Download or read book The Kennedys Amidst the Gathering Storm written by Will Swift and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 783 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An admirably balanced assessment of an enormously complicated man who, wrongly but not ignobly, stood athwart history.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred “Elegantly written, delicately nuanced, this compelling account brings Joe Kennedy and his family to life.” — Bob Self, author of Neville Chamberlain: A Biography “A thoroughly revisionist but remarkably persuasive history of Joseph P. Kennedy’s years in London” — David Nasaw , author of Pulitzer Prize–nominee Andrew Carnegie “By wisely presenting pre-war London as a crucible in the [Kennedy] family history, [Swift] exposes the origin of many of the political, social, personal triumphs and tragedies that have cast the family—the father in particular—as a modern-day Lear.” — Lynne McTaggart , author of Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times, The Field and The Intention Experiment “Swift’s chronicle gives an impressive insight into the mechanics of government on both sides of the Atlantic.” — Anne De Courcy, author of 1939: The Last Season of Peace Anne De Courcy, author of 1939: The Last Season of Peace Anne De Courcy, author of 1939: The Last Season of Peace Anne De Courcy, author of 1939: The Last Season of Peace “Dr. Swift’s psychological insight into the Kennedy family members and their dynamics makes a major contribution to the Kennedy literature.” — Jane Vieth, professor of history, Michigan State University
Download or read book The Kennedys Amidst the Gathering Storm written by Will Swift and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh, empathetic interpretation of the ambassadorship of Joseph Kennedy and explores the intricate, often shifting relationships among Kennedy, Chamberlain, Churchill, and, of course, Roosevelt. Drawing on recently released Kennedy family archives, Joseph P. Kennedy's private papers, and using rare photographs of English society and the photogenic Kennedy clan, Dr. Swift, with penetrating psychological insight, brings to life this fascinating family during a dramatic one thousand day period.
Download or read book An Invitation to the Kennedys written by Emily Hourican and published by Hachette Books Ireland. This book was released on 2023-09-14 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Perfect for fans of The Crown and Downton Abbey ' Hazel Gaynor, bestselling author of The Last Lifeboat 'A breathtaking, glamorous and escapist read' Irish Times London 1938: Daughter of the US ambassador, Kathleen 'Kick' Kennedy is a huge hit in society's most elite circles, though she isn't always sure she fits in. While Kick is falling for duke-in-waiting Billy Cavendish, a man her parents will never let her marry, across the city Lady Brigid Guinness has no interest in love or society connections. But her ambitious brother-in-law has other ideas and seems determined to engineer a match with a German prince. When they are invited to an exclusive gathering at a country estate, the young women soon form an unlikely friendship: the stuck-up aristocrat and the brash American. Then Billy and Prince Fritzi join the party, and tensions rise as Kick and Brigid discover that beneath the group's façade of politeness, nothing is as it seems. As the days at Kelvedon Hall pass in a haze of sunshine, secrecy and surprising revelations, Kick and Brigid begin to rethink their hopes and plans for the future. Do they still want what they once did? And with the world around them constantly shifting, as war in Europe looms, will they ever be able to have it?
Download or read book The Ambassador written by Susan Ronald and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed biographer Susan Ronald reveals the truth about Joseph P. Kennedy's deeply controversial tenure as Ambassador to Great Britain on the eve of World War II. On February 18, 1938, Joseph P. Kennedy was sworn in as US Ambassador to the Court of St. James. To say his appointment to the most prestigious and strategic diplomatic post in the world shocked the Establishment was an understatement: known for his profound Irish roots and staunch Catholicism, not to mention his “plain-spoken” opinions and womanizing, he was a curious choice as Europe hurtled toward war. Initially welcomed by the British, in less than two short years Kennedy was loathed by the White House, the State Department and the British Government. Believing firmly that Fascism was the inevitable wave of the future, he consistently misrepresented official US foreign policy internationally as well as direct instructions from FDR himself. The Americans were the first to disown him and the British and the Nazis used Kennedy to their own ends. Through meticulous research and many newly available sources, Ronald confirms in impressive detail what has long been believed by many: that Kennedy was a Fascist sympathizer and an anti-Semite whose only loyalty was to his family's advancement. She also reveals the ambitions of the Kennedy dynasty during this period abroad, as they sought to enter the world of high society London and establish themselves as America’s first family. Thorough and utterly readable, The Ambassador explores a darker side of the Kennedy patriarch in an account sure to generate attention and controversy.
