 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington D.C. which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with Neil Thompson about his new book, The First Kennedys, which tells the story of Patrick and Bridget who left Ireland following the Great Famine and launched the Kennedy Dynasty in America. Before we begin I'd like to tell you about two programs coming up this month on our YouTube channel. On Monday March 7th at 1 p.m. Megan Kate Nelson will discuss her new book, Saving Yellowstone, which gives the fascinating and complex historical context behind the National Park's establishment 150 years ago this month. And on Tuesday March 8th at 1 p.m. Mary Sarah Bilder will speak on her recent book, Female Genius. Bilder introduces us to Eliza Harriet Barron's O'Connor, a path-breaking female educator in the 1780s. She argued that women had equal capacity and deserved an equal education and political representation and her University of Pennsylvania lecture was attended by George Washington. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy became the first United States president to address the Irish Parliament when he visited that country in June 1963. He declared that no country contributed more to building my own than your sons and daughters. They came to our shores in a mixture of hope and agony and I would not underrate the difficulties of their course once they arrived in the United States. 115 years before this historic visit President Kennedy's own great-grandparents had left Ireland for America in hopes of a better life. They endured hardships in Boston, their new home, but established a place for themselves and their children. Their oldest son Patrick Joseph became the first American Kennedy elector to public office and set the family on a path culminating in the presidency. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, part of the National Archives, holds numerous records of the Kennedy family, including the personal papers of Patrick J. Kennedy, JFK's grandfather. Our guest author today, Neil Thompson, made extensive use of these recently open papers and other documentary resources in the library. We all look forward to hearing the story of the Kennedy family that he has put together. Neil Thompson is the author of five highly acclaimed books, including A Curious Man, Driving with the Devil, and Kick Flip Boys. A former newspaper reporter, he has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and The Wall Street Journal. Joining the author in conversation is Neil Bascombe, a national award-winning and New York Times best-selling author of a number of books focused on inspiring stories of adventure and achievement. His work has been translated into 15 languages featured in several documentaries and optioned for major film and television projects. Now let's hear from Neil Thompson and Neil Bascombe. Thank you for joining us today. Wonderful. Well, I'm here, Neil Bascombe here, to speak with Neil Thompson, the two Niels this evening, this afternoon, about Neil's new book, The First Kennedys. And, Neil, I just want to sort of start off this conversation. I do want it to be as much a conversation as we can make it. Just to give viewers an overview or describe a little launching pad for this conversation. Yeah, thanks, Neil. Thanks for being here and for doing this. Thank you, David, for the generous introduction. I'm really excited to talk about this book with the National Archives and your viewers. And it's just an honor. The book just came out last week, so it's been fun to get out in the world and talk to folks like you and tell you a little bit more about the book and where it came from. And we'll get into some of the details of what's in it. But, Neil, to your question, sort of how did things begin? The book, for me, actually goes back more than 20 years. My first kind of introduction to the idea that I wanted to write about The Kennedys at all goes back to 1999, when I was a newspaper reporter working for the Baltimore Sun and was sent up to Hyannisport to cover the disappearance and then subsequent death we learned of JFK Jr. It was that summer of 1999. I was part of the sort of hordes of reporters stalking that town and hanging outside the Kennedy compound there and came away from that experience sort of awed by our ongoing passion for and love for the Kennedy family in general. There was so much heartache after John Jr. died. When they found his body, I was actually at a bar interviewing the bartender who'd given me a Jameson, so I'm sipping my Jamesons and we learned that they found the plane, the wreckage in the bodies, and she starts crying to me, then says she feels like she lost a family member. And I think a lot of people felt that way after he died. And so that incident which was followed by my drive back home to Baltimore through New Jersey, which is where I'm from, and I came within two miles that day of the cemetery where my grandparents were born, my Irish immigrant grandparents named Patrick and Bridget. And so somewhere in there, something got tripped. I'm half Irish. I was raised Catholic. I spent 16 years in Catholic schools, but I never really thought about the Kennedys or my Irish heritage or any of that until after that incident. So over the next few years, I got more interested in Irish history, read a little bit more about the Kennedys. I traveled to Ireland and started thinking about this book, but I could never find a way in. I felt like so much has been written about the Kennedys. Every angle must have been covered and I couldn't figure out what new story there was to tell. But along the way, my Irish immigrant grandmother Bridget sort of kept speaking to me like there's a story here. Her experience on my side was not all that dissimilar from Bridget Kennedy's experience when she came to America and worked as a maid, separated by 70 years. Anyway, I'll jump forward a little bit. Probably 2016, 2017, as we started to have some new and different conversations about immigration in America at that time, I realized we still haven't resolved this question of whether we are a nation of immigrants or whether we have mixed feelings about