All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy - Hardcover

Edward Klein shows that, despite their glamorous public lives, the Kennedys were as human as the rest of us. Through details on the couple's most intimate moments, including Jackie's defloration in a Paris elevator, and her amusing, albeit catty, disposition (kept under wraps because of her political standing), the ivory tower of their existence seems less out of reach. With chapter titles such as "Indiscreet," "Love Lies Bleeding," and "Pleasure First" the book reads a bit like a romance novel, but with a biting touch of reality.

Of all the great love stories that have had an impact on our times-- Eleanor and Franklin, Winston and Clementine, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor-- none has remained as shrouded in secrecy and misunderstanding as that of John and Jacqueline Kennedy. Here, for the first time, their story is told the way it was always meant to be told-- with such depth and amazing detail that it sheds a whole new light on the relationship at the heart of Camelot. For many years, Edward Klein, the former editor in chief of The New York Times Magazine, was a friend of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Drawing on his personal knowledge, major research libraries, private documents and correspondence, FBI files, and more than three hundred interviews, All Too Human is an original and unprecedented work on the Kennedys-- a book replete with fresh facts and information, as well as a dramatically new interpretation of the Kennedy marriage. The story begins on the very day that Jack and Jackie met in May 1951, and it unfolds before the reader's eyes in a series of dramatic scenes, culminating with the President's assassination in November 1963. Since that bloody day in Dallas, the world has been intensely curious about the bonds that united Jack and Jackie. The book answers these questions:

Was Jack in love with Jackie? And was she in love with him?

Did Jack's father, Joseph Kennedy, arrange his son's marriage?

Did events on their honeymoon shape the future course of their marriage?

To what extent was Jackie aware of Jack's compulsive womanizing, and how did she react?

Did Jackie have affairs of her own?

Did the enormous strains of the presidency-- and the tragic death of their infant son Patrick-- draw Jack and Jackie closer together? Rigorously researched and richly textured, All Too Human reveals the private husband and wife behind the grand image. Much more than a portrait of a marriage, Edward Klein's journalistic tour de force captures the essence of an unforgettable man and an extraordinary woman in their momentous years together: two fascinating individuals whose haunting love story is captured in these pages as never before.