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
Steven Levingston 