The House of Kennedy(92)

iTed with Bobby’s daughter Courtney, his close friend and fellow senator John Tunney, and Bobby’s widow, Ethel. (Photo by Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)





(left) Bobby’s oldest son, Joe, shaking the hands of passengers aboard his father’s funeral train from California to DC in 1968, leading to speculation on the 16-year-old’s own political possibilities. Joe goes on to win his first term in congress in 1987, taking over from Tip O’Neill the same seat his uncle Jack once held. (above) Joe and his brother Michael (left).(Photo left by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images. Photo above by Mario Suriani/AP/Shutterstock.)





Ethel’s nephew Michael Skakel has been accused of killing neighbor Martha Moxley in 1975, when both were teenagers, but Bobby Jr. staunchly defends his cousin’s innocence. (George Etheredge/ The New York Times/Redux)





JFK Jr. (left), a Manhattan Assistant DA, leaves a Palm Beach courthouse with his cousin William Kennedy Smith (right) in 1991. Willie’s rape trial is the first case ever broadcast on Court TV. (Photo by Kathy Willens/AP/Shutterstock)





Bobby with his young son David (above) in 1958. The two have a special connection, and Bobby is extra-protective of his most sensitive child. David (right) struggles throughout his adolescence and twenties, never regaining equilibrium after witnessing his father’s assassination live on television. (Photo above by The Estate of Jacques Lowe/Getty Images. Photo right by Ron Galella/ Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images.)





Bobby and Ethel’s granddaughter, Saoirse Roisin Kennedy Hill. Saoirse, Courtney’s daughter, is open about her struggles with depression, and about not stigmatizing it. (Photo by David L Ryan/The Boston Globe/Pool/ EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)





Young John Jr. adores planes and helicopters. President Kennedy jokes that people will falsely assume his son is racing to embrace him when he disembarks, but “Little do they know — that son would have raced right by his father to get to that helicopter.” (Photo left by Estate of Stanley Tretick LLC/Corbis via Getty Images. Photo above by Estate of Stanley Tretick LLC/Corbis via Getty Images)





John attempts to board any plane or helicopter he comes near, “weeping bitterly” when he is left behind, though his father often consoles him with toy planes. (Photo by Harvey Georges/AP/Shutterstock)





Jackie walking with John Jr. (right), Caroline (left), and her nephew Anthony Radziwill (center). John Jr. and Anthony grow up together and remain close their whole lives, speaking nearly every day. (Photo by PA Images via Getty Images)





Jackie is a devoted mother, who wants Caroline and John Jr. to have “normal and fun” childhoods. “I don’t want my young children brought up by nurses and Secret Service men,” she tells the New York Times. (Photo left by Ron Galella/WireImage. Photo below by Ron Galella/ Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)





Jackie shocks the world when she marries Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis on October 20, 1968, though she credits him with bringing her “into a world where one could find happiness and love.” (Photo by Everett/Shutterstock)





Teenage Caroline and John. (Photo by Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)





John Jr, seen wearing a “Shriver” lifejacket in Hyannis Port, is used to lifelong paparazzi attention. People magazine even names him 1988’s “Sexiest Man Alive.” (Photo by Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)





Instead of politics or law, John Jr. ultimately chooses to go into journalism, founding the celebrity-tinged political magazine George in 1995. (Photo by Larry Busacca/Contour by Getty Images)





In 1996, John Jr. and Carolyn Bessette manage to elude the paparazzi completely when they slip away to be married on a tiny island, though their daily lives are relentlessly documented. (Photo by Lawrence Levine/AP/Shutterstock)





John Jr. and Carolyn taking off in John’s first plane, Cessna Skylane N529JK, in 1998. John later upgraded to a Piper Saratoga shortly before his ill-fated voyage in 1999. (Photo by Boston Herald/Shutterstock)





Notes





PROLOGUE




1 “Daddy. Oh, Daddy”: Dallas, The Kennedy Case, 19.

2 “curse actually did hang”: Joe McGinniss, “The End of Camelot,” Vanity Fair, September 1993.



PART ONE

The Patriarch: Joseph Patrick Kennedy





Chapter 1




1 “When my great-grandfather”: Thomas Maier, The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 7.

2 “power came from money”: Richard J. Whalen, “Joseph P. Kennedy: A Portrait of the Founder,” Fortune, 1963 (Fortune Classics, April 10, 2011).

3 Hostile takeover attempts: Whalen, “Joseph P. Kennedy.”

4 “learned from Daddy”: Robert McCrum, “Eunice Kennedy and the Death of the Great American Dream,” Guardian (UK), August 15, 2009.

5 “They were very conscious”: Jean Kennedy Smith, The Nine of Us: Growing Up Kennedy (New York: Harper, 2016), 10.