that like some people certainly do. And so that renewed my interest in this book and it coincided with, David mentioned the PJ Kennedy papers at the JFK library. It coincided with my discovery that those were, that they existed, that the library was processing those papers, that they might be open to researchers soon. It took longer than I expected to actually get my hands on those. But I did start diving into this story 2017 into 18 and 19. And actually thought I was in a good groove sort of late 2019 only had a few more things to fill in in the book. And then COVID hits and 2020 as I finished the book created some interesting challenges, but ones that I learned a lot from as it relates to what you and I both do researching and finding information to do online. And I'll sum it up just quickly. I wanted to tell a different Kennedy story. I wanted to go back and show where this family came from, what life was like for them in America when they got here. I wanted to tell the story that begins two generations before Joe Kennedy, who's the person many of us think of as the starting point of the Kennedys. And really, this is the alternate version of that. This is like the prelude to the Camelot version of the Kennedy saga. Right. Yeah, I mean, I was envious in a way as a fellow nonfiction narrative writer that you found this incredibly inspiring story and heart wrenching story, particularly starting with Bridget and her experiences that forced her to leave Ireland. Her experiences about crossing to Boston. Did your family, did your grandmother and extended family relate to you other stories similar to hers that connection to sort of emotional searching and writing? Yeah. Yeah, I think there were some family connections that kind of provided some underlying emotional inspiration and context for my research into the Kennedys. You know, I describe in a couple of moments in the book, a little bit of my Irish background, my grandparents were Bridget and Patrick, who came over from Ireland. The Kennedys were Bridget and Patrick, who came 70 years prior to that. And in fact, earlier in my research, I thought maybe there's a personal story here. Maybe I explore my own Irish roots and my family's heritage and sort of tie it into the Kennedys somehow. And it just never felt quite right. I really just wanted to bring to life those early Kennedys, but do so in a way that kept my own family in mind. Unfortunately, my grandmother, my grandfather, Patrick died similar to Patrick Kennedy. He died when he was in his mid 30s, leaving my grandmother widowed and alone raising three kids, including my mother. And it was interesting to learn that similarly the first Kennedys, Bridget and Patrick, Patrick dies nine years after getting to America, leaving Bridget, widowed and alone raising four kids, including her son, PJ, who we might talk about, who's JFK's grandfather. So those connections always made me feel like I was not just telling a new piece of the Kennedy story, but sort of exploring a little bit of my own story as well and getting to understand a little bit better what it was like for my grandparents to come to a new land and start at the bottom, just like the Kennedys did. My grandmother was a maid. My grandfather was a truck driver. Their story is similar to almost every other class of immigrant who's come to America hoping for a new life, but often having to settle for less, settle for hardship and settle for working at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, settle for poverty and loss and disease, all the things that affected the Kennedys as well as my family at certain times. So it became a personal project, even though it's not a personal story per se. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things I was struck by, particularly in the early parts of the book, was the sense that this was really an American story, right? I mean, it is the Kennedy story. It is specifically about Bridget and her coming to the United States and then her raising a PJ and her family and her struggles there. But I was amazed at your ability to just sort of, again, make it an everybody's story, make it an immigrant story. So that, yes, it's important that it was the Kennedys and yes, this is their origin story. But in many respects, it's all of our story because we're all immigrants here. And, you know, were you writing with that in mind? Were you cognizant of that? Or were you sort of focused on, okay, I'm telling the, I got to tell the Kennedys? Yeah. No, you're right. I really did try and keep that in mind. And I'd say there were probably two tracks, getting the Kennedy story right. And ideally going a little bit further than others have gone as they've tried to research that piece of the family, the 19th century Kennedys. But I really wanted to get not just their particular story, right? But the story of others around them, you know, what life was like for other Irish immigrants and other immigrant groups during the period that I write about, which is mostly the second half of the 1800s, because I wanted it to be universal. And I wanted the story to ideally tell us something about who we are as a nation, who we were then, and who we are now. And I was, you know, when I got started, I thought I knew a little bit of our own history as it relates to the how we handled Irish famine refugees and how we handled other immigrants and some of the darker moments of that history of trying to keep immigrants either out or down. But I was pretty shocked to learn how aggressively there were forces aligned against newcomers to America. Across time, really, I mean, it hasn't changed. We are a nation of immigrants, but that's kind of despite our best ever efforts in some quarters to keep immigrants out, or to prevent them from succeeding, to prevent them from voting, to prevent them from holding office, to prevent them from becoming citizens, all these efforts were being made back then by, for example, the Know Nothing Party that was in power in the mid-1850s. So I was trying to really explore that, have it hinted at what we've seen in recent years as we have different conversations about immigration in America, and