RFK Jr. is in the running for president of the United States, the office his father RFK might have won if he had not been assassinated on June 6, 1968. RFK Jr.’s uncle JFK did gain election to the White House before he was shot dead on November 22, 1963. That launched a murder mystery that continues to this day. Readers can get a fresh perspective from Peter Collier, co-author with David Horowitz of The Kennedys: An American Drama – and from a close friend of JFK his own self.
Collier’s novel Things in Glocca Morra is told from viewpoint of LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, a longtime friend of JFK who was with him on a 1945 sojourn in Hollywood. The dream factories were then raging with wars between communist-dominated unions and those with connections to the mob, a conflict this author chronicled in Hollywood Party.
“Jack,” as Lem calls JFK, covers the story as a journalist and falls for a dazzling starlet on the rise. That displeases family patriarch Joe Kennedy, who has big plans for Jack. Toward the end, Lem ruminates about Jack’s murder, but readers with little interest in JFK will find Things in Glocca Morra hard to put down.
Here, in his final book, is Peter Collier at the height of his powers. One could say that as a novelist he’s a great biographer and as a biographer a great novelist. Check out Collier’s 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.”
Peter Collier got his start at Ramparts magazine and co-authored with David Horowitz Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties, a great primer for those not around at the time. Hear Collier on the Vietnam War and the rise of the New Left in this 2018 lecture at Hillsdale College.
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