The First Kennedys

Neal Thompson

Readers are always eager for a new book on the Kennedys, especially one that chronicles the family’s journey from impoverished immigrants to the pinnacle of power, wealth and achievement, exemplified by the presidency of John F. Kennedy. Neal Thompson’s book The First Kennedys delivers a well-written, lively account of Patrick Kennedy and his wife Bridget Murphy, who arrived in Boston at the height of the Irish Famine in 1847. Throughout the anti-Irish 1850s, they moved from one East Boston tenement to another, trying to pay the rent. Patrick died in 1858, and it was his son P.J. Kennedy who made the leap from common laborer to businessman, buying a saloon in Haymarket Square then moving into banking. When P.J.’s son Joseph P. Kennedy finished Harvard, he married Rose Fitzgerald, a daughter of immigrants who also arrived here in 1847. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was their son, the start of their dynasty.
Harper Collins Publishers 336 page / $28 / 2022