have it, you know, hopefully show us a little bit of who we are at our best and at our worst. And both of those are in this story, and they both speak to, like you said, not just the Kennedy experience, but the experience of any immigrant group who's come here and started over and started often at the bottom. So I really wanted that sense of it doesn't just have to be the Kennedy's, you know, fill in anybody's name. I mean, the Kennedy's drives this, because this is a family that ascended to these incredible heights, you know, or a so-called royal family. But to show that they came from nothing like many others did, I find it to be a pretty inspiring story if I'm bridge it to be an inspiring character and someone who's been, you know, largely overlooked in the history of others writing about the Kennedy family. Well, let's, you know, let's go into bridge it a little bit, because, you know, she is an incredible individual. And, you know, what she went through and how she overcame and her sort of purity of spirit and focus on family and sort of constantly trying to get a leg up. I was particularly sort of impressed by those sort of parapetetic journeys that she would make across East Boston from one house to the other, just trying to get just an inch above where she was before. And just sort of, you know, almost leapfrogging her way up the, you know, American ladder, as it were. So talk to me a little bit about what made Bridget capable of taking this journey alone. And then what it was about her in those particularly those early days in East Boston where she shows up basically alone and tries to find her way in this new world in this new city. Yeah. And, you know, a new city in a new world that didn't want her. Exactly. So, so there were there were just so many challenges to her escape from Ireland and starting her new life in Boston. It's, you know, it's amazing that she made it at all. And I describe in the book how so there were so many points along the way where she easily could have lost it all lost her kids that, you know, that family could have easily gone away. And we would never have heard of the Kennedys. But the fact that she overcame all the obstacles in her way and ascended to a place of, you know, achievement and success modest, but enough to, you know, get her family to a level of where they could take it from there, essentially, is remarkable to me. The framework is, you know, she leaves her farm in County Wexford in the late 1840s, like millions, or almost 2 million Irish did between the 40s and 50s, gets on a ship, probably alone, like many women did. I found it remarkable to learn that more Irish women than Irish men came to America during that period of immigration from Ireland. They were a pretty spirited bunch. Life wasn't going to be that great for her back in Ireland anyway. You know, she'd work on a farm. She'd become a farm wife. So I view her as someone who stepped up. She was the first in her family to leave home. She was the first one to leave Ireland and go to America. And I think it says something about her character that she sort of raised her hand, if you will, and said, all right, I'll be the one to go. I'll scope it out. I'll get, you know, establish a hub for the family in America and then I'll send for others to come over later, which is what happened. But she gets to America and steps off the boat and she's surrounded by tens of thousands of other poor, unemployed, impoverished Irish just like her. I describe, you know, one of the diaries of a famine refugee. I got my hands on, described the reaction of another Irish immigrant stepping off the boat at East Boston, which is where Bridget landed and looking around and thinking, this is America. Like this is what I came here for. This is the new land that I dreamed of and was going to be my hope and salvation. So from the very first days in America, life was hard for Bridget. She worked as a maid, not a great job for anyone. But I also found evidence that she and many of the other Irish maids had this interesting relationship with their employers. They were pretty uppity as they were described at the time. They were cocky. You know, they needed the job and they were deferential when they needed to be, but they would also kind of talk back if they found things not to their liking in their job. They would walk off the job if they didn't like it. So they were described in newspapers and in magazines and in cartoons as sort of this pluckish, you know, techno BS women who stood up for themselves. And I think of Bridget that way. I think she's someone who constantly stood up for herself and had ambitions beyond just being stuck as a maid. And little by little, you see her, as you described it, taking these baby steps forward. You know, a little bit better job with each job transition, a little bit better apartment each time. Later, she becomes, you know, a hairdresser at a department store in downtown Boston, which really got her out of the muck of being discriminated against made. But with each step or two forward, there's always a step back. She loses her first son, John Kennedy, dies at just 20 months. Couple years later, she loses her husband to to consumption or tuberculosis. So and he Patrick dies when they have just welcomed into the world their fifth child, their second son, Patrick J, PJ. So Bridget's left with this infant son and three daughters and no husband. And so she kept getting pushed back. And then she would push forward again. I think she's a remarkable character. She's tenacious and and had sort of a vision for what she wanted to accomplish in America, I think. And I think in time she got there or got far enough along to feel like, OK, I established, you know, a place for my family here in America. And she saw the early successes of her kids. And and that was a lot. Yeah, I mean, I recall reading, you know, when she's having all these children and then Patrick dies and just thinking what is going to happen to her now. And yet that the death of her husband Patrick is is in some ways the sort of leaping off point where she becomes an entrepreneur. And she, you know, decides or realizes that, you know, my