In this ârevelationâ of a biography (USA TODAY), a Pulitzer Prizeâwinning journalist examines the life and times of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, arguing she left behind the Kennedy familyâs most profound political legacy.
While Joe Kennedy was grooming his sons for the White House and the Senate, his Stanford-educated daughter, Eunice, was hijacking her fatherâs fortune and her brothersâ political power to engineer one of the great civil rights movements of our time on behalf of millions of children and adults with intellectual disabilities. Her compassion was born of rage: at the medical establishment that had no answers for her sister Rosemary, at her revered but dismissive father, whose vision for his family did not extend beyond his sons, and at a government that failed to deliver on Americaâs promise of equality.
Now, in this âfascinatingâ (the Today show), ânuancedâ (The Boston Globe) biography, âace reporter and artful storytellerâ (Pulitzer Prizeâwinning author Megan Marshall) Eileen McNamara finally brings Eunice Kennedy Shriver out from her brothersâ shadow. Granted access to never-before-seen private papers, including the scrapbooks Eunice kept as a schoolgirl in prewar London, McNamara paints an extraordinary portrait of a woman both ahead of her time and out of step with it: the visionary founder of Special Olympics, a devout Catholic in a secular age, and an officious, cigar-smoking, indefatigable woman whose impact on American society was longer lasting than that of any of the Kennedy men.