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"In my trade I have to read a lot. 1 felt airily confident that I knew everything about the Kennedys worth knowing. This shrewd and absorbing narrative of the rise, flourishing, decline and fall of a tribal empire has shown me how wrong 1 was." —Clifton Fadiman,
Book-of-the-Monlh Club News
The Kennedy family may well be the most photographed, written about, talked about, admired, hated and controversial family in American history. But for all the words and pictures, the real story has not been told until now. Who are the Kennedys? Are they the brilliant, heroic, extraordinary people their admirers believe them to be? Or are they the arrogant, competitive, self-absorbed children of a willful and immensely rich patriarch, as their detractors claim? In fact they are all of these things and more.
Peter Collier and David Horowitz, authors of the best-selling The Rockefellers, have spent years researching archives and interviewing both family members and hundreds of people close to...
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Fülszöveg
"In my trade I have to read a lot. 1 felt airily confident that I knew everything about the Kennedys worth knowing. This shrewd and absorbing narrative of the rise, flourishing, decline and fall of a tribal empire has shown me how wrong 1 was." —Clifton Fadiman,
Book-of-the-Monlh Club News
The Kennedy family may well be the most photographed, written about, talked about, admired, hated and controversial family in American history. But for all the words and pictures, the real story has not been told until now. Who are the Kennedys? Are they the brilliant, heroic, extraordinary people their admirers believe them to be? Or are they the arrogant, competitive, self-absorbed children of a willful and immensely rich patriarch, as their detractors claim? In fact they are all of these things and more.
Peter Collier and David Horowitz, authors of the best-selling The Rockefellers, have spent years researching archives and interviewing both family members and hundreds of people close to the Kennedys. They have discovered hitherto unused and unknown sources and for the first time have penetrated the inner sanctum of the family and have been able to tell much of their recent history from the inside out. Like The Rockefellers, The Kennedys is unique in its combination of intimate knowledge and a perspective free of obligation to family loyalties and myths; the result is this exhaustive and powerful story of four generations of Kennedys.
For it is in The Kennedys that we read not only of the proud achievements of an ambitious tribe, but of the hidden lapses and failings as well. We see Joseph P. Kennedy triumphant as Ambassador to England, but we also read a dark tale of Mephistophelean bargains with organized crime, of shady Hollywood deals and of his frustrated assault on Brahmin respectability. We see Rose Kennedy as the efficient and lovely mother of nine children, but also as a woman who publicly remained oblivious to her husband's sexual escapades. We read of Joe, Jr., the handsome and witty star of the nine children, so envious of his younger brother Jack's PT-109 heroism that he volunteered for a mission that had to fail; of Kick, the romantic and doomed daughter, whose flamboyance jeopardized her father's plans for the family; of Bobby, the priestly younger brother seeking an object for his loyalty; of the suppressed story of Rosemary; and especially of the young Jack revealed through his friendship with LeMoyne Billings.
Along with wonderful rich and funny stories of merciless teasing, family competition and practical jokes, we also read how Bobby's vendetta against organized crime
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may have led to a national tragedy; how after Bobby's death Teddy failed to become the moral center of the family; how Ethel drove her oldest sons out of the house with her anger and how these same boys turned away with a vengeance from the mythic and heroic Kennedy identity and sought life instead in drug forays to Harlem, aided and abetted by JFK's old friend Lem Billings. And there is more—much more.
Collier and Horowitz capture the strain of ambition; the dynastic ebb and flow of the Kennedy family; the invention of a mythic identity—developed over four generations—that led a very young David Kennedy, when once asked what it "meant" to be a Kennedy, to reply, "It means that we're exactly the same as everybody else, except better." Years later Chris Lawford would say, "If you think of it as one movement from Grandfather's early days you realize that the Kennedy story is really about karma, about people who broke the rules and were ultimately broken by them."
The Kennedys: An American Drama is a fascinating and brilliantly comprehensive history that brings together for the first time all the complex strands of the story of the Kennedys' rise and fall and will stand for a long time as the definitive book on this uniquely American family.
Peter Collier and David Horowitz, coauthors of the best-selling book The Rockefellers, met in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley in the early sixties, afterward becoming editors at Ramparts magazine. Peter Collier was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979 and is the author of Downriver, a novel. David Horowitz received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1979 and is the author of The First Frontier.
Jacket design copyright © 1984 by Robert Anthony, Inc. Author photograph by George Paul Csicseiy
Printed in U.S.A. CopyrightT5> 1984 Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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