Catching the Wind : Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975 - Neal Gabler

Catching the Wind

Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975

By: Neal Gabler

Hardcover | 27 October 2020

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Edward M. Kennedy was never expected to succeed. The youngest of nine, he lacked his brothers' natural gifts and easy grace. Yet after winning election to the Senate at the tender age of thirty, he became the most consequential legislator of his lifetime, perhaps even American history. Surviving the traumas of his brothers' assassinations, Ted Kennedy ultimately exerted the greatest effort keeping alive the mission of an active and caring government. He swept into the Senate at the high-water mark of the mid-century New Deal consensus and fulfilled the promise of that momentum throughout his glory years in the Senate as the booming voice of American liberalism.

That voice found its greatest impact in the laws he passed that wove government firmly into American life, extending aid and opportunity to those in most desperate need. Two thousand pieces of legislation, ranging from health care to education to civil rights, bore Ted's fingerprints. He worked tirelessly to better people's lives, even after the Reagan-era push for limited government rewrote the contract between nation and citizens. He did this because he felt he owed it to those who suffered, and those with whom he empathized out of his own pain and ever-present sense of inadequacy.

But Ted Kennedy was not immune to the darkness that plagued his family. He lived long enough to fail, to sin, to fall in and out of favor. The infamous incident at Chappaquiddick marked an unfortunate turning point in the youngest Kennedy's life, and it would not be his last brush with controversy. As his personal failures compounded in the public eye, he struggled to maintain the traction that had carried his agenda so far.

The product of a decade of work and hundreds of interviews, Catching the Wind will be an essential work of history and biography. The first of two volumes in a sweeping narrative, it traces the extraordinary life of an American statesman from his early years through the turning point of the 1970s. It is a landmark study of legislative genius and a powerful exploration of the man who spent his career upholding his mandate in service of a better America.

About the Author

Neal Gabler is the author of five books- An Empire of Their Own, Winchell, Life- The Movie, Walt Disney, and Barbra Streisand. He has received two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, Time's nonfiction book of the year, USA Today's biography of the year, and a National Book Critics Circle nomination. He is currently a professor for the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.
Industry Reviews
"With his trademark elegance and insight, Neal Gabler has crafted a memorable and moving portrait of the last Kennedy brother, which is also, in a sense, a portrait of the last great creative era of governance in the United States. Gabler has made a specialty of capturing the lives of architects of the culture, and now Ted Kennedy joins Walter Winchell and Walt Disney in a gallery of enduring biography."--Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America

"Neal Gabler's Catching the Wind is an awesome biographical achievement. The incredible legislative legacy of Senator Edward M. Kennedy burns brightly and heroically in these well written pages. Gabler, a brilliant historian and prodigious researcher, grapples with all sides of Kennedy's complex personality. The result is a landmark study of Washington power politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the Robert Caro tradition. Highly recommended!"--Douglas Brinkley, Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University and New York Timesbestselling author of American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race.

"Neal Gabler's engrossing biography of Ted Kennedy--a decade in the making--is a remarkably revelatory work, one of those rare books that discards the mythical and reveals the human side of an enormously complicated politician. The youngest Kennedy brother now appears to be the most consequential. Judicious and thoughtful, Catching the Wind will be essential reading for understanding the fate of political liberalism in American history."--Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at City University's Graduate Center

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