Catching the Wind

May 1, 2020

The first of two volumes, this biography by Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Gabler's aims to investigate not only Kennedy's life and legislative strengths (along with the inevitable shortcomings) but his career as emblematic of liberalism and the downswing of liberal ideals.

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August 1, 2020
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.

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Starred review from August 31, 2020
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.

Starred review from September 1, 2020
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)