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The Kennedys: Family
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In power, the Kennedys strode over their failures — the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall — with hardly a sidelong glance. John Kennedy's popularity grew, resting on eloquent speeches, his ravishing family and his toughness in national-security affairs and against racism as civil rights upheavals seized the nation. "Jack's the luckiest kid I know," rasped Old Joe one day in New York City after the dark summer of 1961. "He has learned most of the lessons of being President right at the start."
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The legendary Kennedys seemed to have it all-money, power, charm, ambition. From Joe Kennedy's rise on Wall Street to the collapse of his last son's presidential hopes in 1980, the compelling tale of the Kennedy dynasty still fascinates Americans. American Experience presents the first comprehensive look at one man's elusive dream for his family and his nation, beginning in triumph and ending in tragedy.
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The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys is the sweeping history of two immigrant families, their rise to become potent political dynasties, and the marriage that brought the two together to found the most powerful family in America. Drawing on unprecedented access to the family and its private papers, Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian Doris Kearns Goodwin takes readers from John Francis "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald's baptism in 1863 through his reign as mayor of Boston, to the inauguration of his grandson as president ninety-eight years later. Each character emerges unforgettably: the young, shrewdly political Rose Fitzgerald; her powerful, manipulative husband, Joseph P. Kennedy; and the "Golden Trio" of Kennedy children — Joe Jr., Kathleen, and Jack — whose promise was eclipsed by the family's legacy of tragedy.
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From breathless hagiographies to scandal-mongering expos+�-�s, no family has generated more bestselling books than the Kennedys. None of them... has focused on the watershed period of World War II, when the course of the family and its individual members changed utterly. Now, in an engaging narrative grounded in impeccable scholarship, Edward J. Renehan, Jr., provides a dramatic portrait of years marked by family tensions, heartbreaks, and heroics. It was during this time that tragedy began to haunt the family -- Joe Jr.'s death, the untimely widowhood of Kathleen (a.k.a. "Kick"), Rosemary's lobotomy. But it was also the time in which John F. Kennedy rose above the strictures of the clan and became his own man.
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Maier reveals the relationship the Kennedys had with the Irish Republican Army. While JFK might not have been aware of his family's ties to the IRA, Kennedy cousin Mary Ann Ryan tells Maier about her mother's --- Mary Kennedy Ryan's --- involvement in the IRA women's group.
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The Kennedy sons were pioneer landholders on the Billabong Creek at Jerilderie, New South Wales in company with their sisters’ husbands Brougham, Brodribb and Desailly. Robert Kennedy and Mary Hume were married in 1858 and Robert made enthusiastic attempts to irrigate his ‘back block’, Wunnamurra, from channels which were first hand excavated, then dug with a new fangled horse drawn scoop brought back from the California goldfields by George Desailly. Nowadays that district is crisscrossed with irrigation channels, the fall of the land calculated by laser and computer, but in Robert’s homemade ditches, judged by eye, the water refused to run despite frantic efforts at bailing in order to encourage the flow. Babies were born to Mary and Robert at Wunnamurra, at Roto near Hillston when the family moved on at the introduction of the Robertson Land Act and later at Collingwood, Gunning which had been vacated in fear in 1840 by the widow of Mary’s murdered uncle, John Hume.
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