“The Kennedys may well be the most photographed, written about, talked about, admired, hated, and controversial family in American history. But for all the words and pictures, the real story was not told until Peter Collier and David Horowitz spent years researching archives and interviewing both family members and hundreds of people close to the Kennedys,” reads the Encounter Books profile of The Kennedys: An American Drama, first published in 1984.
“A wonderful hater-of-Kennedys guide,” wrote P.J. O’Rourke in The American Spectator, “an assemblage of ugly facts and rude anecdotes about this large and dirty family. It is not, of course, a complete collection. Deforestation of North America would be needed to print a book that size. But it will suffice. Here, for those who have forgotten or just love to hear it all again, is the fulsome scurvy truth: Old Joseph P. Kennedy was a liar and a greedy thief, an ignoramus, adulterer, vile anti-Semite, coward and pompous ass. His wife Rose was a frigid martinet, unashamed to suckle at the teat of shabby lucre, awash in pietism and tartuffery, filled with the letter of Catholicism and empty of its spirit. They raised their nine whelps in an atmosphere of brutal pride and stupid competition.” And so on, but the story did not end there.
Peter Collier happened onto materials from Lem Billings, a schoolmate and sidekick of John F. Kennedy, and those became the basis for Things in Glocca Morra, a biographical novel in Billings’ voice.
“A beautiful work of art, tender and witty, splendidly written, with richly and sensitively drawn characters, a keen moral compass, and, in its later chapters, an almost unbearable feeling of suspense, “ writes Bruce Bawer. “It is at once a biographical novel that paints a credible picture of the young Jack, imagining how he might have come to be the man he was, for good and for ill.” Things in Glocca Morra is “also a whodunit, raising questions about the real stories behind two horrible deaths,” one of them Jack’s, on November 22, 1963.
Collier and Horowitz teamed up on The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty and The Fords: An American Epic. In 1998, Horowitz authored Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, mandatory reading for anybody who wants to understand the left.
In 2012, Peter Collier authored Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick, the first and only biography of President Reagan’s UN Ambassador, the Democrat who charged that the San Francisco Democrats “always blame America first.” Things in Glocca Morra, was released in 2020, a year after Peter Collier passed away at the age of 80.
Full disclosure: This writer worked with Peter Collier on Heterodoxy, the forerunner to Frontpage Magazine. In 2015, Collier wrote the foreword to Bill of Writes: Dispatches from the Political Correctness Battlefield, which includes several essays from Heterodoxy.
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