"Hidden Benefits of Body Size" (whoops, kind of long)

date of Collier's work
approximates the time when the Kennedy book idea was originated.

Ignoring the shoddy approach and scholarly standards of the work,
the New York Times, Washington Post, and New Republic all gave
the book prominent and glowing reviews. In the latter case,
Martin Peretz placed the book on the August 27, 1984 New Republic
cover under the title "Dissolute Dynasty." He then got longtime
Kennedy basher Midge Decter to write a long review that branded
the saga "a sordid story." Right after this ecstatic reception,
in 1985, Horowitz and Collier landed a feature story in the
Washington Post as "Lefties for Reagan." Two years later, the
pair went on a USIA-State Department sponsored tour of Nicaragua.

This was at a time when the CIA was dumping millions into that
country in a huge psychological and propaganda war effort. That
same year, with lots of foundation money, the pair arranged a
"Second Thoughts" conference in Washington. This was basically a
meeting of "reformed" sixties liberals bent on attacking that
decade and anyone who wished to hold it up as an era of
excitement and/or progressive achievement. Peretz attended that
conference. Later, they sponsored another conference entitled
"Second Thoughts on Race in America." This might have been called
the Washington Post take on race in the eighties since it
featured such Kay Graham-Ben Bradlee employees as Richard Cohen,
Juan Williams, and Joe Klein. Today, these two see themselves as
armed guards protecting America from any renaissance of sixties
activism after Reagan. They are quite open about this and
Kennedy's role in it in Destructive Generation: "Just as
Eisenhower's holding action in the Fifties led to JFK's New
Frontier liberalism in the Sixties...so the clamped-down
Reaganism of the Eighties has precipitated the current radical
resurgence...." Is one to conclude that Clinton