The Kennedy Curse: Why Tragedy Has Haunted America's First Family For 150 Years - Hardcover

Edward Klein

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9780786259816: The Kennedy Curse: Why Tragedy Has Haunted America's First Family For 150 Years

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786259817 ISBN 13: 9780786259816

Publisher: Thorndike Press, 2003

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A New York Times Bestseller

In this probing expos�, renowned Kennedy biographer Edward Klein -- a bestselling author and journalist personally acquainted with many members of the Kennedy family -- unravels one of the great mysteries of our time and explains why the Kennedys have been subjected to such a mind-boggling chain of calamities. Klein explores the underlying pattern that governs the Kennedy Curse.

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About the Author:

Edward Klein is the author of the New York Times bestsellers All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy and Just Jackie: Her Private Years. He covered John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign, served as a foreign correspondent in Asia, and was foreign editor of Newsweek. During his eleven years as editor in chief of The New York Times Magazine, it won the first Pulitzer Prize in its history. His articles have appeared in New York, Manhattan, inc., Vanity Fair, and Parade, for which he also writes "Walter Scott's Personality Parade." He is the author of the novel The Parachutists. He lives in New York City and Bridgehampton, Long Island.

This book is a detective story.

It is an investigation of one of the great mysteries of our time-the Kennedy Curse. It explores the underlying pattern that governs the curse and examines the many influences-historical, psychological, and genetic-that have shaped the Kennedys` character and led to their self-defeating behavior.

The stories in this book illustrate how the Kennedy Curse began in the common Irish immigrant experience of poverty and humiliation, and developed into an obsessive lust for power and dominance over others at the expense of all ethical behavior....

The people in this book were, for the most part, on a fatal collision course with reality. They felt immune to mortal laws and somehow divinely protected from the inevitable consequences of their deeds and misdeeds. In their hunger for unlimited power, they saw themselves as superior beings who resided above the common herd. They felt special-omnipotent and worthy of being worshiped....

Our inclination to idolize the Kennedys has obscured their human attributes. And so, finally, this book is an attempt to demystify the Kennedys by telling the story of how the descendants of Patrick Kennedy, a poor Irish immigrant who came to the shores of the New World in 1849, pulled, tore, scratched, scraped, clutched, and clawed their way to the top of American society-and, in the process, made the fatal mistake of thinking of themselves as divine.

&mdashFrom The Kennedy Curse

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