A Common Good
The Friendship of Robert F. Kennedy and Kenneth P. O'Donnell
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
An illuminating account of the history-making friendship between RFK and the chief of staff to JFK—a bond built on shared ideals, but severed by tragedy.
When they first met at Harvard in 1946, young Bobby Kennedy and Kenny O’Donnell could not have imagined where their lives would take them. Teammates on both the football and debate teams, they formed a partnership that would sustain them through the years, from Robert Kennedy’s tenure as attorney general to O’Donnell’s years as John F. Kennedy’s chief of staff. Together they lived, worked, and struggled through some of the most pivotal moments of the twentieth century, including the assassination of JFK in Dallas. Their harmonious relationship was cut short only by Bobby’s own tragic death.
With full access to the Kennedy family archives, Helen O’Donnell brings an inspiring personal and political alliance to life. With A Common Good, she amply fulfills the promise she made to her late father to honor and preserve his memories of Robert F. Kennedy for future generations.
Kirkus Reviews hails A Common Good as “a moving and intimate study of a unique friendship but also of the time and place, now long ago, in which this friendship formed and blossomed.” O’Donnell “set out to write ‘a good book about two good men.’ In this she has succeeded.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kenneth (Kenny) O'Donnell often appears in the background of Oval Office photographs taken during the Kennedy administration: an unsmiling figure whose nickname--his daughter writes in her biography of her father--was "The Cobra." O'Donnell, friends with Bobby Kennedy from their days on the Harvard football team back in 1946, was so defined by his relationship with the Kennedy family, according to his daughter, that after Bobby's assassination, both he and his wife fell into alcoholism and early death in the late 1970s. The author recalls that Bobby was her father's best friend and that after the assassination his presence hung over their house "like a ghost." In 1951 O'Donnell, who was born in 1924, went to work on Congressman John Kennedy's Senate campaign and was involved in every election after that. The author was six when Bobby was shot and 15 when her father died; her stories here were related to her by JFK's "Irish Mafia," surviving Kennedys and tape recordings her father had made. She recreates his life totally in reference to the careers of John and Robert Kennedy, suggesting that her father had no life of his own. The main body of the book--told in the third person--is serviceable and heartfelt. What makes this account so emotionally involving are the first-person introduction and epilogue that detail the disintegration of the O'Donnell family. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.
