Ted Kennedy
A Life
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION
An enthralling and ground-breaking new biography of one of modern America’s most fascinating and consequential political figures, drawing on important new sources, by an award-winning biographer who covered Kennedy closely for many years
John A. Farrell’s magnificent biography of Edward M. Kennedy is the first single-volume life of the great figure since his death. Farrell’s long acquaintance with the Kennedy universe and the acclaim accorded his previous books—including his New York Times bestselling biography of Richard Nixon, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—helped garner him access to a remarkable range of new sources, including segments of Kennedy’s personal diary and his private confessions to members of his family in the days that followed the accident on Chappaquiddick. Farrell is, without question, one of America’s greatest political biographers and a storyteller of deep wisdom and empathy. His book does full justice to this famously epic and turbulent life of almost unimaginable tragedy and triumph.
As the fourth son of the close-knit but fiercely competitive Kennedy clan, Ted was the runt of the litter. Expelled from Harvard University for cheating, he was a fun-loving playboy who nevertheless served his brothers loyally and effectively. It was easy to take Ted lightly, and many did. But when he was elected to the United States Senate at the age of thirty to fill his brother Jack’s seat, something unexpected happened: he found his home and his calling there. Over time, Ted Kennedy would build arguably the most significant senatorial career in American history.
His life was buffeted by heartbreak: the violent deaths of his three older brothers, his own terrible plane crash, his children’s bouts with cancer, and the hideous self-inflicted wounds of Chappaquiddick and stretches of drinking and womanizing that caused irreparable damage to an already fragile first marriage. Those wounds scarred Ted deeply but also tempered his character, and, eventually, he embarked on a run as legislator, party elder, and paterfamilias of the Kennedy family that would change America for the better. John A. Farrell brings us the man as he was, in strength and weakness, his profound but complicated inheritance and his vital legacy, as only a great biographer can do. Without the story this book tells, no understanding of modern America can be complete.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Farrell (Richard Nixon: The Life) untangles in this masterful account the complex blend of political dexterity, recklessness, and unflagging support of the less fortunate that defined Ted Kennedy's rise from overlooked youngest son of a political dynasty to "Lion of the Senate." According to Farrell, Kennedy grew up "awed by the achievements of his father and brothers and vexed by self-doubt." Only 30 years old when he took his brother John's former seat in the U.S. Senate in 1962, Kennedy remained in that role until his death in 2009, fighting in his final months for the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Kennedy took early stands on civil rights, Farrell writes, but came into his own after the tragic assassinations of his older brothers. Farrell's evenhanded account documents Kennedy's "craven" behavior following the car crash on Chappaquiddick Island that left Mary Jo Kopechne dead, but gives equal weight to his accomplishments as an anti-apartheid advocate, an early champion of gay rights and AIDS funding, and a crusader for healthcare reform. The book shines in its vivid accounts of backroom political dealmaking, as Farrell enlivens his exhaustive research and expert analysis with a novelist's pacing. The result is the definitive one-volume biography of a consequential American lawmaker.
