Catching the wind : Edward Kennedy and the liberal hour / Neal Gabler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gabler, Neal, author.

Contributor:

EBSCOhost.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Kennedy, Edward M. (Edward Moore), 1932-2009.

Kennedy, Edward M.

United States. Congress. Senate--Biography.

United States.

United States. Congress. Senate.

Legislators--United States--Biography.

Legislators.

United States--Politics and government--1945-1989.

Politics and government.

United States--Politics and government--1989-.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xxxvi, 887 pages, 24 unnumbered pages of plates) : illustrations

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Crown, [2020]

System Details:

text file

Summary:

The epic, definitive biography of Ted Kennedy--an immersive journey through the life of a complicated man and a sweeping history of the fall of liberalism and the collapse of political morality. In the tradition of the works of Robert Caro and Taylor Branch, Catching the Wind is the first volume of Neal Gabler's magisterial two-volume biography of Edward Kennedy. It is at once a human drama, a history of American politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and a study of political morality and the role it played in the tortuous course of liberalism. Though he is often portrayed as a reckless hedonist who rode his father's fortune and his brothers' coattails to a Senate seat at the age of thirty, the Ted Kennedy in Catching the Wind is one the public seldom saw--a man both racked by and driven by insecurity, a man so doubtful of himself that he sinned in order to be redeemed. The last and by most contemporary accounts the least of the Kennedys, a lightweight. He lived an agonizing childhood, being shuffled from school to school at his mother's whim, suffering numerous humiliations--including self-inflicted ones--and being pressed to rise to his brothers' level. He entered the Senate with his colleagues' lowest expectations, a show horse, not a workhorse, but he used his "ninth-child's talent" of deference to and comity with his Senate elders to become a promising legislator. And with the deaths of his brothers John and Robert, he was compelled to become something more: the custodian of their political mission. In Catching the Wind, Kennedy, using his late brothers' moral authority, becomes a moving force in the great "liberal hour," which sees the passage of the anti-poverty program and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Then, with the election of Richard Nixon, he becomes the leading voice of liberalism itself at a time when its power is waning: a "shadow president," challenging Nixon to keep the American promise to the marginalized, while Nixon lives in terror of a Kennedy restoration. Catching the Wind also shows how Kennedy's moral authority is eroded by the fatal auto accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969, dealing a blow not just to Kennedy but to liberalism. In this sweeping biography, Gabler tells a story that is Shakespearean in its dimensions: the story of a star-crossed figure who rises above his seeming limitations and the tragedy that envelopes him to change the face of America.

Contents:

Introduction: They came

The youngest

The least

The succession

"If his name was Edward Moore..."

The lowest expectations

"Do a little suffering"

"A heightened sense of purpose"

A dying wind

All hell fell

A fallen standard

A shadow president

"The wrong side of destiny"

Starting from scratch

"People do not want to be improved"

"Awesome power with no discipline"

S.3

"Our long national nightmare is over".

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [827]-841) and index.

Electronic reproduction. Ipswich, MA Available via World Wide Web.

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Online version: Gabler, Neal, Catching the wind

ISBN:

9780804137027

0804137021

Publisher Number:

40030178796

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.