husband's not going to be the one who is going to help me establish this beachhead for my family. I'm going to have to be that beachhead. And so, you know, she makes this leap into starting her own store, which, you know, sounds sort of trivial and small, you know, sort of corner bodega as we have in New York City or elsewhere. But that was a huge moment for her, you know, to sort of, you know, rule her own domain. And I was I was, you made this point really well, how even as she's beginning to sort of triumph in this world, that doesn't want her, that is pushing back and doing everything that's power to sort of keep the Irish out. She's also fighting the, you know, the other legions of sexism. And so every reference to her and all the directories is is the, you know, widow Kennedy. And you keep making that point that it really sort of worked really, really well. I thought as, you know, I'll call it a device because I'm a writer, but it was, you know, it's true and it really worked. Talk to me a little bit about before we sort of go into that, talk a little bit more about this anti Irish sentiment and all the laws and, you know, power structures that were pushing it back against, you know, these quote unquote dirty immigrants, you know, no Irish need apply. I mean, the echoes to today are on every level. And so I just I felt like, you know, at some times I was reading a newspaper report that I, you know, just picked up at the corner newsstand, just the way that they were talking about immigrants, what they were doing to keep them from voting to various other things, trying to keep, you know, the current power structure in place. And so talk to us about the no nothings and other things that Bridget was fighting. Yeah, some of those anti immigrant anti Irish sentiments. Again, I knew they were there back then. And I was shocked and at times pretty dismayed to just learn how aggressive that attitude was, how aggressive the efforts were to keep those immigrants down and out and the specific steps that were taken to keep them down and out and how those echoes to today. I mean, I read headlines or quotes that were word for word. Some of the things that we see in recent years, send them back, build a wall, you know, all these all these attitudes toward people who were just trying to find a new life and find a job and work, they weren't bringing their, you know, crime and their drugs. I think what was unique then, but it also has echoes to today, the big fear that many Americans or you know, people in America at that time had when it as it relates to the Irish was the religion. You know, we were a very Protestant country. Bridget and Patrick end up in Boston, which was a very Protestant, Brahmin, blue bloodish city. And what people feared more than anything was Catholicism or papism, these papists and their freaky religion. That's what a lot of the forces that we're talking about here were trying to keep out or down. So, you know, examples that I came across, efforts to prevent any kind of Catholicism in the schools. They taught religion, but they taught the Protestant version of certain prayers and the Protestant Bible. And if you were, you know, an Irish Catholic kid, and your only choice for school was to go to the public school and learn these lessons, English centric lessons and Protestant centric religious lessons. Your only choice was to go to that. And if you if you opposed doing those things, like, for example, the requirement that you recite the the Protestant version of the Lord's Prayer, you were whipped or expelled. You know, they were just punished for trying to protect the religion. Just one of many examples, the know nothings you mentioned. I'm here in Boston, the Kennedys lived, you know, across from downtown Boston and on the island of East Boston, it was a hub of know nothingism, you know, these nativist political parties that that came into power and prominence and popularity, huge popularity in the mid 1850s, the American Party, the Native American Party, they were all kind of lumped together as the know nothings as our viewers might know. And their mission was to prevent Irish from holding elected office or being allowed to vote. They, you know, if I came across the constitution, proposed constitution of the Massachusetts state, know nothing party. And they proposed and this was proposed many over many times over the subsequent years that an Irish immigrant had to live here for 21 years before they could apply for citizenship and before they could even be considered after citizenship for, you know, the eligibility to vote or hold public office. There are proposed literacy tests, reading and writing for people coming from other countries because they believe that the Irish didn't know how to write and therefore they shouldn't hold public office or vote. There were there were, you know, gangs of thugs, you know, hanging out around polls on election day, listening for Irish Brogues and demanding to see papers to prove that they were allowed to vote. And then there were riots all over the place, not just Boston, Philadelphia, Louisville, Baltimore, you know, often aimed at Irish Catholics trying to, trying to vote. So they were, they were up against a lot. I describe one scene where this group of know nothings paraded down the streets of East Boston to with the intent of sort of destroying the Kennedy's church in East Boston, throwing bricks through Irish businesses and windows, you know, pummeling anyone that they believed to be Irish. I mean, it was a full-on assault. So for Bridget to and her husband to have survived that and then once her husband is dead for Bridget to continue to confront those forces and still manage to move her way up to a level where she could open her own grocery store is just remarkable to me. She was a remarkable character. Yeah, I mean, that's a good transition point because, you know, as as the book is structured, you know, it's sort of two people's story, right? It's the story of Bridget and then it's the story of her son, PJ and and his sort of rags to riches rise and and sort of evolution into the power structure of Boston, which really was the point