Kick Kennedy

May 9, 2016
Kennedy biographer Leaming (Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis) is unlikely to persuade readers who aren’t already Kennedy completists that their time is well spent in reading about the last decade of the short life of Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy (1920–1948). Kennedy’s childhood is largely skipped over, with Leaming presenting the 18-year-old daughter of the new U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain in 1938 as she’s introduced to the British aristocracy. The British aristocratic lifestyle waned during the interwar period and the “Little American Girl” became for them a symbol of their “vanished world.” The book traces Kennedy’s relationship with various scions of the nobility in detail, building up to her growing attachment to William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington. Their romance distresses her Catholic parents, who can’t countenance their daughter marrying a Protestant. Kennedy marries anyway, in 1944, but Hartington is killed in battle within a few months. Kennedy’s herself is killed in a plane crash in 1948 along with her married lover, Peter Fitzwilliam. Despite Leaming’s extensive interviews with the surviving members of Kennedy’s “aristocratic cousinhood,” she fails to make the case that such attention to Kennedy’s life is warranted; many will reach the last page wondering what was so special about Kennedy, apart from her last name.

March 1, 2016
A biography of the comparatively unheralded sister closest in age to John F. Kennedy strains to find something new to say about the Kennedy clan. How this book was written might be more interesting than the actual contents, as Leaming apparently stumbled across her story while researching more substantial biographies (Churchill Defiant, 2010, etc.). The framing sustains some suspense, as the book begins with an unnamed source whose identity isn't revealed until the final pages. In between, Leaming chronicles a changing Britain through World War II and its immediate aftermath, as the country's mood changed from isolationism and appeasement--in line with the position favored by Ambassador Joseph Kennedy--to a patriotic engagement with the Nazis, which found many sons of the British aristocracy serving and dying in the war, to an aftermath that saw both Churchill and the aristocracy challenged by a populist surge. Amid all this is a love story that wouldn't fill a book if it didn't involve the Kennedys. Leaming mainly examines the romance between a feisty debutante and Billy Cavendish, heir to a prestigious dukedom. Marrying Billy would give Kick an identity, wealth, and power independent of her family, but it would also mean crossing her family by marrying outside the Catholic Church. True love weathered those challenges, but the war ended Billy's life a month after they wed, with Kick in America (to the displeasure of her new British family) mourning the recent death of her brother in the war. Should Kick remarry, as Billy prophetically advised? Will she retain her British ties or return to live in the States? While the young widow tried to figure out her life without becoming a duchess (a future she seemed to miss as much or more than her late husband), she made a surprising choice that would further alienate her family and result in her early death. Leaming doesn't present much new for Kennedy buffs, but the age of Downton Abbey offers fresh context for this story of American royalty and its more tradition-minded British counterpart.

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April 1, 2016
Affectionately known as Kick, due to her vitality, curiosity, and irrepressible spirit, Kathleen Kennedy took Britain by storm when she accompanied her family to London upon her father's appointment as U.S. ambassador. Immersed in the halcyon, pre-WWII world of country-estate weekends and city nightclubs, Kick, a devout Catholic, won the heart of Billy Cavendish, the Protestant heir to the Duke of Devonshire. It would take six years for the couple to overcome the religious objections of both families, and only a few months for their marriage to end when Billy was killed in battle. As a much-sought-after widow, Kick vacillated between England and America, and between a scandalous love affair with a married man and her family's extreme moral censor. When she died in a plane crash in 1948, en route to introduce her lover to her father, Kick's soul was in a state of familial and emotional turmoil. Following her last book, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (2014), biographer Leaming candidly demystifies the life of one of the least-known Kennedys and vividly illuminates the complex world of British aristocracy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)