NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK . One of the truly great biographies of our time. -Sean Wilentz, New York Times bestselling author of Bob Dylan in America and The Rise of American Democracy

A landmark study of Washington power politics in the twentieth century in the Robert Caro tradition. -Douglas Brinkley, New York Times bestselling author of American Moonshot

The epic, definitive biography of Ted Kennedy-an immersive journey through the life of a complicated man and a sweeping history of the fall of liberalism and the collapse of political morality.

Catching the Wind 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, a man so doubtful of himself that he sinned in order to be redeemed. The last and by most contemporary accounts the least of the Kennedys, a lightweight. He lived an agonizing childhood, being shuffled from school to school at his mother’s whim, suffering numerous humiliations-including self-inflicted ones-and being pressed to rise to his brothers’ level. He entered the Senate with his colleagues’ lowest expectations, a show horse, not a workhorse, but he used his ninth-child’s talent of deference to and comity with his Senate elders to become a promising legislator. And with the deaths of his brothers John and Robert, he was compelled to become something more- the custodian of their political mission.

In Catching the Wind, Kennedy, using his late brothers’ moral authority, 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. Then, with the election of Richard Nixon, he becomes the leading voice of liberalism itself at a time when its power is waning- a shadow president, challenging Nixon to keep the American promise to the marginalized, while Nixon lives in terror of a Kennedy restoration. 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.

In this sweeping biography, Gabler tells a story that is Shakespearean in its dimensions- the story of a star-crossed figure who rises above his seeming limitations and the tragedy that envelopes him to change the face of America.