Download or read book When Lions Roar written by Thomas Maier and published by Crown. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 802 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive history of the deeply entwined personal and public lives of the Churchills and the Kennedys and what their “special relationship” meant for Great Britain and the United States When Lions Roar begins in the mid-1930s at Chartwell, Winston Churchill's country estate, with new revelations surrounding a secret business deal orchestrated by Joseph P. Kennedy, the soon-to-be American ambassador to Great Britain and the father of future American president John F. Kennedy. From London to America, these two powerful families shared an ever-widening circle of friends, lovers, and political associates – soon shattered by World War II, spying, sexual infidelity, and the tragic deaths of JFK's sister Kathleen and his older brother Joe Jr. By the 1960s and JFK's presidency, the Churchills and the Kennedys had overcome their bitter differences and helped to define the “greatness” in each other. Acclaimed biographer Thomas Maier tells this dynastic saga through fathers and their sons – and the remarkable women in their lives – providing keen insight into the Churchill and Kennedy families and the profound forces of duty, loyalty, courage and ambition that shaped them. He explores the seismic impact of Winston Churchill on JFK and American policy, wrestling anew with the legacy of two titans of the twentieth century. Maier also delves deeply into the conflicted bond between Winston and his son, Randolph, and the contrasting example of patriarch Joe Kennedy, a failed politician who successfully channeled his personal ambitions to his children. By approaching these iconic figures from a new perspective, Maier not only illuminates the intricacies of this all-important cross-Atlantic allegiance but also enriches our understanding of the tumultuous time in which they lived and the world events they so greatly influenced. With deeply human portraits of these flawed but larger-than-life figures, When Lions Roar explores the “special relationship” between the Churchills and Kennedys, and between Great Britain and the United States, highlighting all of its emotional complexity and historic significance.
Download or read book Watching Darkness Fall written by David McKean and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping and groundbreaking account of how all but one of FDR's ambassadors in Europe misjudged Hitler and his intentions As German tanks rolled toward Paris in late May 1940, the U.S. Ambassador to France, William Bullitt, was determined to stay put, holed up in the Chateau St. Firmin in Chantilly, his country residence. Bullitt told the president that he would neither evacuate the embassy nor his chateau, an eighteenth Renaissance manse with a wine cellar of over 18,000 bottles, even though “we have only two revolvers in this entire mission with only forty bullets.” As German forces closed in on the French capital, Bullitt wrote the president, “In case I should get blown up before I see you again, I want you to know that it has been marvelous to work for you.” As the fighting raged in France, across the English Channel, Ambassador to Great Britain Joseph P. Kennedy wrote to his wife Rose, “The situation is more than critical. It means a terrible finish for the allies.” David McKean's Watching Darkness Fall will recount the rise of the Third Reich in Germany and the road to war from the perspective of four American diplomats in Europe who witnessed it firsthand: Joseph Kennedy, William Dodd, Breckinridge Long, and William Bullitt, who all served in key Western European capitals—London, Berlin, Rome, Paris, and Moscow—in the years prior to World War II. In many ways they were America’s first line of defense and they often communicated with the president directly, as Roosevelt's eyes and ears on the ground. Unfortunately, most of them underestimated the power and resolve of Adolf Hitler and Germany’s Third Reich. Watching Darkness Fall is a gripping new history of the years leading up to and the beginning of WWII in Europe told through the lives of five well-educated and mostly wealthy men all vying for the attention of the man in the Oval Office.
Download or read book Tempting All the Gods written by Jane Karoline Vieth and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tempting All the Gods is a detailed study of Joseph P. Kennedy’s diplomatic career in London. It examines Kennedy’s role as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s from 1938–1940, a crucial time in world history. It describes his attitudes toward American foreign policy before the outbreak of war and after the war began, explains why he held those views, and assesses their impact on Anglo-American relations. It also looks at the diplomatic background against which he worked, at the political philosophies and personalities of the statesmen with whom he dealt, and at his relations with them, particularly President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Ministers Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. Here the reader will find a meticulously researched account of Kennedy’s career based on the latest evidence available, providing a current and balanced historical reassessment. Scholars will be able to study Kennedy’s diplomatic career within the broader context of international relations and also to gain a fuller understanding of his view of his own motives and policies, including an understanding of why the ambassadorship was the greatest achievement—with the poorest outcome—in the varied life of an intensely ambitious man who was dedicated foremost to family, friends, and fortune. This book will prove significant to students of Anglo-American relations and of World War II, and to the general public, with its enduring fascination with the Kennedy family.
