Category: Books

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Twilight of Camelot: The Short Life and Long Legacy of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy

From the author of the “insightful and well-crafted” (The Wall Street Journal) Kennedy and King comes a heart-wrenching and sensitive examination of the tragic loss of President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s premature son, Patrick, and how their shared grief brought them closer together in the months leading up to his assassination.

In April 1963, President Kennedy and the First Lady announced that she was pregnant with their third child—joyful news after years of miscarriages and the stillborn birth of a daughter in 1956. But on August 7th, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was born six weeks premature and died less than two days later.

In this probing, soulful account of the struggle to save Patrick, Steven Levingston takes us inside the long-troubled relationship of Jack and Jackie as they faced one of the most difficult experiences of their marriage. With a “perceptive and eloquent” (The Christian Science Monitor) voice, Levingston reveals how Patrick’s death, tragic as it was, ultimately brought the couple closer together and set the President on a trajectory to be a better husband and father in the months leading up to their fateful campaign trip to Dallas.

In a parallel storyline, Levingston reveals the largely unknown role President Kennedy played in modernizing an important corner of American health care. After Patrick’s death, he ordered studies into the primitive state of premature care and drummed up millions of dollars in government funding, igniting a revolution in treatments that over the decades have saved millions of infants thanks to the invention of baby ventilators, new drugs, and modern neonatal intensive care units.

For his definitive account of Patrick’s brief but influential life, Levingston draws on first-ever interviews with doctors who treated Jackie and Patrick, in-depth revelations of the Secret Service agent in whose speeding car Jackie nearly gave birth prematurely, and on new archival documents. Twilight of Camelot is a fresh and humanizing portrait of one of the most famous and complicated couples of the 20th century, and a pulsating drama that illuminates one of the least-known periods in Kennedy family history.

“Historian, biographer, and journalist Levingston (Kennedy and King, 2017) casts welcome light onto an often-eclipsed chapter in the Kennedy saga. . . . A fresh and empathic perspective to a tragic loss.” —Booklist, starred review

“The book offers a bird’s-eye view that affords sympathy for the family and presents JFK as a changed man, both personally and professionally. It showcases Levingston’s knack for narrative history, reinforcing the strength of his previous presidential studies of Kennedy and Obama.” —Library Journal, starred review

“A poignant contribution to Kennedy lore.” —Kirkus

“Twilight of Camelot tells, with nuance and immediacy, the story of the short life of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy—and its lasting aftereffects, including in the field of neonatal medicine. Steven Levingston has long been a first-class chronicler of the Kennedy years, and he shows it once again in this sterling book.” —Fredrik Logevall, author of JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956

“Steven Levingston’s Twilight of Camelot movingly illuminates the heart rendering saga of the death of President John F. and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s infant son in 1963. This narrative stands as a testimonial to the Kennedys’ stoic courage, Catholic faith and iron-willed endurance. Elegantly written and brilliantly researched, this history-driven lament of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy is an essential addition in the U.S. presidential history field writ large. Highly recommended!” —Douglas Brinkley, New York Times bestselling author of American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race

“With a keen reporter’s eye and masterful narrative skill, Steven Levingston gives us an intimate account of the twilight of Jack and Jackie Kennedy’s marriage and how they lost a baby son. It is a heart-rending story, but also surprisingly hopeful about what can come from tragedy.” —Evan Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of Robert Kennedy: His Life

“This is a tender, deeply reported story of love reborn after a grief that spares no one. Steven Levingston combines the full force of his talents as a veteran journalist with the grace and wonder of a writer at his peak. Finally, we know how Patrick Bouvier Kennedy’s tragically short life launched a medical movement that saves the lives of millions of premature babies every year. This is the hope we crave.” —Connie Schultz, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author of The Daughters of Erietown

“A moving account of the long medical shadow cast by the very short life of the Kennedy White House baby, tracing the story through personal and political history and reminding us how recent and remarkable is the ability to care for premature and critically ill newborns.” —Perri Klass, MD, professor of journalism and pediatrics at New York University and author of The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future

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Barack and Joe: The Making of an Extraordinary Partnership

A Washington Post 2019 Notable Selection

A vivid and inspiring account of the “bromance” between Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

The extraordinary partnership of Barack Obama and Joe Biden is unique in American history. The two men, their characters and styles sharply contrasting, formed a dynamic working relationship that evolved into a profound friendship. Their affinity was not predestined. Obama and Biden began wary of each other: Obama an impatient freshman disdainful of the Senate’s plodding ways; Biden a veteran of the chamber and proud of its traditions.

Gradually they came to respect each other’s values and strengths and rode into the White House together in 2008. Side-by-side through two tension-filled terms, they shared the day-to-day joys and struggles of leading the most powerful nation on earth. They accommodated each other’s quirks: Biden’s famous miscues kept coming, and Obama overlooked them knowing they were insignificant except as media fodder. With his expertise in foreign affairs and legislative matters, Biden took on an unprecedented role as chief adviser to Obama, reshaping the vice presidency. Together Obama and Biden guided Americans through a range of historic moments: a devastating economic crisis, racial confrontations, war in Afghanistan, and the dawn of same-sex marriage nationwide. They supported each other through highs and lows: Obama provided a welcome shoulder during the illness and death of Biden’s son Beau.

