They were America's children, symbolic of hope and youth, then of tragedy, and finally of the enduring power of the Kennedy legacy. In the 255 vibrant photographs in this book - mostly never before published - we watch John and Caroline grow up in the adoring, and sometimes harsh, glare of public attention.
They were the youngest children to live in the White House in over a century - Caroline just three and John Jr. a newborn when their father took the oath of office. Symbolizing the youthful vigor of the new administration, they won the hearts of the American people as they romped around - and under - their father's desk in the Oval Office. And when, three years later, Caroline kissed JKF's coffin and John Jr. saluted the passing bier, they were forever etched into the nations' collective heart.
We see their awkward adolescence, their sorrows at senseless losses in the family, their first forays into romance, their efforts to establish themselves as responsible adults, their happy marriages and Caroline's motherhood. And we watch in admiration as Caroline recovers from the untimely death of her beloved brother to assume the mantle of the Camelot legend.
This is a book that will tug at the heart-strings of all who remember fondly these two remarkable American offspring.
James Spada (23 January 1950 - 18 May 2017) was a American photographer and celebrity biographer.
As a thirteen-year-old kid in Staten Island, James Spada started the first Marilyn Monroe Memorial Fan Club. He produced four bulletins and one yearbook a year for four years, when he had to disband the club due to lack of money.
In college he founded EMK: The Edward M. Kennedy Quarterly, and worked as an intern in Senator Kennedy’s Boston office in 1970.
At 23 his first book, Barbra: The First Decade (The Films and Career of Barbra Streisand), was published. He followed that up with the authorized book The Films of Robert Redford. He went on to write illustrated coffee-table books about Streisand, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Midler, Shirley MacLaine and Warren Beatty, and Jane Fonda.
In 1987 his first non-pictorial biography, Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess, became a major international bestseller. He followed that up with intimate biographies of Peter Lawford, Bette Davis, Barbra Streisand, and Julia Roberts.
His writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, People, Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, The New York Times Book Review, McCall’s, the Los Angeles Times, the London Sunday Express, and many other publications.
In 2010 his first work of fiction, Days When My Heart was Volcanic—A Novel of Edgar Allan Poe, was published.
In recent years he has become equally renowned as a photographer of the male nude. His first collection, Black & White Men, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award as the Best Visual Arts Book of 2000.
----------------------------- From "Black & White Men" published in 2000: Over the past several years, Jim has also become known for his evocative black-and-white studies of the male nude. He has had three one-man exhibitions, most recently in January 2000 at the prestigious Gallery One at the New England School of Photography in Boston. "I've been taking pictures since I was a teenager," Jim says, "but it took a back seat to my celebrity books. Now I d like to be known as a hyphenate, a writer-photographer. Photographing people is very much like writing about them, except that I'm creating the portrait with light rather than words. Light is as much a subject for me as the model."