Free Republic

Full title: The great woman behind the Kennedy men: Rare and never before seen pictures shed light on Rose Kennedy as the matriarch of America's celebrated dynasty A month before the nation marks the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, a new photo book put together by Caroline Kennedy tells the story of her remarkable family through the eyes of her indomitable grandmother. Rose Kennedy's Family Album, which went on sale Tuesday, features a trove of 300 images - many of them never made public before - taken between 1878 and 1946, when John F. Kennedy won the...

The Kennedys fought with the likes of Franklin Roosevelt, Jimmy Hoffa, and Robert Bork over the duration of thirteen presidential administrations. Now that no Kennedy holds political office in Washington, they're fighting each other. The family feud involves two iconic landmarks: the Kennedy Cape Cod compound and the John F. Kennedy Library overlooking Dorchester Bay. In Hyannis Port, Ted Kennedy's heirs prepare to transform the waterfront mansion the family has owned for 85 years into a retreat for thinkers and politicians contemplating public policy. The compound where early movie-mogul Joe Kennedy screened films for starlet Gloria Swanson, where the brood...

Rose Kennedy, for one brief shining moment the most powerful mother in America, went over John F. Kennedy's head in 1962 to write directly to Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev. For that, she got a playful scolding from her son. She spunkily wrote a letter asking the Russian leader to autograph pictures of his meeting with her son, and Khrushchev complied. "Would you be sure to let me know in the future any contacts you have with heads of state . . ." John Kennedy wrote to his mother on White House stationery on Nov. 3, 1962, just days after the...