Product Description

In GRACE & POWER: THE PRIVATE WORLD OF THE KENNEDY WHITE HOUSE, New York Times bestselling author Sally Bedell Smith takes us inside the Kennedy White House with unparalleled access and insight. Having interviewed scores of Kennedy intimates, including many who have never spoken before, and drawing on letters and personal papers made available for the first time, Smith paints a richly detailed picture of the personal relationships behind the high purpose and poiltical drama of the twentieth century's most storied presidency.
At the dawn of the 1960s, a forty-three-year-old president and his thirty-one-year-old first lady – the youngest couple ever to occupy the White House – captivated the world with their easy elegance and their cool conviction that anything was possible. Jack and Jackie Kennedy gathered around them an intensely loyal and brillant coterie of intellectuals, journalists, diplomats, international jet-setters and artists. Perhaps as never before, Washington was sharply divided between the “ins” and the “outs.”
In his public life, JFK created a New Frontier, stared down the Soviets, and devoted himself to his wife and children. As first lady, Jackie mesmerized foreign leaders and the American people with her style and sophistication, creating a White House renowned for its beauty and culture. Smith brilliantly recreates the glamorous pageant of the Kennedy years, as well as the daily texture of the Kennedys’ marriage, friendships, political associations, and, in Jack’s case, multiple love affairs.
Smith’s striking revelations include new information about what drew Jack to his numerous mistresses – and what effects the relationships ultimately had on the women; about the rivalries and resentments among Kennedy’s advisers; and about the poignant days before and after Kennedy’s assassination.
Smith has fashioned a vivid and nuanced portrait not only of two extraordinary individuals but of a new age that sprang to life around them. Shimmering with intelligence and detail, GRACE AND POWER is history at its finest.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #56151 in eBooks
• Published on: 2004-05-04
• Released on: 2004-05-04
• Format: Kindle Book
• Number of items: 1

From Publishers Weekly
Smith, a Vanity Fair contributing editor (and biographer of Princess Diana and Pamela Harriman, among others), does a workmanlike job of narrating familiar scenes from the Kennedy White House, aka Camelot. Although publicity for this volume is at pains to emphasize that Smith has interviewed "scores of Kennedy intimates, including many who have never spoken before," the few new witnesses unearthed by Smith attended the same parties, concerts and picnics as all the other sources we've heard from in previous years. So once again Smith waltzes through portraits of the Kennedys entertaining, with greatly varying degrees of success, the likes of Gore Vidal, Ben Bradlee, William Walton and JFK's frequent "squeeze" Mary Meyer. Not a few of the people who loom large in Smith's volume (Bradlee, Theodore White, Paul "Red" Fay, Vidal, Lee Radziwill, Walton, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Dave Powers and Ken O'Donnell among them) have previously—as Smith's profuse footnotes attest—written their own accounts of the Camelot scenes in which they play. Endeavoring to interweave her somewhat redundant yet eloquently rendered social history with the political history of the Kennedy administration, Smith tends on occasion to oversimplify and understate major strategic discussions and initiatives, these being sketched much better in such books as Richard Reeves's President Kennedy. For those who seek yet another highly readable account of the White House milieu shaped by John and Jackie Kennedy—the place we've all gotten to know so well through the years—Smith's book does the job. 48 pages of photos not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Vanity Fair contributing editor Smith has written a glossy, gossipy, but serious account of the Kennedys’ White House Years. If you’re looking for analysis of the Bay of Pigs or Cuban missile crisis, turn to one of the other thousand Kennedy books (see below). Grace and Power, a social history of the Camelot couple, contains just enough political asides to interest history buffs. But Smith, a consummate researcher and reporter, focuses mainly on minutiae, from Jackie’s Cassini-designed wardrobe to her discussion with a doctor about foreplay techniques. Nonetheless, she presents a diverse array of characters, particularly Jackie, with flair and sophistication. One caveat: this book, notes the Washington Post, “should carry a warning label: ‘Not for those with a low tolerance for treacle.’”

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Review
“After all the hundreds of books written about JFK and Jackie, this is the one that really tells the truth, that gets behind the layers of gossip and conspiracy and innuendo to tell the reader what life was actually like in the White House of Jack and Jackie Kennedy. Sally Bedell Smith is a phenomenal reporter with a sure command of her subject and a keen eye for telling detail and personal nuance. This is it: the last – and true – word on the Kennedy White House.”
-EVAN THOMAS, author of Robert Kennedy: His Life
“GRACE AND POWER has the readability and texture of an absorbing novel of manners, but it is also a social history of an event-making president and first lady and their entourage at the center of a fateful time. Sally Bedell Smith has done an impressive job of revealing geological layers of the Kennedy world that, despite hundreds of previous books, have remained unseen until now.”
-- MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, author of The Conquerors
“Sally Bedell Smith has produced a mesmerizing account of the Kennedy years that is filled with rich reporting, sophisticated insights, and riveting tales all put into historical perspective. Both Jack and Jackie come into vivid focus. We see the complex relations they had with their court of friends and advisers, and we feel the poignancy of such moments as the death of their son Patrick.
It’s a fascinating book written with grace and intelligence.”
-WALTER ISAACSON, author of Benjamin Franklin: an American Life
“The Kennedys and their crowd always seemed just out of earshot. In GRACE AND POWER,
we at last hear what they were saying.”
-JOSEPH J. ELLIS, author of Founding Brothers
“Sally Bedell Smith has not just come up with new information and fresh insights – she has made the story itself seem new and fresh and more compelling than ever. For those of ...

