The Last Brother: The Rise and Fall of Teddy Kennedy

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. First edition. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Good in fair dust jacket. DJ has small piece missing at back, some wear and soiling, and sticker residue over bar code. Some pages have small corner creases.. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 626 p. Coda. Author's Note. Bibliography. Personally acquainted and sympathetic with his subject, the author of The Selling of the President, among other works, brings to startling life the childhood, brief triumph, and long downward slide of Ted Kennedy--a man at war with himself, doomed to live in the giant shadow of his brothers From Wikipedia: "Joseph McGinniss, Sr. (December 9, 1942 March 10, 2014), known as Joe McGinniss, was an American non-fiction writer and novelist. He first came to prominence with the best-selling The Selling of the President 1968 which described the marketing of then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon, and from that time until his death in March 2014 authored eleven works. His last book was The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, an account of Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska who was the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee. McGinniss graduated in 1964 from the Roman Catholic-affiliated College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He became a general assignment reporter at the Worcester Telegram but left within a year to become a sportswriter for The Philadelphia Bulletin. He then moved to The Philadelphia Inquirer as a general interest columnist. In 1979 he became a writer-in-residence at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. McGinniss became an overnight success when his first book, The Selling of the President 1968, landed on The New York Times bestseller list when he was twenty-six years old, making him the youngest living writer with that achievement. The book described the marketing of Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign. McGinniss stumbled across his topic while taking a train to New York. A fellow commuter had just landed the Hubert Humphrey account and was boasting that "in six weeks we ll have him looking better than Abraham Lincoln." McGinniss tried to get access to Humphrey s campaign first, but they turned him down. So he called up Nixon s, and they said yes." The book was well received by both critics and the public and has been recognized as a "classic of campaign reporting that first introduced many readers to the stage-managed world of political theater." It "spent more than six months on best-sellers lists, and McGinniss sold a lot of those books through television, appearing on the titular shows of Merv Griffin, David Frost, and Dick Cavett, among others." Conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr., "assumed McGinniss had relied on 'an elaborate deception which has brought joy and hope to the Nixon-haters. ' But even Buckley liked the book." After the success of his book in 1968, McGinniss left the Inquirer to write books full-time. He next wrote a novel, The Dream Team. It was followed by Heroes and Going to Extremes, a nonfiction account of his year exploring Alaska. In the 1980s came the McGinniss trilogy of true crime books, Fatal Vision, Blind Faith and Cruel Doubt. All three books were made into television miniseries. His 1983 account of the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case, Fatal Vision, was a best-seller. MacDonald sued McGinniss in 1984, alleging that McGinniss pretended to believe MacDonald innocent after he had already come to the conclusion that MacDonald was guilty, in order to continue MacDonald's cooperation with him. After a six-week civil trial that resulted in a hung jury, his publisher's insurance company chose to settle out of court with MacDonald for $325, 000. There was a later book about the MacDonald case by Jerry Allen Potter and Fred Bost called Fatal Justice that was a counterattack to Fatal Vision. Potter and Bost professed that MacDonald was innocent and that McGinniss's book was wildly inaccurate. They pointed to various parts of the book they claimed were untrue. For example, McGinniss proposed a theory that MacDonald killed his wife and children during a psychotic episode brought on by his use of diet pills. At the trial, McGinniss was forced to admit under oath that he had no hard evidence to support this theory and that it may not have.