The Last Brother

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In The Last Brother, Joe McGinniss brings to startling and disturbing life the childhood, the brief triumph, and the long downward slide of the last Kennedy brother...and exposes, as never before, the chilling reality behind the glittering facade of America's First Dysfunctional Family, as well as the terrible cost of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy's dark ambitions for his children - even the last and least of them. His book focuses in particular on the extraordinary sixties, a decade that began in glory for the ...
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More About This Book

Overview

In The Last Brother, Joe McGinniss brings to startling and disturbing life the childhood, the brief triumph, and the long downward slide of the last Kennedy brother...and exposes, as never before, the chilling reality behind the glittering facade of America's First Dysfunctional Family, as well as the terrible cost of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy's dark ambitions for his children - even the last and least of them. His book focuses in particular on the extraordinary sixties, a decade that began in glory for the family with Jack's ascension to the presidency, and ended - after the murders of Jack and Bobby, the tragedy at Chappaquidick, and their father's death - with Teddy, the last brother, standing alone in the rubble of Camelot. While The Last Brother is both shocking and newsworthy, Teddy Kennedy emerges as a curiously tragic figure, the victim of his own family, forever "the fat, awkward little boy" who was ignored by his siblings, his father and his mother, then propelled, unwilling and unprepared, into the public limelight. Searing, yet strangely moving and even sympathetic, The Last Brother presents a detailed, tragic portrait of a man at war with himself, doomed to live in the giant shadow of his brothers, trapped in the glorious but hollow Kennedy myth, longing - but unable - to escape.
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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
McGinniss's biography of Edward M. Kennedy is a salacious read containing the things that make a bestseller: sex, incest, money, politics, power, compelling personalities. The problem, though, is, can you believe McGinniss? Although the bibliography lists 73 titles, there is not one footnote. There are juicy tidbits about members of the family. Joseph Kennedy progresses from a WW I draft dodger to U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James. He beds innumerable women, manipulates the stock market, becomes a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite. Rose is portrayed as the ultimate holder of Irish grudges: when her husband had his stroke she delayed calling a doctor while she played golf. A devout Catholic, she was actually happy about Joe's affairs because then she didn't have to sleep with him. Retarded Rosemary was lobotomized because she was considered a less-than-perfect Kennedy. There are dark hints that Joseph may have had an incestuous relationship with her. Sexual innuendo is rampant throughout the book. When McGinniss finally gets around to concentrating on Ted, we are given a picture of a lonely boy raised by servants. The first crisis of his life comes when he is expelled from Harvard for cheating. His father was furious, but only because Ted got caught. We see Ted as an ineffective campaign manager for JFK in 1960 and we see him being forced by his father to run for JFK's former Senate seat in 1962. In 1968 after RFK's assassination, Ted turned ``reflexively, to women, alcohol and other drugs.'' The book ends with the Chappaquiddick tragedy in 1969 and the questions raised by Ted's alibi. Thus the biography misses Ted's presidential campaign in 1980 and the events surrounding the rape charges against his nephew William Smith in 1991. Employing journalistic histrionics and amateur psychology in his attempts to find what makes this family and this one man obsessed with winning at all costs, McGinniss concludes that the Kennedys are all-American frauds. The reader will wonder if McGinniss isn't one also. First serial to Vanity Fair; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club Super Releases; Reader's Digest Condensed Book selection; NBC miniseries; author tour. (Aug.)
Ilene Cooper
With all the books, television shows, and movies about the most famous of all American families, you might think there would be nothing left to say about the Kennedys. You would be right, though best-selling snooper McGinniss would argue the opposite. McGinniss' notion seems to be that since we've read all there is to read about what Ted Kennedy actually did and said in his life, it's time to "investigate" what he might have been thinking while he was doing and saying all those now-familiar things. This tack--portraying Kennedy's thoughts from an inside-the-head view without ever interviewing the man--is already the subject of controversy in the prepublication press, and rightly so. McGinniss' musings are a distraction at best and a dangerous mixing of fact and fiction at worst. Take this downright bizarre observation: "Suppose--not that there is any evidence he [Kennedy] considered this--he suddenly just veered away from his sister, and plunged, fully clothed, into the roiling frigid waters of Nantucket Bay? Just swam out into the mist until exhausted? Wild speculation aside, this supposedly revelatory account is merely a cut-and-paste job that sheds no new light on the dynamics of the Kennedys. One of McGinniss' primary theses, that old Joe Kennedy boosted his sons up the political ladder through public relations rather than performance, is hardly a scoop. Nor can anyone who saw Ted Kennedy during his 1980 presidential campaign have been unaware that this was a man going through the motions. And by ending the book with Chappaquiddick, McGinniss leaves no room for redemption. There is hardly a word about Kennedy's successful Senate career, and none about his remarriage to a woman who, by all other accounts, seems to have calmed him down. McGinniss' recounting of all the stupid, callous, dangerous, and even deadly things Edward Kennedy did in his life may make unenlightening reading, but it's definitely the stuff miniseries are made of. This one is already scheduled on NBC for February 1994.
Kirkus Reviews
Can one sympathize with a rich, powerful, boozing, aging rou‚ of a US senator? Maybe—if the senator is the Ted Kennedy presented in McGinniss's harsh but oddly compassionate biography. It's a lot more difficult, actually, to sympathize with the rich, powerful, aging bestseller of a writer—who, if even half the accusations are true, not only created scenes for this book out of whole cloth but plagiarized William Manchester's The Death of a President (1967). Save for a coda that summarizes Kennedy's slide toward irrelevance in recent presidential elections, McGinniss takes the senator only up to Chappaquiddick, which he considers not only the mangling of one man's political aspirations but also the final price paid for Joe Kennedy's dynastic hopes: "The nation...demanded that Teddy live not only his own life but, also, simultaneously, the unlived portion of the lives of his three older brothers." Except for one typically unsourced assertion that Ted phoned a onetime girlfriend in the hours after the accident, McGinniss hasn't uncovered much about Chappaquiddick not revealed in Leo Damore's Senatorial Privilege (1988)—but that's hardly surprising given the recent revelations about the author's apparent penchant for creative research. In any case, the thrust of McGinniss's narrative, whatever its provenance, is that, from the start, Ted was too emotionally maimed for the burden laid upon him: His parents shuttled him to ten schools by age 13 but visited him in none; Joe saw Ted's expulsion from Harvard as a threat to Jack's political hopes; Jack and Bobby were aghast that Joe had pushed Ted into his first Senate race so early in his career; the two assassinationslaunched Ted toward the boozy self-destruction that led to Chappaquiddick. It's all told with verve: but veracity? Caveat emptor. (First serial rights to Vanity Fair; film rights to NBC)
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780671679453
  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster
  • Publication date: 9/8/1993
  • Pages: 624

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4.5
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Sort by: Showing all of 3 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 22, 2011

    Old News

    Interesting book, but almost 20 years old

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 2, 2009

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  • Anonymous

    Posted March 9, 2009

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