Customer Reviews

"Camelot" re-revealed magnificently...
The essence of "Camelot" wasn't necessarily the inspiring leadership of John Kennedy (although this certainly doesn't hurt the Camelot mystique) or the seemingly serene picture of the youngest elected President and his equally youthful wife, rather it was a culture, indeed an attitude or mystique that many historians have tried to capture with heretofore moderate to little success. In this light, Sally Bedell Smith has presented her attempt at synthesizing the mystique with the well documented history of JFK's administration and has succeeded fabulously with "Grace and Power".

The perspective that Smith presents is one that many historians have missed...in a day when JFK administration books abound, Smith gives us a whole new view into the Kennedy family. Right from the beginning of this work, we delve into the personal and behavorial side of both the new President and his First Lady and see how they are in turn affected by the avalanche of the media and policy machine. JFK's full medical history (recently made public in Robert Dallek's magnificent work "An Unfinished Life") is further explained by Smith with many new nuances and she describes how these many maladies not only affected his work as President, but his family life as well. Indeed, we see JFK's covert doctor (Max Jacobson..."Dr. Feelgod") administering to Jackie as well (during periods of stress or depression) and it's this level of new information, presented not in a tawdry gossipy style, but in fair and elegant prose, that really made this work hard for me to put down. JFK's dalliances with many other women comes to be a main theme at the beginning of the story and we see how Jackie's attitude of benign acceptance at this behavior is formed over time in the White House. At the same time, Smith suceeds in presenting JFK as a loving Father and husband...further enhancing this mysterious component of JFK's behavior.

The social scene at the JFK White House is comprehensively descibed...at times offering a counter-balance with what is happening in the world and I thought this added a fullness to the Kennedy story that is usually missing from many otherwise excellent JFK works. For example we see the dinners and the guests who attended them given equal importance in the book while the emotion and stress of the Cuban Missile Crisis is distracting the President. How JFK reacts at these events (i.e. away from "work") is a fascinating new look at the Crisis and Administration as a whole and is this new information that I mentioned that should be the selling point for this work. Closing out the book, Smith eloquently descibes the before and after affects of the assasination on all the participants (old girlfriends as well as close family friends) and tries to philosophize on what the tragedy meant to each.

Historians may argue that the level of scholarship pertaining to Presidential history is lacking (although, I thought Smith did an admirable job describing the events that she did cover), but clearly the focus of this work was not a historical narrative but a genuine social/historical synthesis.

Supported by many new interviews and research, Sally Bedell Smith has added immensly to the monumental amount of literature surrounding the JFK administration and given us a unique perspective that should be used by all as an emotional target for that magnificent and tragic time. A fairly quick read (about 470 pages of readable text) and lively written, I would recommend this book very highly.

Charmed Circle
I thought it was utterly impossible to say anything new about the Kennedys. But 10 minutes into this book, I was completely hooked. It takes the reader back to a different and more civilized time, when politics was last rancorous, when glamor was not politically incorrect, when government really was made up of the best and brightest.

Grace and Power delves deeply into Jack and Jackie Kennedy's public, private, and psychological lives. It shows their complex interactions with each other and the people around them, and in the process demonstrates that all politics is intensely personal.

JFK's promiscuity is explored not for the sake of titillation, but rather to explain the man and to explore the complicity of the press. The portrait of Jackie is the best that's ever been written. Her love for Jack is heartbreakingly constant. Ms. Smith shows her to be highly intelligent, emotionally uncertain, and occasionally manipulative.

The research in Grace and Power is prodigious, and the author makes every sentence carry its weight in facts. The result is a narrative that barrels along and maintains a degree of suspense, and a looming sadness, despite the fact that the ending has been known for 40 years.

One of the authors who blurbed the book called it "the last--and true--word on the Kennedy White House." He had it right. What a splendid piece of work.

Read it more for the humanity than the history
All the well-known incidents of Kennedy's 1000 Days are here, but I don't think you'll find anything substantial you didn't know about The Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missle Crisis, Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, etc. What makes this book special are the highly credible anecdotes about the President and First Lady, the little things that make them come to life. I enjoyed reading about President Kennedy's complicated relationship with Adlai Stevenson and his fascination with the men women found attractive, and why. I also was intrigued by Jackie's ambivalence about her role as First Lady and her role in history, which seemed to be a reflection of her ambivalence about her marriage to the fascinating, trying man she loved. The tales in this book lend texture and depth to our understanding of the Presidency that helped shaped the turbulent 1960s.