88 books like The Kennedy Men

A few months after President Kennedy’s assassination, Mrs. Kennedy sat down for a series of interviews with the historian and family friend Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Her eight hours of tapes, which remained sealed until a few years ago, are riveting and full of intimate, powerful details.

It is most rewarding to hear her whispery voice as she offers often pointed observations about the people and events that shaped her husband’s presidency.   

I love how Smith tells the intimate story of Jack and Jackie’s relationship in the White House. Plenty of accounts describe how JFK exercised power during his brief tenure as president. That is not what interests Smith. She highlights how the pressure of the office impacted the relationship between the First Lady and the President.

There are plenty of juicy tales about JFK’s womanizing and his abuse of prescription medication. What I found most fascinating was how Jackie coped with it all. The Kennedys in Smith’s account are complicated and complex, talented and flawed, but above all else, very human. 

I love this book because of the unique perspective of the writer. Clint Hill was the secret service agent who jumped on the back of the presidential limousine in Dallas to protect Mrs. Kennedy in the seconds after the fatal bullets had struck the President.

His description of that moment and the following hours is as riveting as it is disturbing. Hill, assigned to protect the First Lady, spent more time with her than anyone else, and their relationship continued after she left the White House.  

I love this book because it offers an intimate glimpse into the place that the Kennedys called home, where they felt most comfortable, and where they went to celebrate their triumphs and mourn their tragedies.

Storey is a terrific writer who makes the reader feel as if they are on the Cape with the family as they engage in various (and often strenuous) activities. She manages to capture the family's life away from cameras and reporters.  

Lee was the popular, well-connected military attaché in the U.S. Embassy in London. A staunch supporter of U.S. aid for Britain, he played an important role in preparing for America’s entry into the war. During the Blitz, he castigated American correspondents who described London as “devastated” by the German bombing campaign. “London is not devastated, and if you want one soldier’s opinion, it will not be devastated,” he told them. His diary reflects his determination to counter the defeatist predictions of Joseph Kennedy, who had served as U.S. ambassador in London until 1940.

The Dark Side of Camelot is Sy Hersh's controversial takedown of the Kennedy dynasty.

Sidestepping the conspiracy theories surrounding the president's murder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter hones his spotlight on the man's life instead; a glamorous one riddled nonetheless with self-imposed scandals on a dizzying array of levels.

The book is loaded with volumes of interviews with retired Secret Service, CIA agents, and other insiders who knew a different John F. Kennedy than most of the public. Their revelations depict a man obsessed with revenge and sex in ways that nearly turned our Cold War hot.

An adage is that history books are written by the victors. The Dark Side of Camelot is proof that the truth-tellers have a say sometimes as well.

This e-book by The Washington Post’s book editor is the moving account of Jackie’s heartbreaking loss of her and the president’s baby, Patrick, in August 1963. Always plagued by problematic pregnancies, resulting in a miscarriage and stillborn daughter in the 1950s, as First Lady Mrs. Kennedy hoped to give birth to her and the president’s third child (to join five-year-old Caroline and two-year-old John Jr.) in September 1963. But the baby arrived more than a month early, suffering from undeveloped lungs, and died within two days. Jackie and Jack were devastated. As they clung to each other in grief, the First Lady told her husband that she couldn’t bear to lose him. She would just three months later.

This book is too ambitious to be perfect, but it is the perfect example of an author doing whatever he likes, able to rely on a massive talent to bail him out of trouble every time he disappears into another labyrinthine digression. Mailer’s audacious use of the first person to tell the story of espionage in the twentieth century, becoming a conduit for his vast range of characters, real and imagined, showed me that writing a novel where you are a leading character could take you to places that writing in the third person could not. In my seventh novel, I knew it was the right story for me to finally unleash a first-person narrative on.   

The founder of pioneering web magazine Salon, Talbot covers fresh ground in this book, documenting how Robert Kennedy secretly searched for the truth behind his brother’s murder before he was assassinated himself in 1968. Based on some 150 interviews with Kennedy relatives and administration insiders, the book strikes a good balance between presenting facts and writing in an interesting style that brings to life the political struggles of that turbulent period. Robert Kennedy suspected not only the CIA, but organized crime and anti-Castro Cuban exiles who supposedly worked together. Talbot’s work does an excellent job of showing the links and explaining why some of the same sources might have conspired against RFK.

Whenever anyone writes about Dallas, Texas, odds are it’s going to include the rich, the seedy, and a murder.

In this case it’s the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But this book is so much more.

It’s a history of the moneyed-powerful and the stepped on in early 1960s Dallas, setting up an understanding of how this murder that shook the world was destined to happen in the Lone Star State.

And it’s a book I have been recommending for 10 years, not simply because it’s a riveting read, which it most definitely is, but because—despite the passage of 60 years—it’s a reflection of the U.S. today.