Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter - Softcover

From the Author:

Why I wrote Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter:

Kick Kennedy is a fascinating, complicated character.  But while her story is a riveting  personal drama, it is an important piece of history as well.  Most unexpectedly, the story of Kick's life between the ages of 18 and 28  affords us a way into a normally closed world, the world of the British aristocracy, which during those years was a world in tumultuous upheaval.
When Kick arrived in England and fell in love with the young man who was heir to one of England's great Protestant families, the aristocracy was in the process of losing the political power and influence it had wielded for centuries.  
To tell Kick's story--a story of love and war, of ambition and terrible loss--was also to have the extraordinary opportunity to tell the story of that moment in history in a very intimate way.
The book I've written, therefore, is not the typical Kennedy story--most decidedly not--though it is most surely also an important part of that family's history too.  It is a story that takes place largely in Great Britain between the years 1938 and 1948 as war approaches and then changes everything forever.
Writing this book was a great adventure.  I love doing archival research, and to write Kick Kennedy I worked in public and private archives on two continents.  I've worked with enormous quantities of recently released materials by and about Kick and her world.  And in addition to the letters, diaries, and scrapbooks held in public archives, I was also generously given access to important materials still held in private hands.  But these papers were only part of what made telling this story possible.  For, particularly with Kick's own letters and diaries, it is crucially important to understand that this is a case where a biographer cannot depend completely on what Kick  writes or the scenes she depicts.  Many of Kick's letters--and even some parts of her diaries--were written as much to conceal as to reveal.  In order to accurately understand Kick's story, to know what was really happening--especially at the most important and dramatic moments in her life--I had to to be able to interview those in whom she confided the things she would not or could not commit to paper.  I had to be able to interview the people who were eyewitnesses to certain events, the people who in some cases understood things Kick did not, could not.
Without those interviews, Kick's story could not be accurately told.  And so this book turned out to be also a matter of luck and timing.  The interviews it required could not have been done if I had started work on the project just a few years ago as the key witnesses are all gone now.  
I began to research Kick's story when the key witnesses, the people who had been closest to her in these years, the people with whom she had shared her most intimate confidences, were still alive and able to be interviewed.  Over the course of years, these people talked to me at length in intense and intimate conversations about a young woman and a time that they had puzzled over and discussed among themselves for 5 decades.  These people entrusted me, as they saw it, not merely with Kick's story, but with important history.  I wrote the book because I was given a great gift by them--the unique opportunity to see a tumultuous time in history from a very intimate angle,to depict a world and characters who have now vanished forever.

Barbara Leaming is a New York Times bestselling author. Three of her biographies have been New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her book Churchill Defiant received the Emery Reves Award from The Churchill Centre. Leaming’s articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, London’s The Times, and other publications. She lives in Connecticut.