where that allowed the Kennedys to become the Kennedys that we know today become the first family. But before we go there, I'd like to talk about the research here. And maybe this is again, because I'm interested in it and and the writing of the story because, you know, no one's ventured to do this book before. And it's it's very likely not because someone hadn't thought of it. Or to have done, you know, biographies of the Kennedys, you know, there were there seem to have been a lot of challenges in terms of the research of this. And I'm just, you know, sort of bowing down a little bit to your, you know, persistence in following these sources and getting to the root of the story of Bridget and PJ. So maybe talk to us about how the National Archives or other archives were a launching point for you. Yeah, you're right. And it's fun to talk to another researcher or historian about this kind of stuff, because there were huge challenges. And there were many points along the way where I thought, this is nuts. I'm not going to find this story. I thought I was going to find no wonder nobody's gone down this path before. It's just not there. But but yeah, the research was a fascinating experience. Because I think I initially assumed I can figure this out, you know, between my connections to different archives and libraries, and with the JFK library here in Boston being super cooperative and communicative, every step of the way, I thought, surely buried in those archives is a little bit more about Bridget, a little bit more about PJ, all I need to do is dig deeper and find it and bring this whole thing to life. I should say, you know, I really, my first stab at this was back in 2006, I went to Ireland, I went to the Kennedy Homestead, as it's called, where Patrick Kennedy came from. It's still there, it's still in the family. I talked to, you know, extended relatives, I did some archival research there. And so I thought I had a good sort of foundation to continue this once I got back up to speed on this book a decade later. And my first stop was the JFK library. And they were incredibly generous and helpful and sent me a lot of the information that they did have on PJ, which was not insubstantial, not a whole lot on Bridget, you know, she was a poor immigrant maid, she didn't leave behind her collected papers or letters or, you know, any really easily accessible information for a historian to just latch on to and tell her story. So they helped dig the Massachusetts Historical Society, helped dig for me, you know, the archives at Boston College and other universities here in Boston helped me dig. What I had to do to bring Bridget to life was come at it from a bunch of different angles and try to tell the story of her as I knew it and then of others around her because there was information I was able to find, for example, about Irish maids who were doing the same job as Bridget at the same time in the same places, you know, letters, for example, at Boston College from a woman named Bridget back to her family in Ireland. You know, I was able to find grocery store account books to help understand what the accounting was like and what kind of stuff was on the shelves. We talked briefly earlier about or David mentioned it in the beginning about the PJ Kennedy papers at the JFK library and I became aware of them in 2016, 2017 and was thrilled. I thought, all right, once those are open, I've got this story. Surely everything's going to be in there. And I was in touch with the archive folks at the JFK library regularly every six months. I'd say, hey, when are those going to be open to the public? How far along are we? And, you know, there are short staffed, overworked. They've got a lot of people like me and you coming to them every day saying, can you help me with my book? So it took a while for those papers to get processed and digitized. So I had to be patient. Maybe I wasn't patient all the time, admittedly. But they were patient with me. Then they finally started processing them and said, we're on a path now, it's in our budget, we're taking the first steps to get things going. And then they started the actual digitization and then COVID hits. And people start working remotely and that those efforts sort of ground to a halt. So I was already pretty far along in the research. I was terrified that I wasn't going to be able to access those papers in time. To their huge credit, the head archivist and the other woman who was doing the processing of those papers made it a priority. And I got this Christmas day email one day, hey, we processed the first two thirds. I think it was a couple hundred pages and here they are. They just made them available online and sent me the link. I can't remember if they sent me the digital documents directly. But it was Christmas. It was awesome. These were letters that PJ Kennedy had written throughout the course of his career from late 1800s into the early 1900s. And they helped me describe who PJ was. This generous, empathetic guy who was focused on helping his community, on helping others, helping new immigrants to America find a job or a place to live. This is all as it related to his role as a politician or later in his life, just sort of a helper. Backroom sort of ward boss as he was described. But someone who helped others. And what those papers and that bit of research helped as it relates to Bridget was I could trace back these traits in PJ and how he conducted himself in business back to his mother and show that these were things that she valued as well. I describe her in the book as this neighborhood hub around which family members and neighbors and other maids and children all sort of circulate. And she was remarkably at her death in 1888 described in print in the Boston Globe in an obituary as this sort of woman of noble traits and community pride. I forget the exact wording, but she created something for herself and her family in the neighborhood and then PJ intern did the same. And the research that I was able to get at the JFK Presidential Library helped bring some of that to life for sure. It was invaluable. Yeah, that's awesome. And not as an advertisement for