Download or read book John William McCormack written by Garrison Nelson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-03-23 with total page 929 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first biography of U.S. House Speaker John W. McCormack, author Garrison Nelson uncovers previously forgotten FBI files, birth and death records, and correspondence long thought lost or buried. For such an influential figure, McCormack tried to dismiss the past, almost erasing his legacy from the public's mind. John William McCormack: A Political Biography sheds light on the behind-the-curtain machinations of American politics and the origins of the modern-day Democratic party, facilitated through McCormack's triumphs. McCormack overcame desperate poverty and family tragedy in the Irish ghetto of South Boston to hold the second-most powerful position in the nation. By reinventing his family history to elude Irish Boston's powerful political gatekeepers, McCormack embarked on a 1928 - 1971 House career and from 1939-71, the longest house leadership career. Working with every president from Coolidge to Nixon, McCormack's social welfare agenda, which included Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, immigration reform, and civil rights legislation helped commit the nation to the welfare of its most vulnerable citizens. By helping create the Austin-Boston Connection, McCormack reshaped the Democratic Party from a regional southern white Protestant party to one that embraced urban religiously and racially diverse ethnics. A man free of prejudice, John McCormack was the Boston Brahmin's favorite Irishman, the South's favorite northerner, and known in Boston as "Rabbi John," the Jews' favorite Catholic.
Download or read book The Kennedys in the World written by Lawrence J. Haas and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-03 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Kennedys in the World tells a new, rich, fascinating, and consequential story about Jack, Bobby, and Ted Kennedy. From an early age the brothers developed a deep understanding of the different peoples, cultures, and ideologies around the world; a keen appreciation for the challenges that such differences created for the United States; and a strong desire to reshape America’s response to them. From their childhoods in the first half of the twentieth century, the brothers were prodded by their ruthless, demanding, win-at-all-costs father, Joe Kennedy, and their cold and distant mother, Rose, to learn and care about the world—and told they could shape America’s role in it. For more than six decades after World War II, the brothers shaped broad issues of war and peace as well as the U.S. response to almost every major global challenge of their times: the Soviet Union and China, the Cold War and Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Chile, Nicaragua and El Salvador, Korea and Vietnam, South Africa and Northern Ireland, and Iraq (twice). In their time, America was what it remains today—the world’s greatest power, with roles and responsibilities that stretch across the planet. Consequently, as the brothers remade America’s empire, they invariably changed the world.
Download or read book Last Lion written by Bella English and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-02-17 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: POPPO'S Memory Book: A Child's Guide to Remember and S.M.I.L.E. after Loss Written by a school counselor, this memory book helps comfort children who have experienced the loss of a loved one. Through a variety of activities in this special keepsake, children are encouraged to express their feelings, ask questions, share memories, use their imagination, and find happiness beyond the sorrow that comes with loss. For more information and special pricing offers please visit: www.mypoppo.org.
Download or read book Rogue Diplomats written by Seth Jacobs and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of America's most significant political, economic, territorial, and geostrategic accomplishments from 1776 to the present day came about because a U.S. diplomat disobeyed orders. The magnificent terms granted to the infant republic by Britain at the close of the American Revolution, the bloodless acquisition of France's massive Louisiana territory in 1803, the procurement of an even vaster expanse of land from Mexico forty years later, the preservation of the Anglo-American 'special relationship' during World War I—these and other milestones in the history of U.S. geopolitics derived in large part from the refusal of ambassadors, ministers, and envoys to heed the instructions given to them by their superiors back home. Historians have neglected this pattern of insubordination—until now. Rogue Diplomats makes a seminal contribution to scholarship on U.S. geopolitics and provides a provocative response to the question that has vexed so many diplomatic historians: is there a distinctively “American” foreign policy?
