Neal Gabler

Neal Gabler is the author of five books, including three biographies: An Empire of Their Own, Winchell, and Walt Disney. which won him his second Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was named biography of the year by USA Today. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shorenstein Fellowship from Harvard, and a Woodrow Wilson Public Policy scholarship, and was the chief nonfiction judge of the National Book Awards. Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975 (Crown) is the first volume of Neal Gabler’s magisterial two-volume biography of Edward Kennedy. It is at once a human drama, a history of American politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and a study of political morality and the role it played in the tortuous course of liberalism. Though he is often portrayed as a reckless hedonist who rode his father’s fortune and his brothers’ coattails to a Senate seat at the age of thirty, the Ted Kennedy in Catching the Wind is one the public seldom saw—a man both racked by and driven by insecurity. The last and by most contemporary accounts the least of the Kennedys, a lightweight, he entered the Senate with his colleagues’ lowest expectations, but he used deference and comity to become a promising legislator. And with the deaths of his brothers John and Robert, he was compelled to become the custodian of their political mission. He becomes a moving force in the great “liberal hour,” which sees the passage of the anti-poverty program and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. But Catching the Wind also shows how Kennedy’s moral authority is eroded by the fatal auto accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969, dealing a blow not just to Kennedy but to liberalism. Sean Wilentz, New York Times bestselling author of Bob Dylan in America and The Rise of American Democracy, called it “One of the truly great biographies of our time, […] a masterwork of historical reconstruction. […] Here is biography written at the highest level.”