Catching the wind Edward Kennedy and the liberal hour

Neal Gabler

Book - 2020

"The epic, definitive biography of Ted Kennedy--an immersive journey through the life of a complicated man and a sweeping history of the fall of liberalism and the collapse of political morality. Edward M. Kennedy was never expected to succeed. The youngest of nine, he lacked his brothers' natural gifts and easy grace. Yet after winning election to the Senate at the tender age of thirty, he became the most consequential legislator of his lifetime, perhaps even American history. Surviving the traumas of his brothers' assassinations, Ted Kennedy ultimately exerted the greatest effort keeping alive the mission of an active and caring government. He swept into the Senate at the high-water mark of the mid-century New Deal consensu...s and fulfilled the promise of that momentum throughout his glory years in the Senate as the booming voice of American liberalism. That voice found its greatest impact in the laws he passed that wove government firmly into American life, extending aid and opportunity to those in most desperate need. Two thousand pieces of legislation, ranging from health care to education to civil rights, bore Ted's fingerprints. He worked tirelessly to better people's lives, even after the Reagan-era push for limited government rewrote the contract between nation and citizens. He did this because he felt he owed it to those who suffered, and those with whom he empathized out of his own pain and ever-present sense of inadequacy. But Ted Kennedy was not immune to the darkness that plagued his family. He lived long enough to fail, to sin, to fall in and out of favor. The infamous incident at Chappaquiddick marked an unfortunate turning point in the youngest Kennedy's life, and it would not be his last brush with controversy. As his personal failures compounded in the public eye, he struggled to maintain the traction that had carried his agenda so far. The product of a decade of work and hundreds of interviews, Catching the Wind will be an essential work of history and biography. The first of two volumes in a sweeping narrative, it traces the extraordinary life of an American statesman from his early years through the turning point of the 1970s. It is a landmark study of legislative genius and a powerful exploration of the man who spent his career upholding his mandate in service of a better America"--

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Subjects
Genres
Biographies
Published
New York : Crown [2020]
Language
English
Main Author
Neal Gabler (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xxxvi, 887 pages, 24 unnumbered pages of plates: illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages [743]-841) and index.
ISBN
9780307405449
  • Introduction: They Came
  • 1. The Youngest
  • 2. The Least
  • 3. The Succession
  • 4. "If His Name Was Edward Moore..."
  • 5. The Lowest Expectations
  • 6. "Do a Little Suffering"
  • 7. "A Heightened Sense of Purpose"
  • 8. A Dying Wind
  • 9. All Hell Fell
  • 10. A Fallen Standard
  • 11. A Shadow President
  • 12. "The Wrong Side of Destiny"
  • 13. Starting from Scratch
  • 14. "People Do Not Want to Be Improved"
  • 15. Awesome Power with No Discipline"
  • 16. S.3
  • 17. "Our Long National Nightmare Is Over"
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
Review by Booklist Review

In this first volume in a two-part life of Edward M. Kennedy, prize-winning biographer Gabler traces the trajectory of the alleged "last and least" of the Kennedys to his emergence as the "lion of the Senate" and the hero of liberalism. Gabler frames Kennedy's early years through the familiar tropes of "mean mommy" and "controlling daddy" to explain Rose and Joseph Kennedy's psychological leverage over their youngest child. There was also the endless fraternal competitiveness with John and Bobby in every aspect of life, but most notably in politics. With this family background, Gabler demonstrates how Kennedy was initially perceived as a legislative lightweight and a privileged gadabout. Kennedy was transformed by the assassinations of his brothers and his own tragic failure at Chappaquiddick, becoming a stronger, more devout statesman as he adopted his martyred brothers' causes as his own. In his intense focus on Kennedy's formative and transformative Senate career, Gabler provides blow-by-blow insights into some of the most consequential legislation of the 1970s, from civil rights to immigration to health care. The result of staggering research and expert analysis, Gabler's discerning evaluation of the totality of influences upon one of the twentieth century's most persuasive and popular statesmen is a triumphant achievement and essential reading for everyone fascinated by the Kennedys, politics, and governance.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy was not a callow afterthought to his larger-than-life brothers, but "the most consequential legislator of his lifetime" and an embodiment of liberalism's strengths and tragic weaknesses, according to this sweeping first installment in a planned two-volume biography. Cultural historian Gabler (An Empire of Their Own) recaps Kennedy's many years of patient, incremental lawmaking on immigration, the Voting Rights Act, health insurance, and campaign finance. He also situates Kennedy in a larger narrative about the dismantling of the "post--New Deal modern liberal consensus" as liberalism's "moral authority" was undermined by the Vietnam War, which Ted Kennedy was slow to oppose; by public perceptions of liberals' ethical laxness and irresponsibility, which were stoked by Kennedy's handling of the car accident that killed Mary Jo Kopechne on Chappaquiddick in 1969; and by liberals' failure to bridge the gap between their civil-rights agenda and the racial resentments of the white working-class part of their base. There's plenty of drama and pathos, including a riveting recreation of physical attacks on Kennedy by mobs of Boston anti-busing protesters, but Gabler pierces the haze of glamour surrounding the Kennedy clan to get at the substance of the politics they personified. This elegantly written and shrewdly insightful account is a must-read for political history buffs. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary. (Oct.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

