The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys

Two Families, One American Story

The story of the Kennedys is one of the defining American stories of the twentieth century, but Doris Kearns Goodwin understood that to tell it properly you had to go back further — to the immigrant boats from Ireland, to the wards of Boston, to the ambitions and resentments of men and women who knew they were kept out of the drawing rooms of Yankee Boston and made the determination that their children and their children’s children would not be.

The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys begins with the Irish Famine generation and traces both families through more than a century — John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, Rose’s father, charming his way up through Boston’s Democratic machine to become Mayor; Joseph P. Kennedy accumulating the wealth and connections that would fund his sons’ careers while never quite escaping the social exclusion that had defined his own ambitions; and then the sons themselves: Joe Jr., Jack, Bobby, Ted.

The Weight of the Patriarch

Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. is the book’s most complex figure. Goodwin does not spare him: his anti-Semitism, his dealings with bootleggers during Prohibition, his appeasement sympathies as Ambassador to Britain, his driving of his sons toward the political achievement he could not himself attain. But she also renders him as a product of his history — a man whose early experiences of exclusion created a hunger for respect that wealth alone could not satisfy.

The relationship between Joseph Kennedy and his sons, and particularly his response to Joe Jr.’s death in the war, is rendered with full psychological complexity. The weight of the patriarch’s ambition on the sons who survived — and the ways in which Jack Kennedy had to escape that weight to become his own man — is one of the book’s central dramas.

A Foundation for Understanding

The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys was Goodwin’s first major work, and it shows both the ambition and the occasional unevenness of an early book. But its research is genuinely exceptional — Goodwin had extensive access to family papers and intimate sources — and as a foundation for understanding why the Kennedys were the way they were, it remains indispensable.

Rose Kennedy and the Women of the Story

If Joseph P. Kennedy is the book’s most complex male figure, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy is its quiet center of gravity, and one of Goodwin’s most significant interpretive achievements is to take her seriously as a shaping force rather than a passive matriarch. The daughter of a Boston mayor and the wife of a man whose infidelities were an open secret, Rose channeled her formidable intelligence and discipline into the raising of nine children, organizing the household with an almost institutional rigor — index cards tracking each child’s health, dinner-table quizzes on current events, a relentless emphasis on competition and Catholic faith. Goodwin draws on Rose’s own diaries and recollections, granting her an interior life that earlier Kennedy chronicles had largely denied her, and the result is a portrait of a marriage and a family system in which the public triumphs of the sons are inseparable from the private discipline of the mother. The tragedies that shadow the women of the family — the lobotomy inflicted on Rosemary, the early deaths of Kathleen and others — are handled with a restraint that makes them more affecting rather than less.

Goodwin’s Method and Her Later Career

The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys belongs to a particular kind of American historical writing that Doris Kearns Goodwin would go on to define: the intimate, character-driven group biography that treats political history as the sum of human relationships. The methods on display here — exhaustive archival work married to a novelist’s instinct for scene and motive — would later produce No Ordinary Time, her Pulitzer Prize–winning study of the Roosevelts during the Second World War, and Team of Rivals, the account of Lincoln’s cabinet that influenced a generation’s understanding of political leadership. Reading this early book alongside those later masterworks reveals a writer already in full possession of her central conviction: that the largest forces in history are best understood through the smallest details of how particular families and individuals lived, quarreled, ambitioned, and grieved.

Who Should Read It

This is a book for readers willing to invest in scope — nearly a thousand pages spanning more than a century — in exchange for genuine depth. It will most reward those interested in the immigrant roots of American power, in the Irish-Catholic experience of exclusion and arrival, and in the psychological machinery that produced a political dynasty. Readers seeking a tight account of John F. Kennedy’s presidency should look elsewhere, since Goodwin’s focus is on the generations that made him possible rather than on the thousand days in office. Approached as the origin story of the Kennedys rather than a chronicle of their best-known chapter, it is one of the indispensable works of American family biography.

It is worth pairing with Goodwin’s later books for the full effect. Read after No Ordinary Time and Team of Rivals, this first volume reveals the seeds of everything that would make her one of America’s most beloved historians: the patience with archives, the refusal to reduce historical figures to villains or saints, and the conviction that the deepest currents of public life run through private rooms. Newcomers to her work could begin here and watch a great historian discovering her method in real time.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — An ambitious multigenerational biography that illuminates the Irish-American foundations of one of America’s most consequential political families.