Download or read book New Deal Cowboy written by Michael Duchemin and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2016-09-22 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best known to Americans as the “singing cowboy,” beloved entertainer Gene Autry (1907–1998) appeared in countless films, radio broadcasts, television shows, and other venues. While Autry’s name and a few of his hit songs are still widely known today, his commitment to political causes and public diplomacy deserves greater appreciation. In this innovative examination of Autry’s influence on public opinion, Michael Duchemin explores the various platforms this cowboy crooner used to support important causes, notably Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and foreign policy initiatives leading up to World War II. As a prolific performer of western folk songs and country-western music, Autry gained popularity in the 1930s by developing a persona that appealed to rural, small-town, and newly urban fans. It was during this same time, Duchemin explains, that Autry threw his support behind the thirty-second president of the United States. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Duchemin demonstrates how Autry popularized Roosevelt’s New Deal policies and made them more attractive to the American public. In turn, the president used the emerging motion picture industry as an instrument of public diplomacy to enhance his policy agendas, which Autry’s films, backed by Republic Pictures, unabashedly endorsed. As the United States inched toward entry into World War II, the president’s focus shifted toward foreign policy. Autry responded by promoting Americanism, war preparedness, and friendly relations with Latin America. As a result, Duchemin argues, “Sergeant Gene Autry” played a unique role in making FDR’s internationalist policies more palatable for American citizens reluctant to engage in another foreign war. New Deal Cowboy enhances our understanding of Gene Autry as a western folk hero who, during critical times of economic recovery and international crisis, readily assumed the role of public diplomat, skillfully using his talents to persuade a marginalized populace to embrace a nationalist agenda. By drawing connections between western popular culture and American political history, the book also offers valuable insight concerning the development of leisure and western tourism, the information industry, public diplomacy, and foreign policy in twentieth-century America.
Download or read book Rendezvous with Destiny written by Michael Fullilove and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-07-03 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The remarkable untold story of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the five extraordinary men he used to pull America into World War II In the dark days between Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt sent five remarkable men on dramatic and dangerous missions to Europe. The missions were highly unorthodox and they confounded and infuriated diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic. Their importance is little understood to this day. In fact, they were crucial to the course of the Second World War. The envoys were magnificent, unforgettable characters. First off the mark was Sumner Welles, the chilly, patrician under secretary of state, later ruined by his sexual misdemeanors, who was dispatched by FDR on a tour of European capitals in the spring of 1940. In summer of that year, after the fall of France, William “Wild Bill” Donovan—war hero and future spymaster—visited a lonely United Kingdom at the president’s behest to determine whether she could hold out against the Nazis. Donovan’s report helped convince FDR that Britain was worth backing. After he won an unprecedented third term in November 1940, Roosevelt threw a lifeline to the United Kingdom in the form of Lend-Lease and dispatched three men to help secure it. Harry Hopkins, the frail social worker and presidential confidant, was sent to explain Lend-Lease to Winston Churchill. Averell Harriman, a handsome, ambitious railroad heir, served as FDR’s man in London, expediting Lend-Lease aid and romancing Churchill’s daughter-in-law. Roosevelt even put to work his rumpled, charismatic opponent in the 1940 presidential election, Wendell Willkie, whose visit lifted British morale and won wary Americans over to the cause. Finally, in the aftermath of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Hopkins returned to London to confer with Churchill and traveled to Moscow to meet with Joseph Stalin. This final mission gave Roosevelt the confidence to bet on the Soviet Union. The envoys’ missions took them into the middle of the war and exposed them to the leading figures of the age. Taken together, they plot the arc of America’s trans¬formation from a divided and hesitant middle power into the global leader. At the center of everything, of course, was FDR himself, who moved his envoys around the globe with skill and élan. We often think of Harry S. Truman, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and George F. Kennan as the authors of America’s global primacy in the second half of the twentieth century. But all their achievements were enabled by the earlier work of Roosevelt and his representatives, who took the United States into the war and, by defeating domestic isolationists and foreign enemies, into the world. In these two years, America turned. FDR and his envoys were responsible for the turn. Drawing on vast archival research, Rendezvous with Destiny is narrative history at its most delightful, stirring, and important.
