Twilight of Camelot
The Short Life and Long Legacy of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the “insightful and well-crafted” (The Wall Street Journal) Kennedy and King comes a heart-wrenching and sensitive examination of the tragic loss of President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s premature son, Patrick, and how their shared grief brought them closer together in the months leading up to his assassination.
In April 1963, the White House announced that Jackie was pregnant with a sibling for Caroline and John Jr.—joyful news after years of miscarriages and a stillbirth in 1956. But on August 7th, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was born six weeks premature and died less than two days later.
In this probing, soulful account of the struggle to save Patrick, Steven Levingston takes us inside the long-troubled relationship of Jack and Jackie as they faced one of the most difficult experiences of their marriage. With a “perceptive and eloquent” (The Christian Science Monitor) voice, Levingston reveals how Patrick’s death, tragic as it was, ultimately brought the couple closer together and set the President on a trajectory to be a better husband and father in the months leading up to their fateful campaign trip to Dallas.
In a parallel storyline, Levingston reveals the largely unknown role President Kennedy played in modernizing an important corner of American health care. After Patrick’s death, he ordered studies into the primitive state of premature care and drummed up millions of dollars in government funding, igniting a revolution in treatments that over the decades have saved millions of infants thanks to the invention of baby ventilators, new drugs, and modern neonatal intensive care units.
For his definitive account of Patrick’s brief but influential life, Levingston draws on first-ever interviews with doctors who treated Jackie and Patrick, in-depth revelations of the Secret Service agent in whose speeding car Jackie nearly gave birth prematurely, and on new archival documents. Twilight of Camelot is a fresh and humanizing portrait of one of the most famous and complicated couples of the 20th century, and a pulsating drama that illuminates one of the least-known periods in Kennedy family history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Losing a baby broke the First Couple's hearts but revived their marriage according to this emotionally probing history. Former Washington Post editor Levingston (Little Demon in the City of Light) recaps the death of Patrick Kennedy two days after Jackie Kennedy gave birth to him, five weeks early, in August 1963; he succumbed to hyaline membrane disease, a lung disorder that was often fatal in premature infants. Patrick's demise, Levingston notes, captivated the world and inspired improvements in neonatal healthcare that have all but eliminated such deaths, funded in part by bills President Kennedy signed after his son's death. But Levingston's focus is on the tragedy's role in JFK's transformation from heartless womanizer—he was yachting with other women when Jackie gave birth to a stillborn daughter in 1956—to loving family man. This time, Kennedy stood vigil over his dying son and shed "cataracts" of tears after his death. In the aftermath, the couple made previously uncommon public displays of affection, while Kennedy bonded with his young children. (He also, according to Levingston, swore off sex with his two mistresses, even as he continued to rendezvous with them.) Later chapters explore how the newly rekindled relationship compounded Jackie's trauma after the assassination. Levingston fleshes out his chronicle of the couple's reconciliation in soap-operatic prose. It makes for an affecting if occasionally maudlin addition to the Camelot saga.