archivists and the national archives, but they've been absolutely more than generous many times for me too. And I, you know, we couldn't do what we do without them. You know, I have to say, you know, when you were just writing about Bridget and, you know, her coming across on the ship. And, you know, what I liked about what you did there was you, it's so descriptive and you really do feel like you're there and you understand what she's seeing and feeling and experiencing on every level, which is, you know, often very horrific. But you tread this nice line that, you know, some narrative nonfiction authors will, you know, tread up a little too far, perhaps, and sort of almost fictionalize what is happening. But what I liked about how you did it is that you made clear in points when you didn't know exactly what she would have experienced, what she experienced, because you weren't on that boat and she didn't leave a letter. You had assembled all these other sources and all these other experiences of young women who had come across that it felt very, very authentic to me. And I knew when I was reading what's the history of these ships and these experiences of the young maids and then what was Bridget's specific experience. And I just want to say, you know, again, how nicely you did that. Just talking about the writing a little bit, because I think I'm curious, you know, it felt very contemporary to me. The writing did. I was, you know, I noted in particular, correct me if I'm wrong here, but even your prologue was written in present tense, which I found, am I right? Which I thought was a really interesting choice. And, you know, the second thing I will reference is, you know, you make contemporary illusions. For instance, you call Liverpool like Mordor from Jared Tolkien's books. And you quote modern writers, modern refugees, you quote Obama, experiencing the, you know, what their experiences as immigrants were or the like. And I just, why did you make that choice? What was the sort of, I know these choices are carefully made. Sometimes. And I just want to get your sort of thought process. Yeah. You know, they're all great observations because there was definitely an intent there to bring in some contemporary voices and sensibilities because I wanted this story to tie, tie into what has been happening more recently. And so to your point, you know, section breaks in the book, I have quotes from other authors talking about the immigrant experience via Tan Nguyen. And you mentioned the Obama quote saying, you know, in no other country is a story like mine even possible. So, you know, I wanted to have the story kind of look forward a little bit here and there without overdoing it, hopefully, and give it sort of a sense of currentness because I feel like some of the themes that I had to try to explore throughout this story are still very current. So I didn't want it to feel too dusty and historical. I wanted to show that some of the things that Bridget and her family were up against are the same things that a lot of folks are up against today. So yeah, I wanted to have to have that sort of freshness just a touch. Briefly back to your comment about the ships, the coffin ship that Bridget came across on and that ties into some of the research we were talking about. I did try and walk this very fine line of saying, not saying I knew Bridget's experience specifically, although at times I did. I wanted to come clean. Maybe it's Catholic guilt or something. I didn't want to fake it. I didn't want to say, you know, she probably went like this or she must have been thinking that, you know, there are other devices that other writers have used and in some cases it works. It just wasn't for me. I wanted this to be the real version of the story and because we don't know, I wanted to say we don't know. And one reason for that is Bridget as a first name and Murphy as a last name, two of the most common names in Ireland at the time. So trying to find documentation to show that this Bridget Murphy on this ship was our Bridget Murphy. I couldn't do it. You know, there were scores of Bridget or Biddy or Brydie Murphys that I came across and ship passenger manifest lists, for example, same with Patrick Kennedy. Super common name. We can't look at one particular ship or one specific document and say, oh yeah, that must have been our Patrick Kennedy. So I tried to find the right balance and really go deep on the experiences of others as they were coming to America or experiencing, you know, the hardships that that my characters experienced at the same time. So it was a balancing act. And I just, I don't need to make you blush, but there's some great writing in here. And I pulled out one sentence. I just want to get your reaction to it. Just, you know, how do you feel after you write a line like this, which is actually I thought absolutely beautiful. This is page 103 here and it's right when Patrick Bridget's husband is dying from consumption. And so it was Patrick died at home bits at a time and then in November 1858 all at once. I just thought that was just magnificent. Throw yourself a little party. You never know what's going to work. You never know what's too much or not enough. But I really did want to bring his do the best I could with that scene. You know, I wasn't there. We don't know exactly what his final days were like, but I do know what death by consumption was like for many others. And I describe it, you know, the Bronte sisters dying of consumption, you know, Henry David Thoreau later that disease affected so many people. So it was able to, you know, I found doctors reports from the 1800s describing how that disease progressed in a person. But I didn't want to get too scientific with it or medical with it. I wanted to show what it was like for this one family watching their husband, their father just sort of waste away little by little. And then all at once he was gone. And it felt like just a terrifying moment in the lives of that family that we think of as on the one hand, being so powerful and impervious to certain hardships. On the other hand, we've seen tragedy affect that family time and time again. And this