With this new book, award-winning author Gabler profiles the life and career of Edward "Ted" Kennedy (1932--2009), from his status as "the least of the Kennedy's…the one of whom little was expected" to a senior statesman in the U.S. Senate. This first volume, of two, is meticulously researched yet readable. Gabler has great respect for Kennedy, and considers him to be "the most consequential legislator of his lifetime." The author effectively describes how the politician forged a genuine connection with voters and fellow senators of both parties, and writes at length about Kennedy's first campaign for the Senate (to fill his brother John's seat). After Robert Kennedy's assassination, there was great pressure on Ted to run for president; the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident derailed any chance of the presidency in 1972. Gabler discusses personal challenges in Kennedy's life, including a serious plane crash, his son's cancer, and wife Joan's alcoholism. But much of this book consists of legislative triumphs and failures. The volume ends with a breakdown of policies the Kennedys championed. VERDICT While this is primarily a political biography, the book contains plenty of personal material about the Kennedy family to satisfy all levels of readers. An important contribution on this family dynasty.--Thomas Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A vigorous, highly readable life of Edward Kennedy (1932-2009), taking him from birth through the Watergate era. Ted Kennedy was the last of nine children born to Joseph and Rose Kennedy. "Few families were as class-conscious," writes Gabler, whose previous books have centered on popular culture, "and for all the animus Joe felt toward his Protestant social superiors, he assiduously emulated them and forced his children into the mold." After Joe Jr.'s death in World War II, it fell on John F. Kennedy to become president--all part of Joe Sr.'s plan, mapping out the lives of his children when they were still in diapers. "Joe Kennedy," writes the author, "had already decided that Bobby was going to be Jack's attorney general…because he felt that Jack needed the protection of having a family member close by." And Ted? Much as the Kennedys stuck together, nothing tremendous was expected of the baby of the family, though he was still expected to enter politics. Gabler carefully charts the course of his 1962 run for Senate, just barely at the constitutionally required age of 30, a race marred by bitter opposition by the Boston elite and by the resurrection of a long-buried cheating scandal when Ted was at Harvard. He overcame both to win 55% of the vote and immediately set to work to prove that those who dismissed him as having bought his way into office were wrong. As Gabler tabulates, Ted Kennedy "sponsored 2,552 pieces of legislation, just under seven hundred of which became law." During a career marked by the assassinations of his older brothers, the Chappaquiddick incident (which, Gabler notes, was less politically damaging than one might expect), and turmoil over such issues as affirmative action and school integration, Kennedy achieved remarkable things. The author ends with nearly 35 years of Kennedy's political career to come, leaving plenty of material for the second volume. A book full of triumph and tragedy and an exemplary study in electoral politics. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

