Showing results by author "Peter S. Canellos" in All Categories

They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court. Almost a century after his death, John Marshall Harlan’s words helped end segregation and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom. But his legacy would not have been possible without the courage of Robert Harlan, a slave who John’s father raised like a son in the same household.

No figure in American public life has had such great expectations thrust upon him, or has responded so poorly. But Ted Kennedy -the youngest of the Kennedy children and the son who felt the least pressure to satisfy his father's enormous ambitions - would go on to live a life that no one could have predicted: dismissed as a spent force in politics by the time he reached middle age, Ted became the most powerful senator of the last half century and the nation's keeper of traditional liberalism.