was one of the first and it echoes throughout the rest of the family saga, you know, early death by whatever means. So I'm glad that wine stuck out. The saga element of the story and I do want to, you know, we have about 15 minutes left. So I do want to launch a little bit into the PJ, because he certainly is the kind of rags to reach. And, you know, sets the foundation for the Kennedy clan. Tell us a little bit about PJ and his sort of his rise because it felt like it came at the time when the Irish and Boston were on the ascent. You know, you have Bridget, in fact, but as PJ begins his rise, the Irish are in some ways coming into their own and it's a very different story to Bridget's and it's the nicer coda to her. Yeah, it was it was interesting to you know, the book is sort of divided in those two parts, Bridget's coming to America in her early years, trying to make it opening her own grocery store, finally getting to a position of of success and independence. And handing off to her children, in this case, PJ, whatever she was able to learn and hand off to them. And then PJ's story, you know, roughly halfway through the book picks up from there. And I knew little bits and pieces about his sort of ascent to political power. I knew he was a politician. I didn't know how influential he was during his time. And as you said, it was a time when the Irish Democrats, in their case, were just starting to come to power. And PJ was at the forefront of that transition. You know, we talked earlier about Boston being a very Protestant, very Brahman, very old school city. It was also very Republican at that time. And so the Irish, in PJ's case, he was a saloon keeper. He opened a saloon in South Boston, and was fairly successful there, open another one in East Boston, and then over time, opened a handful of others. And that sort of got him to a level of not just success financially, but he was interacting with a lot of the other politicians of the day, who would come to his pub, who would get to know him, you know, he'd serve them beers. And little by little, he got pulled into Irish Democratic politics, really early on, just street level, Ward politics. He was, you know, his first official role was with the Ward 2 Democratic Committee in East Boston, where he would just go around and try and solicit votes, knocking on doors. I mean, it was like a community organizer. And little by little impressed the Ward elders and then the larger Democratic establishment, who were at that time really looking for people like PJ, who could represent their kind. And it was interesting to learn more too about how I'm describing PJ as a scent into that sort of political realm. And then alongside him is John Fitzgerald, JFK's other grandfather, who's doing the same thing. Also a immigrant grocer's son who grew up poor, also working his way up into Ward politics in Boston. And the two of them were part of this, you know, first wave of Irish Democrats who started getting elected to the board of Alderman, the city council, and then in time state elected office, and then national office. It just didn't happen for decades, you know, and it's really only in the 1880s. PJ runs for, he actually leaps ahead and ends up running for the state house for state representative in Massachusetts, sort of seven terms in a row as either a representative or senator. John Fitzgerald same deal runs for state office. He's a state senator and then later becomes a congressman. So that shift in politics in this city and then more broadly spreading out from there was a remarkable time because these first generation Irish in many cases were finally finding their way in to the establishment and finding ways to help their people. And I just love seeing, again, back to the PJ Kennedy papers later after he's out of elected office and he's kind of this Ward elder and someone that people come to for help and advice. He was part of this board of strategy that I write about in the book. But he continues to help his kind all the way until his death. Many of his letters are about as I described earlier about helping other people. So that period I found just fascinating. And PJ Kennedy was part of that core group of Irish who, you know, you think of Boston as a today as a pretty Irish democratic city politically. And it really all started with PJ back then. Yeah, I mean, he's a very laudable character. I mean, he seems almost like a foil to his son, Joe, in some respects. You know, I imagine we could debate that. But, you know, he just not a big drinker didn't seem like he was much of a womanizer, very devoted to family, very devoted to, like you said, to helping people in the community just seemed to be that individual who was always there. If you, you know, the sort of patriarch of the Irish in Boston. And so, you know, sort of drawing it down to bring it to JFK and Robert and other members of his grandchildren. Like, could you talk to us a little bit about the certain characteristics that you found had been inherited if not by Joe, by Joe and Rose's children? Yeah. Yeah, I find that interesting that sort of transition from PJ, who's all about helping his people and and really working it on the ground. I describe actually Joe talking years later about his father giving away too much to people, you know, he lost a fortune just giving making loans to people in his community or just giving money away to people. And he was just too generous with his time and his finances. You know, I think Joe, interestingly, saw what his father did and said, that's not for me. I'm not going to become a politician. I'm going to get into banking and make some money, which is what he did. Interestingly, though, his first job in banking or second job, but his most prominent one was at his father's bank, this bank where Joe got his start was founded by and run by his father and some other Irish folks in East Boston. So, you know, that transition from PJ being genuine and helpful and sort of straight, as he was described later in life, remarkably straight for a saloon keeper turned politician. Then you get to Joe, and he doesn't have this sense of necessarily loyalty to his community and