Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House

November 2003 was 40 years after the horrific assassination of President Kennedy. But the appeal of the Kennedys and their Camelot court remains as strong as ever, as the regular flow of books about them attests. But unlike so many of these other books, Sally Bedell Smith's Grace and Power has no axe to grind about the Kennedys: no obsession with JFK's womanising, or the alleged Mafia connections, or the family's susceptibility to tragedy. Instead, in a major work of history she tells the story of John and Jackie's three years in the White House straight: soberly, comprehensively, sensitively, from beginning to sudden end. Grace and Power is, then, a compassionate and immensely poignant chronicle of pivotal historical events seen from the inside out, from within the private home of the President and First Lady. When John Kennedy entered the White House he was only 43; his vulnerable wife Jackie, astonishingly, just 31. For all the superficial opulence and lavish partying of their social circle, we see, therefore, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the burgeoning American civil rights movement from the perspective of an invalid president often barely well enough to appear in public, and a young wife abandoned by her husband's relentless womanising. But in a single brief epoch, they changed the politics and style of America. Forty years on from JFK's assassination, as many people who are far too young to remember it are fascinated by the Kennedys just as much as those who remember exactly where they were. This is the classic account of that time.

Sally Bedell Smith has written biographies of William Paley, Pamela Harriman and Princess Diana - Diana: The Life of a Troubled Princess, also published by Aurum. She lives in Washington DC.