“Levingston, a gifted diviner of our political ethos and an eloquent chronicler of our national tendencies, delves purposefully into the relationship between Obama and Biden, showing how it was the magical melding of two forceful personalities who were quite dissimilar in many ways, but no less capable of turning their differences into national benefit. . . . This buddy film come-to-life is a magnificent story told with poetic verve by a writer who sets his study up like a thriller and crafts it with the pace and surprise of a first-rate novel.”―Michael Eric Dyson, from the Foreword

Levingston “quotes from both men’s Twitter and Instagram accounts; late-night hosts, cable news gasbags and internet meme-makers are all frequently cited. And he attempts to tease out why those who were ‘observing the president and vice president from a distance’ were so invested in Obama and Biden’s relationship. Part of it, Levingston theorizes, was that ‘America had a weakness for buddy teams. Felix and Oscar. Bert and Ernie. Buzz and Woody.’ More interestingly, he argues that Obama and Biden’s partnership, ‘just by its existence and daily workings . . . served as a badge of racial harmony.'” ―New York Times

“Levingston weaves a lively narrative about an unlikely alliance between the taciturn Obama and gregarious, voluble Biden.” ―Kirkus Reviews

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Related work:

Miller Center – University of Virginia

stevenlevingston

Kennedy and King: The President, the Pastor and the Battle Over Civil Rights

A New York Times Editors’ Choice Pick

“Steven Levingston’s Kennedy and King is an unqualified masterpiece of historical narrative. Every page sparkles with literary verve, eloquent storytelling, and keen analytic judgment. It might be the best dual biography I’ve ever read. A landmark achievement which elevates civil rights history into a high art form.”
― Douglas Brinkley, New York Times bestselling author of Rosa Parks and The Reagan Diaries

Kennedy and King traces the emergence of two of the twentieth century’s greatest leaders, their powerful impact on each other and on the shape of the civil rights battle between 1960 and 1963. These two men from starkly different worlds profoundly influenced each other’s personal development. Kennedy’s hesitation on civil rights spurred King to greater acts of courage, and King inspired Kennedy to finally make a moral commitment to equality. As America still grapples with the legacy of slavery and the persistence of discrimination, Kennedy and King is a vital, vivid contribution to the literature of the Civil Rights Movement.

“Levingston . . . contrasts the unstoppable forces of King’s soaring oratory, Christian principles, and moral authority with the immovable objects of Kennedy’s privilege, political calculation, and presidential power. Their push and pull unfolded in a cultural cauldron that encompassed the Montgomery bus boycott, the freedom rides, King’s stints in jail, the children’s crusade in Birmingham, Gov. George Wallace’s segregationist stand at the University of Alabama, and the march on Washington.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A riveting episode in American history.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Kennedy and King tells the story of two brilliant leaders who injected new meaning into the veins of American society. Together, their influence created a moral imperative that changed the U.S. and the world. Levingston’s book is both historical and visionary. By reminding us of these great leaders and their accomplishments, this book will fuel your passion for the new work we still need to do in our society today.”―Congressman John Lewis (D-GA)

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Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Époque Paris

A delicious account of a murder most gallic—think CSI Paris meets Georges Simenon—whose lurid combination of sex, brutality, forensics, and hypnotism riveted first a nation and then the world.

Little Demon in the City of Light is the thrilling—and so wonderfully French—story of a gruesome 1889 murder of a lascivious court official at the hands of a ruthless con man and his pliant mistress and the international manhunt, sensational trial, and an inquiry into the limits of hypnotic power that ensued.

In France at the end of the nineteenth century a great debate raged over the question of whether someone could be hypnotically compelled to commit a crime in violation of his or her moral convictions. When Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé entered 3, rue Tronson du Coudray, he expected nothing but a delightful assignation with the comely young Gabrielle Bompard. Instead, he was murdered—hanged!—by her and her companion Michel Eyraud. The body was then stuffed in a trunk and dumped on a riverbank near Lyon.

As the inquiry into the guilt or innocence of the woman the French tabloids dubbed the “Little Demon” escalated, the most respected minds in France debated whether Gabrielle Bompard was the pawn of her mesmerizing lover or simply a coldly calculating murderess. And, at the burning center of it all: Could hypnosis force people to commit crimes against their will?

“Levingston has unearthed a whopper of a story, and lovingly crafted a dense, lyrical yarn that hits the true-crime trifecta of setting, story and so-what. Such books remind us that times may change, but the human animal does not.”
—The New York Times

“Levingston, who is nonfiction book editor of the Washington Post and knows a good story when he sees one, has given it a richly enjoyable telling. Its lurid and improbable plot twists are expertly transposed into a breathless true-crime thriller set against a sumptuous evocation of the boulevards, nightclubs and boudoirs of Belle Époque Paris.”
—Wall Street Journal

“International journalist and Washington Post nonfiction book editor Levingston uses the story of a murder by a foolish girl and her lover to illustrate another side of belle epoque Paris. The author foregoes the tabloid excesses and exploitation of lurid details from that time and focuses on the debate as to whether a person is capable of committing a crime under hypnosis or even post-hypnotic suggestion.” ―Kirkus Reviews

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