Catching the Wind

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

Neal Gabler is the author of five books, including three biographies: An Empire of Their Own, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Winchell, which was named Time magazine s nonfiction book of the year and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Walt Disney, which won him his second Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was named biography of the year by USA Today. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shorenstein Fellowship from Harvard, and a Woodrow Wilson Public Policy scholarship, and was the chief nonfiction judge of the National Book Awards.

Kennedy s expansive life has yielded no shortage of biographies, but [Neal] Gabler s is on its way toward becoming the most complete and ambitious. As a character study it is rich and insightful, frank in its judgments but deeply sympathetic to the man Gabler regards as the most complex of the Kennedys. . . . Catching the Wind lends a cinematic sweep to Kennedy s legislative crusades. The New York Times

Particularly today, when partisan divisions in America run so deep, it s instructive to recall Kennedy s skill at working across party lines and gaining sufficient Republican support to secure an astonishing array of legislative achievements. . . . Illuminating,[AD1]  and sympathetic . . . Gabler s study, when completed, will be the most detailed portrait we have of the man, and by a considerable margin. The Washington Post

The rich narrative is studded with tasty factoids and lively quotes, anecdotes and vignettes. The Wall Street Journal

One of the truly great biographies of our time, Catching the Wind is a masterwork of historical reconstruction. It turns Ted Kennedy s combination of decency, carelessness, political craftiness, and transcendent idealism into a powerful account of the travails of modern American liberalism. Here is biography written at the highest level. Sean Wilentz, New York Times bestselling author of Bob Dylan in America and The Rise of American Democracy

A mammoth undertaking . . . Neal Gabler has brilliantly documented the rise of the most consequential legislator of our day, one who reached Shakespearean heights and tabloid depths. But the Ted Kennedy story is about much more. It is the tale of modern American liberalism and the shifting winds of political morality. . . . Deeply impressive. Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci

With his trademark elegance and insight, Gabler has crafted a moving