The First Kennedys

September 1, 2021

In Lincoln and the Fight for Peace, CNN anchor Avlon addresses President Abraham Lincoln's conciliatory vision regarding the post-Civil War era, aiming to show how it influenced activists from Nelson Mandela to Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. (75,000-copy first printing). The New York Times best-selling Baime's White Lies profiles Black civil rights activist Walter F. White, who figured largely in the Harlem Renaissance and the NAACP while leading a dual life as a reporter investigating racial violence in the South because he could pass for white (40,000-copy first printing). Chapin, The President's Man, here recalls his years as personal aide, special assistant, and finally deputy assistant to President Richard Nixon as the 50th anniversary of Watergate looms. In African Founders, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Fischer shows that enslaved Africans brought with them skills ranging from animal husbandry to ethics that profoundly shaped colonial and early U.S. society (100,000-copy first printing). A conservative gay reporter who has received awards from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, Kirchick dug through multitudinous declassified documents and interviewed over 100 people to write Secret City, which profiles the impact of the LGBTQ+ community on Washington, DC, politics since Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. A multi-award-winning journalist and professor emeritus at Champlain College, Randall intends to show that not only were The Founders' Fortunes pledged in support of the Revolutionary War but that concerns about their fortunes helped prompt it. A professor of art crime at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Thompson is an acknowledged expert in the national debate surrounding Smashing Statues--should controversial public monuments be pulled down or allowed to stand? Journalist/author Thompson ( Kickflip Boys) uses newly released records to tell the story of Patrick and Bridget Kennedy, who fled Ireland's Great Famine for Boston, MA, and became The First Kennedys, founders of a political dynasty.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 8, 2021
Journalist Thompson (Hurricane Season) delivers an illuminating look at the earliest years of the Kennedy family in America. Thompson traces the family’s U.S. roots back to Bridget Murphy (c. 1825–1888), who left Ireland for Boston in the late 1840s and found work as a servant before marrying fellow countryman Patrick Kennedy. They had five children before Patrick died of consumption in 1858. Instead of returning to domestic service, Murphy became “a proper wage earner, an entrepreneur, and even a landlord, at a time when most women needed a husband’s permission and a special license to open a business.” The skills she acquired—and the money she lent him—benefited her only surviving son, P.J., whose career as a saloon owner, liquor importer, and Democratic party boss made him “one of the wealthiest and most influential men on the island of East Boston.” P.J.’s successes paved the way, in turn, for his son, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., to make his fortune as an investor and film producer and help establish the political careers of his sons John, Robert, and Ted. Thompson is especially good at evoking the hardships Murphy endured and placing them in the context of the 19th-century Irish experience. The result is an engrossing, real-life rags-to-riches tale.

December 15, 2021
The Kennedys before Joseph and Rose. Journalist Thompson, grandson of Irish immigrants, digs into the history of the family, beginning with the two who left Ireland to seek a new life in America: Bridget Murphy and Patrick Kennedy. In the 1840s, adventurous Bridget was driven by "a craving to leave the safety of habit and family and fling herself among strangers toward a strange new land." Undaunted by a tough job market and the hostility of native Bostonians, Bridget found work as a domestic, to which she returned between pregnancies after she married the handsome Patrick. The couple managed on Patrick's earnings as a barrel maker, but when he died of consumption in 1858, Bridget, in her mid-20s, struggled to support her four young children. A maid's earnings would hardly suffice, so she became a hairdresser at an upscale department store, saved enough to become a grocer, and, by 1865, was a landlady for her own property. Patrick J. (1858-1929), her youngest child and only son, inherited her drive and resourcefulness. Restless as a laborer, he saw the business potential of liquor. By the time he was 23, he had a liquor license with a saloon that attracted local pols. Soon, he was tapped to run for election to Boston's Democratic Ward and City Committee and, at 27, won election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where he served five terms before moving to the state Senate. Among his business ventures was the establishment of the Columbia Trust Company, a bank that later launched the career of his son Joseph Patrick Kennedy. Thompson offers a cursory overview of Joe, Rose, and their children, devoting his attention to their forebears. Drawing on archival material, contemporary publications, and family papers where sources about the Kennedys' early years are scant, Thompson provides solid historical context about the plight of Irish immigrants, roiling national politics, and changing demographics. A lively biography of an iconic family before it became famous.

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February 1, 2022
Much has been written about the Kennedy dynasty of the twentieth century, but Thompson (Kickflip Boys, 2018) takes us back to where it all began. When Bridget Murphy and Patrick Kennedy embarked on their long exodus from Ireland to the United States, they had no idea that they would be the genesis of American royalty. Fleeing a country ravaged by famine, they faced immeasurable hardship in a new land unwelcoming to the Irish. The couple persevered in the face of discrimination, diligently striving to provide for their burgeoning family. Illness left Bridget a widowed, single mother--a difficult situation by today's standards, nearly impossible in the 1800s. The fiercely independent woman hustled her way from maid to small-business owner. Bridget's tenacious drive paved the way for her son P.J., the first Kennedy elected to office, to thrive entrepreneurially and politically. Thompson's impressive research and engaging exposition create a unique addition to the Kennedy canon. This is not just the story of the Kennedys; Thompson paints a picture of life for many Irish immigrants. History buffs should pick up this book immediately.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from January 1, 2022

Journalist Thompson (Kickflip Boys) may surprise both general readers and historians with a Kennedy book based on newly accessible materials and differently focused on the family's first members in the United States: John F. Kennedy Jr.'s Irish immigrant paternal great grandparents. Benefiting from the papers in the Kennedy Library of P.J. Kennedy (the only surviving son of Bridget Murphy Kennedy and her husband Patrick) as well as digital ancestry databases, this winsomely written book employs cultural context, empathy, multiple viewpoints, and careful evaluation of sources. Central are the entrepreneurial, too-soon widowed, resilient matriarch Bridget and her equally risk-taking youngest child P.J. With more street than book smarts, he went from working in shops and saloons to holding local elected office, navigating fluctuating Prohibition laws, and overcoming antipathy to his ethnicity and religion. Thompson notes that Catholics protested hegemonic American Protestant-dominated schools, often countering with their own. As for the Fitzgerald family, the author concentrates on "Honey Fitz" (JFK Jr.'s maternal grandfather, the mayor of Boston) and culminates with the marriage of JFK Jr.'s parents, Joseph Patrick Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald. VERDICT This is both an absorbing family story and a saga of the Irish diaspora in Boston, a city that eventually accepted the Kennedys and allowed the ambitious family to achieve versions of the American dream before fate intervened.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.