One The Youngest He was the youngest, and from that nearly everything in his life would follow. And not only was he the youngest, he was also unexpected--­an accident. Beginning in 1915, with the birth of Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr., Kennedy children arrived at one-­ or two-­year intervals for the next ten years and six more babies. Rose Kennedy said that after the birth of Robert Francis Kennedy in 1925, her friends "gently chided" her against having any more, and she seemed to agree. But three years later, Jean Kennedy arrived, which, Rose said, made her even more "skittish" about her passel of children. After Jean's birth, Joseph Sr., apparently anticipating no more offspring, named the family yacht the Ten of Us, and he warned his wife that if she had another child, he would give her not the customary trip to Europe that had followed each birth but a black eye. But in February 1932--­February 22, 1932, Washington's birthday--­almost four years to the day of Jean Kennedy's birth, Edward Moore Kennedy arrived to forty-­one-­year-­old Rose Kennedy, not only the youngest, not only unexpected, but an afterthought. And more than an afterthought. One Kennedy biographer surmised that he was reparation for Kennedy's torrid affair with the film star Gloria Swanson, whose career Kennedy had guided--­an amends to his wife after the affair had ended. By that time, Joseph and Rose were intimate only infrequently, by most accounts, but the couple rendezvoused in the spring of 1931 at the Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, Virginia, after Joseph's four-­month winter vacation at Palm Beach, Florida, and spent a few days together before Joseph left alone for New York. Edward was born nine months later. Despite her husband's threat, Rose still got her European trip shortly after the birth. For the youngest, the circumstances surrounding the birth were an augury both of the family traditions to which he would be obligated and of the negligence with which he would often be treated. Though the family lived in Bronxville, New York, at the time, Rose insisted he be born at St. Margaret's Hospital in Dorchester, Massachusetts, so he could be delivered by Dr. Frederick Good, who had delivered each of his siblings. She recuperated in Dorchester for two weeks, near her parents, since Joseph hadn't attended the birth or provided any emotional support but instead had retreated once again to Palm Beach. "There was no need keeping Joe around in the winter, not in the middle of February for a baby," Rose later told her ghostwriter, with a certain dismissiveness toward her new child. But she said that her husband had meals sent to her from the Ritz Hotel via taxi because "he felt so sorry for me being in a hospital." And if the baby was an afterthought, so too was his name. Edward Moore was a family retainer, a onetime secretary to Rose's father, John Fitzgerald, when Fitzgerald was mayor of Boston, which is when Joseph Kennedy met Moore back in 1912. Moore continued in the position under mayors James Michael Curley and Andrew James Peters, before accepting a job with Joseph Kennedy as his counselor, after which, according to historian and Kennedy family chronicler Doris Kearns Goodwin, "the bond between the two men proved inseparable." But "counselor" may have been both too august and too limited a word for what Moore did for Joe Kennedy. "Eddie Moore became his closest friend," Rose would say of Moore's relationship to her husband, "someone he trusted implicitly in every way and in all circumstances. His wife, Mary, became an equally great friend, confidante, and unfailing support for me." So close were the Kennedys and the Moores that Joe sold them his Brookline, Massachusetts, house on Beals Street in March 1920, which had the advantage of bringing them from Charlestown, where they had lived with Mary Moore's mother, to just around the corner from the Kennedys' new house, where they could be on call in case Joe needed them. Still, for all the talk of friendship, the relationship was hardly one of equals. Edward Moore served Joseph Kennedy. He was, as Time magazine put it, "nurse, comforter, stooge, package-­bearer, adviser, who played games with Joe and the children, bought neckties and bonds for Joe, opened doors, wrote letters, investigated investments, saw to it Joe wore his rubbers." One Kennedy biographer called him a "valet," another a "flunky." One of Joseph Kennedy's granddaughters said that the childless Moore's duties included being an "occasional babysitter." A more important duty was to provide cover for Joe Kennedy. According to Joseph Kennedy biographer David Nasaw, Kennedy and Moore set up a real estate company, Fenway Building Trust, after World War I, in which Joe owned 98 percent of the shares but Moore was assigned the task of convincing two women to sell their real estate to the company for notes that were then used to buy more real estate. Another biographer said Kennedy used Moore's name to hide Wall Street transactions with which he didn't want to be publicly associated. And Kennedy used Moore as a cover in other ways. He was a beard for Kennedy, so that even Rose Kennedy said Joe told her "that he kept Eddie around when he was signing contracts with some of these 'dames,' as he used to say. And then he'd [Joe], you know, get framed and get into difficulties." And if Edward Moore was a beard, he was a procurer for Kennedy and the Kennedy sons too. As a Harvard student, John Kennedy had his father's "administrator"--­it could only have been Moore--­find girls for him and five friends for a bacchanal at Cape Cod, after which John fretted over whether or not he had gotten the "clap." But Joe Kennedy enjoyed Moore not just for his service, which was slavish, or his loyalty, which was total, but for his sociability. "Irish as a clay pipe," Time wrote of him, and Edward Kennedy himself would say that his father "cherished Eddie's convivial soul." During a 1932 train tour in support of Franklin Roosevelt's presidential candidacy, a trip on which Moore accompanied Kennedy, Roosevelt adviser Raymond Moley remarked on Moore's "infinite capacity to make friends," though vaudevillian Eddie Dowling, who was on the same tour, thought the amiability was tempered by his servility. "He never stopped telling me, and anybody else that would listen, about the greatness of Joseph P. Kennedy." The idea that Kennedy and Moore were inseparable was less figurative than literal. Joe's "shadow," Gloria Swanson called him. Moore was with him in Boston at the beginning, in New York when Kennedy moved there for business, in Hollywood when Kennedy began assaying the movies. And when Roosevelt won the election and named Kennedy the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Moore accompanied him to Washington, where they lived together on a 125-­acre estate in Rockville, Maryland. They were still living there when Kennedy became head of the Maritime Commission, and he and Moore spent two and a half months working with a former Harvard classmate of Kennedy's named John Burns, who had become a judge, to devise the commission's subsidy structure. Moore was with Kennedy when Kennedy became the United States ambassador to England, and they sailed there together; with him when Kennedy returned to America; and with him nearly every day thereafter, until Moore was felled by a fatal illness in 1952. Edward Kennedy would later say he found it "endearing" that his father had named him for his friend, even as he'd named his first son, Joseph, after himself and his second son, John Fitzgerald, after Rose's father, and Edward Kennedy would talk proudly about how Moore was his father's "go-­to guy." But for all his intimacy with the Kennedy family, Edward Moore was still a retainer, and for Joseph Kennedy to name his youngest son after him--­a man of no great distinction, a man whose chief virtue was his undying loyalty to his boss--­as seemingly a small reward for Moore's service was itself a harbinger of Edward Moore Kennedy's status in the family. If Edward Moore Kennedy was the youngest of the Kennedy children, he was also the least. Excerpted from Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975 by Neal Gabler All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.