The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby

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Books about the Kennedys are legion. Yet missing until now has been the exploration of the bond between Jack and Bobby, and the part that it played in their rise and fall. Eight years apart in age, they were wildly different in temperament and sensibility. Jack was the born leadercharismatic, ironic, capable of extraordinary growth and reach, yet also pathologically reckless. Bobby was the fearless, hardworking Boy Scoutunafraid of dirty work and ruthless about protecting his brother and destroying their enemies. Jack, it was said, was the first Irish Brahman, Bobby the last Irish Puritan.
As Mahoney demonstrates with brilliant clarity in this impeccably documented, magisterial book, the Kennedys lived their days of power in dangerous, trackless territory. The revolution in Cuba had created a poisonous cauldron of pro- and anti-Castro forces, the CIA, J. Edgar Hoovers FBI, and the Mafia. Mahoney gives us Jack and Bobby in all their hubris and humanity, youthfulness and fatalism. Here is American history as it unfolds. The Kennedy Brothers is a fresh and masterful account of the men whose legacy continues to hold the American imagination. Originally published under the title Sons and Brothers.

Reviews

A haunting evocation of the fire-and-ice political partnership between Robert and John F. Kennedy and of how, despite energy and idealism, the brothers encountered tragedy by blundering into trackless wood of ambition and emotion.
Proves that the lives and deaths of John F. and Robert F. Kennedy remain as compelling now as they were throughout the turbulent 1960s.

Author Bio

Richard D. Mahoney, a Kennedy scholar emeritus of the University of Massachusetts, is an expert on international economics and foreign policy and the author of two histories of the Kennedy administration. He was the Democratic secretary of state and acting governor of Arizona. He is currently the director of the School of Public and International Affairs at North Carolina State University.

David Talbot is the author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years and The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. He is the founder and former editor in chief of Salon.