to the Irish and to his heritage. He wanted to become American fast. And he wanted his sons and daughters to be American. And he wanted to and he wanted more, more, he wanted power and money and all of that. So he's fascinating, you know, he's often sort of depicted as the patriarch of the family. But I'd argue, you know, PJ was the true patriarch or more accurately Bridget was the matriarch of the whole plan. But to your question, I think you see the sensibilities of both Bridget and PJ, maybe skip Joe to some extent, but with help from Rose, sort of make their way into later generations of that family. Many of those children of Joe and Rose did have this sense of giving back and this sense of service and helping, you know, I, Eunice Kennedy's, you know, helping start the special Olympics. I had a sister who had Down syndrome and we went to the special Olympics regularly. So, you know, thinking that that family helped that, that effort to happen. And others like that, you know, I think JFK and RFK did have a sense of caring about those who are less fortunate than them in ways that maybe their father didn't necessarily. So quickly among the traits I saw were like, you know, empathy sense of community sense of helping others at the same time as ambition and tenacity and grit and resilience. I think you see that transfer from Bridget to PJ to Joe and Rose's kids for sure. I'm just a question from the audience here today. Can you talk to us about research or what you learned about the early history of the Fitzgerald talent? Yeah, I didn't go back as far with the Fitzgeralds. You know, in part I felt like Doris Kerns Goodwin did an amazing job in her Kennedy's and Fitzgerald's book. A lot of that focused on the immigrant, Irish immigrant Fitzgeralds and their early days in Boston. I didn't want to cover that same ground. I was hoping to find a new angle to the story. But I did do some research starting with John Fitzgerald's political ascent and ha and learned a lot about the relationship between Fitzgerald and PJ Kennedy. They didn't like each other. They were contemporaries. They came up the same in the book I described. They should have been soulmates. American-born kids of Irish immigrants, parents were grocers who also sold liquor on the side. They both come up through the ranks of Irish democratic politics. They both vacationed together at Orchard Beach in Maine, which is where Joe and Rose first met and eventually fell in love. So they were part of each other's lives from an early age and for the rest of their life. At times they didn't like each other. PJ considered Honey Fitz as he was known kind of a buffoon. He was way more flamboyant and out there and more of a typical politician than PJ was. PJ was quieter and behind the scenes. But they needed each other. I described this one fascinating moment that I found and I think the photograph of this is at the JFK library. Honey Fitz is elected to Congress, but he's been just charging so hard campaigning and going back and forth from Boston to Washington. And he comes down with consumption, the disease that killed PJ's father. The doctors say you need to get away and take a break. He decides to go south to Asheville, North Carolina. And he takes PJ with him. So that's his companion as they go south so that Honey Fitz can recover and relax. And his partner on that trip and back is PJ, his sometime foe, the guy whose children, the two of them, wanted to keep apart and weren't able to do so. So there was a really interesting relationship between the two of those. And so I do explore some of that in the book. Right. Good. So yeah, I do recall reading that section of the book and wanting to be a bit of a fly-in-the-wall at that journey those two took would have been absolutely fascinating. We only have a couple of minutes left. And I just want to ask a sort of umbrella question, which is, you've spent a long time on this project and spent a lot of time researching the Kennedays and thinking about the Kennedays. And from that point where you started, you were in the JFK Jr.'s death to the point where you're now on tour talking about this great book of yours, how has your view of the Kennedays changed? How is it different than maybe what you perceived to be the Kennedays at the beginning of this journey of yours? Yeah, that's a good one. I always had some, but call it generic sense of appreciation for that family, the service that they've been given to the country. You know, they're less prominent, obviously now than ever before. I think given the loss of Joe Kennedy, the third, I think a few years back, we now for the first time in decades don't have a Kennedy in Congress. So I've seen the family rise, hit by tragedy, rise again. And I admire their resilience and their commitment to serving the country. I know there are probably many complicated feelings out there about the other members of the family and their history. And I think as a dynasty, it's not what it was. And maybe that makes sense. Dynasties just don't last. But I developed a deeper appreciation for all the things that different generations of that family confronted over time and find it remarkable that they've had such a lasting impact on our national politics and culture and sort of sensibilities. I don't love this idea of the royal family in Camelot, you know, sort of the sexier or timescedier parts of the family history. Those kinds of episodes that, you know, you see in the tabloids are unfortunate and they are part of the family saga. But I also think there are so many good things that came from that family that we're experiencing today. We're living with today because of their efforts. Right. And it started with Bridget and Vijay. Exactly. So I'll conclude it there. I want to thank the National Archives for hosting you, Neil, and for having me moderate here. And I encourage everyone to read the first kind of news. It's a very, very illuminating book and just an absolute pleasure to read. Thank you, Neil. Neil, thanks so much for doing this. Really enjoyed talking with you. And thanks to everyone who joined us. And thanks, big thanks to the National Archives for doing this. Wonderful.