Johnson on such an important matter of foreign policy. Moreover, as LBJ militarized the U.S. effort and sent combat troops that eventually numbered more than half a million, Bobby came to see that LBJ would do the opposite of whatever Bobby proposed — both because LBJ hated Bobby and because he always suspected (sometimes with good reason) that Bobby was plotting behind his back. So, Bobby feared that the more he called for troop withdrawals and negotiations, the more that LBJ would dig in on the war, the troops, and the bombing, causing more of the death and destruction that sickened Bobby. But, by early 1967, after two years of trying to convince LBJ — through public prodding and private conversation — to change course in Vietnam, both Bobby and Ted gave up any hope and broke openly with him.

You open Chapter 6 with a delightful anecdote less than three months into the Kennedy presidency — just after the Bay of Pigs fiasco — of JFK telling Richard Nixon, of all people, “It really is true that foreign policy is the only important issue for a president to handle, isn’t it? I mean, who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25 in comparison to something like this?” (And that’s before the Cuban missile crisis.) But in thinking about that in the 21st century, doesn’t it seem as though our two previous U.S. presidents, and the man in the Oval Office now, care much more about domestic policy and politics — and little about foreign affairs?

Presidents, of course, have their natural predispositions. Some are clearly more interested in domestic than foreign affairs, and some are just the opposite. Of the latter group, JFK was undoubtedly the best example. He not only cared overwhelmingly about foreign affairs rather than domestic affairs, but he also saw domestic affairs largely through the prism of foreign affairs. For example, he wanted to nourish a strong economy largely because he thought it necessary to support America’s global role, and he became interested in civil rights largely because America’s race problems were giving the nation a black eye with nations of color around the world.

Of our recent presidents, Obama and Trump clearly cared more about domestic than foreign affairs. Obama was focused on reshaping America at home, and he sought to reduce America’s footprint around the world. Trump was significantly isolationist: He didn’t seem to see the need for American leadership abroad, and he didn’t seem to even recognize the important distinctions between free and non-free states. I don’t think that Biden is like them, however. To the extent that he’s focusing more on domestic than foreign affairs so far, that’s because he faced a raging pandemic and a weak economy when he took office. He feels deeply about restoring America’s traditional leadership role in the world, and I think we’ll see more of that as the pandemic recedes and the economy improves.

On July 4, 1961, Ted Kennedy said that the fall of Berlin could be “a prelude to the fall of Boston.” All three of the Kennedy brothers in your book were dedicated anti-communists. How do you believe they would view the current fascination for Marxist ideas among Gen-Zers and “Democratic Socialists” like Bernie Sanders and his young acolytes in Congress and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party?

Very negatively. All three brothers were hard-core Cold Warriors through Jack’s death. To be sure, Bobby and Ted evolved after that, largely because of Vietnam. They came to worry more about what America was doing around the world, particularly when those actions failed to reflect America’s highest ideals. But neither of them ever lost their absolute distaste, if not hatred, for communism. Neither of them ever forgot the clear distinctions between a free and democratic country like America and a non-free communist country like, in their time, the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. Were they alive today, they would view the current fascination for Marxist ideas as profoundly misguided and naïve.

Penultimate question: What surprised you most in your research?

Two things. First, I was very surprised to learn that, despite the purposeful public displays of familial bliss that Joe and Rose orchestrated, the Kennedys were in many ways what, today, we would call “dysfunctional.” That showed up in a big way in the relationships that shaped the boys. Joe Jr., the first son who died during a dangerous bombing mission over Germany in 1944, bullied and beat Jack regularly; Jack deeply resented his mother’s coldness toward him; Bobby was a classic middle child who was starved for attention as his father focused on Joe Jr. and Jack and the family doted on the younger Ted; and Ted was quite lonely as a child as his parents shuffled him off to 10 different schools.

Second, I was very surprised to learn just how gifted Jack, Bobby, and Ted each were as writers, as illustrated not just by their newspaper dispatches but also by their books, diaries, letters, and private notes. They wrote with a sharp eye for detail and a clever turn-of-phrase, and their writings from abroad were rich in detail about the history, cultures, ideologies, and other aspects of the lands they visited. All three of them easily would have been successful journalists or other kinds of writers.

Last question: I know you wrote about the three Kennedy brothers who went into politics, but I covered the Clinton administration and can’t help but ask: Wouldn’t Rose and Joseph Kennedy Sr. have been surprised, and delighted, that it was one of their daughters who served as ambassador to Ireland for five years, and helped shepherd the Good Friday agreement that brought solace to millions of Irish — and Irish Americans?

I believe so. Keep in mind: Joe, in particular, focused so much of his attention on his boys because he assumed, quite rightly for his time, that they were the ones who could climb the ladder of political success. He raised them in what was then the overwhelmingly male-dominated world of politics and global affairs. But Joe and Rose also instilled in their daughters a sense of public responsibility, an obligation to give back to those who were left fortunate. That’s among the reasons why we saw Eunice Shriver doing the work that she did with the Special Olympics. And that’s why Jean Kennedy Smith jumped at the chance to serve as America’s ambassador to Ireland after Ted Kennedy recommended to President Clinton that he nominate her. Joe and Rose would have been very proud at the central role that both Ted and Jean Kennedy Smith played in bringing “the troubles” of Northern Ireland to an end.