Download or read book The Battle of Britain written by James Holland and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 1114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking new account of the Battle of Britain from acclaimed Cambridge historian James Holland The Battle of Britain paints a stirring picture of an extraordinary summer when the fate of the world hung by a thread. Historian James Holland has now written the definitive account of those months based on extensive new research from around the world including thousands of new interviews with people on both sides of the battle. If Britain's defenses collapsed, Hitler would have dominated all of Europe. With France facing defeat and British forces pressed back to the Channel, there were few who believed Britain could survive; but, thanks to a sophisticated defensive system and the combined efforts of the Royal Air Force, the Royal Navy and the defiance of a new Prime Minister, Britain refused to give in. From clashes between coastal convoys and Schnellboote in the Channel to astonishing last stands in Flanders, slaughter by U-boats in an icy Atlantic and dramatic aerial battles over England, The Battle of Britain tells this epic World War II story in a fresh and compelling voice.
Download or read book Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms written by Paul Willetts and published by Constable. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms provides the first comprehensive account of what was once hailed by a leading American newspaper as the greatest spy story of World War II. This dramatic yet little-known saga, replete with telephone taps, kidnappings, and police surveillance, centres on the furtive escapades of Tyler Kent, a handsome, womanising 28-year-old Ivy League graduate, who doubles as a US Embassy code clerk and Soviet agent. Against the backdrop of London high society during the so-called Phoney War, Kent's life intersects with the lives of the book's two other memorably flamboyant protagonists. One of those is Maxwell Knight, an urbane, endearingly eccentric MI5 spyhunter. The other is Anna Wolkoff, a White Russian fashion designer and Nazi spy whose outfits are worn by the Duchess of Windsor and whose parents are friends of the British royal family. Wolkoff belongs to a fascist secret society called the Right Club, which aims to overthrow the British government. Her romantic entanglement with Tyler Kent gives her access to a secret correspondence between President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, a correspondence that has the potential to transform the outcome of the war.
Download or read book FDR s Ambassadors and the Diplomacy of Crisis written by David Mayers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating history of American diplomacy in the Second World War and the ways US ambassadors shaped formal foreign policy.
Download or read book The Missing Kennedy written by Elizabeth Koehler Pentacoff and published by Bancroft Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rosemary (Rosie) Kennedy was born in 1918, the first daughter of a wealthy Bostonian couple who later would become known as the patriarch and matriarch of America’s most famous and celebrated family. Elizabeth (Liz) Koehler was born in 1957, the first and only child of a struggling Wisconsin farm family. What, besides their religion, did these two very different Catholic women have in common? One person really: Stella Koehler, a charismatic woman of the cloth who became Sister Paulus Koehler after taking her vows with the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis of Assisi.Sister Paulus was Liz’s Wisconsin aunt. For thirty-five years―indeed much of her adult life―Sister Paulus was Rosie Kennedy’s caregiver. And a caregiver, tragically, had become necessary after Rosie, a slow learner prone to emotional outbursts, underwent one of America’s first lobotomies―an operation Joseph Kennedy was assured would normalize Rosie’s life. It did not. Rosie’s condition became decidedly worse. After the procedure, Joe and Rose Kennedy sent Rosie to rural Wisconsin and Saint Coletta, a Catholic-run home for the mentally disabled. For the next two decades, she never saw her siblings, her parents, or any other relative, the doctors having issued stern instructions that even the occasional family visit would be emotionally disruptive to Rosie. Following Joseph Kennedy’s stroke in 1961, the Kennedy family, led by mother Rose and sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, resumed face to face contact with Rosie. It was also about then that a young Liz Koehler began paying visits to Rosie. In this insightful, poignant, and important memoir, based in part on Sister Paulus’ private notes and augmented by dozens of never-before-seen photos, Liz Koehler-Pentacoff recalls the many happy and memorable times spent with the “missing Kennedy.” Based on independent research and interviews with the Shriver family, she tries to come to grips with Joseph Kennedy’s well-intended decision to submit her eldest daughter to a still experimental medical procedure, and his later decision to keep Rosie almost entirely out of public view. She looks at the many parallels between Rosie’s post-operative life, her own, and those of the two families. And, most important, she traces how, entirely because of Rosie, the Kennedy and Shriver families embarked on an exceedingly consequential campaign advancing the cause of the developmentally disabled―a campaign that continues to this day. Ten years after Rosie’s death comes the first full-length book about Rosie Kennedy, a fitting testimonial to a sad but truly meaningful and important life.
