Twilight of CamelotTwilight of Camelot

A heart-wrenching and sensitive examination of the tragic loss of President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy's premature son, Patrick, and how their shared grief brought them closer together in the months leading up to his assassination. In April 1963, the White House announced that Jackie was pregnant with a sibling for Caroline and John Jr.--joyful news after years of miscarriages and a stillbirth in 1956. But on August 7th, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was born six weeks early, and in the absence of lifesaving measures common today, he died less than two days later. In this definitive, soulful account of the struggle to save Patrick, Steven Levingston reveals that the infant's brief life, tragic as is was, ultimately set the notoriously unfaithful president on a path to becoming a more attentive husband and father only months before his fateful trip to Dallas. In a parallel storyline, Levingston reveals the largely unknown role President Kennedy played in modernizing an important corner of American health care. After Patrick's death, he ordered studies into the primitive state of premature care and drummed up millions of dollars in government funding, igniting a revolution in treatments that over the decades have saved millions of infants thanks to the invention of baby ventilators, new drugs, and modern neonatal intensive care units. For his definitive account of Patrick's brief but influential life, drawing on first-ever interviews with doctors who treated Jackie and Patrick, new revelations of the Secret Service agent in whose speeding car Jackie nearly gave birth prematurely, and on new archival documents, Twilight of Camelot is a fresh and humanizing portrait of one of the most famous and complicated couples of the 20th century, and a pulsating drama that illuminates little-known details of the Kennedy family history and legacy.