Just before we moved we received a donation of paperbacks on the Kennedys, and here they finally are! Most books are on JFK and RFK, but there are also some on Jacky. All priced around $.50 because of brown pages, but otherwise they are in good shape. (There are no split bindings! Isn't that just amazing!) All are from the 1960's.
"I don't like to lose," JFK said once. His biographer Gene Schoor (see below) writes,"All his life John F. Kennedy looked for challenges. And never more so than in his early years and young manhood. First it was the fierce and friendly rivalry with his older brother, Joe, Jr, Then it was trying to make the football teams he wasn't big enough for... overcoming poor grades... fighting constant injuries to win a swimming meet or to get into a Navy that had turned him down..."
The more special of the collection:
The Kennedy Courage: Profiles in Courage of a great American Family, edited by Edward Hymoff
A Nation of Immigrants, by John F. Kennedy
Published posthumously, this is his call for a complete revision of the immigration law.
Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, by Harry Golden
"We face... a moral crisis as a country and as a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves... It is a time to act in the Congress, in your state and local legislative body, and above all, in all of our daily lives"- JFK
Young John Kennedy, by Gene Schoor (see above)
White House Nanny, by Maud Shaw
The Accidental President: The Election Year Blockbuster on LBJ, by Robert Sherrill
The back of this book reads "a needed expose or a brutal hatchet job, it is a MUST reading." For me the most amazing thing is the cover, with LBJ drawn to look like hawk!
A New Day, by Robert F. Kennedy
What makes this so poignant is it's inscription on the back of the cover. "Assassinated 6/5/68- 12:15 AM. Died 6/6/68- 1:15 AM. Funeral 6/8/68- Arlington, Washington, D.C." You can just feel the writer's grief and pain.
Portrait of a President, by William Manchester (see below)
The Untold Story- Why the Kennedys Lost the Book Battle, by Lawrence Van Gelder
"The real reasons they tried to suppress "The Death of a President". How Manchester's book fired the LBJ-RFK feud..."
The STRANGEST story here is about the book not in this collection. William Manchester had become friends with JFK when they were both healing from war wounds in a Boston hospital. After her husband died, Jackie asked Manchester to write a book about the days before and just after her husband's assassination. Manchester supposedly worked 100 hour weeks for more than a year in order to meet a 1967 deadline. He finished in time, 1200 pages later, but only after a two month hospitalization for exhaustion. Then the trouble started. The family was furious about some of the manuscript's revelations. They tried to block the book. Eventually a compromise was reached and 7 pages were deleted before publishing. Those 7 pages are still sealed. One wonders when the public will get to know what was in them.
Look for all these books (except for Death of a President)in a box on the floor of the bio. section.
