A review by murph2244
Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975 by Neal Gabler

5.0

This is a really thorough account not just of Ted Kennedy's life but also the liberalism of the 1960s under his brothers and LBJ and the beginnings of the conservative backlash that began with Richard Nixon (this is volume 1 of 2 so it only goes through 1975). It takes us from his childhood as the last and least of the Kennedy family, struggling under the standards set by his older brothers and the weight of his father's expectations that their family be a perfect set of smart, talented, charismatic, and attractive people. This required that he absorb and bottle up all the trauma that came with falling short of those expectations and his feelings of loneliness as he, unwanted by his parents, was shipped around from school to school. Not processing these traumas was compounded as he entered adulthood and saw his brothers violently killed one by one, leaving him thoroughly broken at the time of the accident on Chappaquiddick. This biography takes a more positive view of Ted than many accounts of that accident, suggesting that it was the cumulative weight of that trauma that caused him to act inexplicably when confronted again with death, rather than political considerations as many have guessed. But the book is also a history of the moralism and liberalism in politics of that era, from Jack's young and optimistic aesthetic that, especially after his death, opened many Americans up to making personal sacrifices to advance liberal causes for the greater good. It moves through Bobby taking up that mantle, and then Ted, while Chappaquiddick and Vietnam began to erode the moral authority associated with the Kennedys and, by extension, the liberal movement, helping lead to the conservative swing that would dominate the 1970s and 80s. But, Gabler suggests, they also, in dooming Ted's presidential aspirations, freed him to move further left as the country moved right, as seen in the final chapters detailing his push for Medicare for All in the 70s and the violent backlash he faced in Boston for supporting busing to integrate schools at a time when many politicians, including the one who last year became the first to ever defeat a Kennedy in Massachusetts, opposed it. All in all I really enjoyed reading this and learning about the complex factors that allowed a brief moment of liberalism and social progress to flourish, and I'm excited to read about the continuation of the fight for those ideals in a conservative national environment in volume 2!