The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy

David Nasaw, the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, tells the full story of Joseph P. Kennedy, the founder of the twentieth century's most famous political dynasty. The only biographer granted unrestricted access to the Joseph P. Kennedy papers in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library tracks Kennedy's astonishing passage from East Boston outsider to supreme Washington insider. The author explores not only of one of the twentieth century's wealthiest and most powerful Americans, but also of the family he raised and the children who completed the journey he had begun.