Sons and Brothers : The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy

by Mahoney, Richard D.

• ISBN13: 9781559704809
• ISBN10: 1559704802
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-08-18
• Publisher: Arcade Pub

Summary

This intriguing book brings a fresh perspective to bear on the intimate, charged partnership of John and Robert Kennedy. The author, Richard D. Mahoney, whose father was a friend of Bobby's and an appointee of Jack's, has both the academic and political experience necessary to evaluate evidence of the Kennedys' relations with the Mafia, anti-Castro rebels, and other groups lurking in the shadows of American life. He also has a sharp eye for the brothers' differing yet complementary personalities. Jack was intellectual and cheerfully cynical, with a zest for pleasure increased by a life-threatening illness concealed from the public. He looked to passionate, partisan Bobby for bulldog-like political support and used his brother as a "moral compass" when planning his administration's actions on civil rights, the corruption of organized labor, and the containment of Communism. Their powerful father, Joseph--whose deep pockets basically bought Jack the presidency and at the same time compromised it because of Joseph's links to organized crime--looms over the brothers as the author of a Faustian bargain that may well have played a role in JFK's assassination. Mahoney's vivid, compulsively readable text offers suggestive questions rather than definitive answers, but it certainly succeeds as a bracing corrective to "America's inability to see its history as tragedy," a failure Jack and Bobby emphatically did not share. --Wendy Smith

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	xiii
Crusades: 1951--1959	3	(38)
The Campaign: 1960	41	(48)
Ordeal: 1961	89	(54)
Triumph: 1962	143	(80)
Rendezvous: 1963	223	(76)
Bobby Alone: 1964--1968	299	(76)
Epilogue	375	(4)
Notes	379	(46)
Index	425