Edward Kennedy
An Intimate Biography
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In this groundbreaking biography of Edward Kennedy, historian and journalist Burton Hersh combines a lifetime of research and reporting with a lively mixture of never–before–told anecdotes (including the definitive version of the incident at Chappaquiddick, the details of which Kennedy himself filled in for Hersh shortly after it occurred) to create a broad yet unfailingly intimate portrait of the politician who would be universally acknowledged as one of the twentieth century's greatest American legislators.
Hersh was acquainted with Kennedy since his college days, and the result here is a unique series of revelations that serve to reinterpret the senator's public and private personas. Conditioned by deep–seated fears that he was an afterthought within his own powerful family, Kennedy developed a genius for conciliation and strategizing that made him a dramatically more effective political figure than either of his older brothers. In addition to this biography's account of the Chappaquiddick incident, Hersh also delivers the first full report of the vendetta between Kennedy and Richard Nixon, exposing the behind–the–scenes manipulations to which Kennedy resorted to drive Nixon from office during the Watergate scandal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A vivid protagonist who never quite escapes the pull of family and fate anchors this novelistic portrait of the late Massachusetts senator. Journalist Hersh (Bobby and J. Edgar) makes Kennedy his own statesman a born politician and authentic liberal who combined a capacity for conciliation with a talent for ruthless maneuvering. But Kennedy never entirely shook off the hold of Kennedyness: the shadow of his domineering father, who he feared might have him lobotomized like his sister Rosemary if he didn t measure up; the ghosts of his dead brothers; the dread of assassination; the predatory sense of entitlement, especially to booze and women; the clan s epic bad luck. The author meticulously recounts Kennedy s political wrangles and legislative initiatives, but his approach is literary rather than wonkish; drawing on Hersh s decades-long acquaintance with the family, the prose brims with sardonic humor and indelible sketches of, say, Bobby s misery-wrinkled little hawk s face or Jackie s uncomfortable campaign appearances as a remote Vogue cutout before... seemingly endless files of scrubwomen. The result is an entertaining, psychologically acute rendition of a man and a mystique.
