The kennedys documentary

Review of Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch( (Norton, 2013) by Barbara Perry, Co-chair of the Miller Center Oral History Program and U.Va. Associate Professor. Rose Kennedy was a complex, contradictory, powerful woman and remains an icon of American life.

As matriarch of the Kennedy clan that became America’s most powerful political dynasty, Rose was the daughter of the powerful Boston Irish politician John Fitzgerald (better known as Honey Fitz), wife of the wealthy and powerful Joe Kennedy, Sr., a media figure in her own right, and a powerful shaper of the family’s and thus America’s destiny.

She was also prevented from attending Wellesley and sent to a convent by her father, the much-wronged wife of a famously philandering husband, and the tragic mother of so many lost children.

Barbara Perry’s book gives the fully-rounded woman to us—the woman who was dedicated to projecting a perfect image of herself and her family, who pushed her family to excellen