Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. Doris Kearns Goodwin. 1987.

This saga of three generations begins on a bitter winter day in 1863 with the baptism of John F. Fitzgerald Kennedy, holding the Bible in which his grandfather’s birth was noted, is sworn in as President in January 1961. In less than a century the Fitzgerald and the Kennedy’s rose from poverty and obscurity in the immigrant Irish slums of Boston to a glory and glamour unmatched by any other family in the history of the United States.

Act One is the rise of the Fitzgerald family through the traditional means of sleazy big city politics. The first Fitzgerald daughter, Rose, is shrewdly political, fiercely religious, unyielding, critical and far more worldly than she is usually interpreted to have been.