Traces the misfortunes of the Kennedy family from the 1830s to the present to consider the author's theories about the family's biological inclinations toward trouble.

A family portrait captures the scandals, clandestine love affairs, and hidden secrets of the Kennedys

A meticulously researched chronicle of five generations of the Kennedy dynasty explains how their Irish-Catholic roots informed their lives and political beliefs and reveals how the immigrant experience shaped both their remarkable success and many tragedies. 100,000 first printing.

In The Kennedy Myth, Jim tells the Kennedy story from John Kennedy’s presidential campaign through Robert Kennedy’s assassination and analyzes it in terms of archaic, historic, and modern types of civil religion. From Robert N. Bellah, Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, author of Religion in Human Evolution: The assassination of a president has been a deeply traumatic event in American history, perhaps above all in the case of Lincoln. However, much closer to our own time, the assassination of John F. Kennedy shook the nation to its foundations. Such an event opens up levels of meaning that are well below the surface most of the time. Wolfe helps us in this book, which is about Kennedy's life as well as his death, to understand the depth dimension of the nation in which we live.

The Kennedys 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 was not told until Peter Collier and David Horowitz spent years researching archives and interviewing both family members and hundreds of people close to the Kennedys. An immediate classic, The Kennedys combines intimate knowledge with a perspective free of obligations to family loyalties and myths, bringing the story of four generations of ''America's family'' fully into view. Collier and Horowitz capture the strain of ambition; the dynastic ebb and flow; the invention of a mythic identity; the corrosive underside of the dream of Camelot - developed over four generations - that led one young Kennedy to say, ''We broke the rules and in turn we were 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 strains of the story of the Kennedys' rise and fall. The authors have added new material showing the effect of the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., and the other family tragedies of the last few years, on the Kennedys and their mythic role in American life.

John F. Kennedy was not only a president, but also a symbol for America's most cherished ideas. In The Kennedy Obsession, John Hellmann takes a thoroughly original approach to understanding Kennedy's star power and his carefully crafted public image. Tracing Kennedy's self-creation as diligent scholar, bashful hero, and sensitive rebel-cued by cultural figures such as Lord Byron, Ernest Hemingway, and Cary Grant-and the images of Kennedy in the aftermath of his assassination, Hellmann reveals the painstaking transformation of private life into public persona, of a man into perhaps the major American myth of our time.

In its drama and scope, this number one bestseller about two families--whose ambitions propelled them to unprecedented power and whose passions nearly destroyed them--is one of the richest works of biography in the last decade. "Rarely has popular history rung so authentic".--The New York Times. First time in trade paper. Photographs.

Meticulously researched both here and abroad, The Kennedys examines the Kennedy's as exemplars of the Irish Catholic experience. Beginning with Patrick Kennedy's arrival in the Brahmin world of Boston in 1848, Maier delves into the deeper currents of the often spectacular Kennedy story, and the ways in which their immigrant background shaped their values-and in turn twentieth-century America-for over five generations. As the first and only Roman Catholic ever elected to high national office in this country, JFK's pioneering campaign for president rested on a tradition of navigating a cultural divide that began when Joseph Kennedy shed the brogues of the old country in order to get ahead on Wall Street. Whether studied exercise in cultural self-denial or sheer pragmatism, their movements mirror that of countless of other, albeit less storied, American families. But as much as the Kennedys distanced themselves from their religion and ethnic heritage on the public stage, Maier shows how Irish Catholicism informed many of their most well-known political decisions and stances. From their support of civil rights, to Joe Kennedy's tight relationship with Pope Pius XII and FDR, the impact of their personal family history on the national scene is without question-and makes for an immensely compelling narrative. Bringing together extensive new research in both Ireland and the United States, several exclusive interviews, as well as his own perspective as an Irish-American, Maier's original approach to the Kennedy era brilliantly illustrates the defining role of the immigrant experience for the country's foremost political dynasty.

With a new preface: An “irreverent [and] entertaining” portrait of JFK, the Camelot mystique, and the politics of charisma (The Christian Science Monitor). Described by the New York Times as “a sort of intellectual outlaw,” Garry Wills takes on the romantic myths surrounding the Kennedy clan in this thought-provoking examination of electoral politics and the power of image in America. Wills argues that the much-admired dynasty, beginning with patriarch Joe Kennedy, created a corrupt climate where appearances were more important than reality, truth was discarded when it wasn’t convenient, and an assortment of devoted loyalists sacrificed integrity for the sake of reflected glory. Touching upon topics ranging from the manipulation of the PT-109 story in the media to the authorship of Profiles in Courage to the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis to persistent rumors of extramarital affairs, Wills offers a persuasive look not only at President John F. Kennedy and his brothers Robert and Edward, but also at the bubble that existed around them and lured in some of the best and brightest of the era. From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg and Why I Am a Catholic, The Kennedy Imprisonment is “a brilliant and troubling study of the Kennedy era in American politics” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).