As a profoundly and sharply revealing portrait of the evolving machinery of American legislative governance and one senator’s struggle to harness it and play its changes in the 1960s and early ’70s, Neal Gabler’s Catching the Wind proves every bit as worthy a sequel to Master of the Senate as Caro’s own The Passage of Power. Harry Williams in his path-breaking biography of Huey Long. As a chronicle of the decline of American liberalism from the time of Ted Kennedy’s birth at the dawn of the New Deal to the collapse of its ethic of activist government in the 1970s, Catching the Wind transcends the limits of political biography to a degree matched only in recent decades by Robert Caro in his majestic biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, David Levering Lewis in his two-volume life of W.E.B. In that sense, Catching the Wind matches the undeniable ambition of its subject at every step. as much the story of the liberal wind Kennedy caught at its final peak and worked to harness in the years of its dissipation as it is an account of Kennedy’s own life.

Neal gabler catching the wind