Well, that was kind of disappointing.

Sarah Bradford is one of those authors that I have fairly high expectations for. Her Borgia biographies are quite good; but then, this Jackie bio makes me want to go back and fact-check all of her claims in previous books. Maybe she became overwhelmed with the Kennedy legend? I don't know. This just... wasn't up to par.

For much of the book, Bradford comes off less as a biographer and more as a gossipmonger. She has a shoot first and ask questions later kind of attitude, reporting every little scandalous detail without actual wondering if it's true. There is so much rumor surrounding the Kennedys, and so much of it well-recorded, that in my opinion you really have to take everything with a grain of salt.

In his superb biography "Robert Kennedy: His Life" Evan Thomas painstakingly picks apart every major rumor surrounding his subject. He reports what some have said, but admits that it may or may not be true based on x, x, and y reasons. Bradford, on the other hand, chooses to regurgitate everything anyone has ever said, citing several "sources" (a la Us Weekly) without naming names.

She also manages to, for lack of a better term, screw up some fairly big details. She says at one point that Marilyn Monroe had two husbands, while it has been common knowledge for quite some time that she had three. (Bradford specifically forgets Monroe's non-famous husband that she married before becoming an actress; Joe Dimaggio and Arthur Miller, she of course remembers.) She also recounts a tale of JFK talking about assassination the day of his death, making finger guns and lurching into a crouch. But... wait a second. Hasn't Bradford spent numerous pages talking about how bad Jack's back was? If he couldn't pick up his own son, how could he spontaneously crouch down in a dramatic moment of play-acting?

It's just--fishy.

I'm not saying that the Kennedys were pure as driven snow. It's just that Bradford spins so much rumor that I can't really tell fact from fiction. She treats the rumored affair between Bobby Kennedy and Jackie as if it's pure fact, relying on "sources" and rumors spread by RFK's enemies. (Of which he had plenty.) However, numerous biographers have cited RFK as being too sanctimonious to approach infidelity. More still have admitted that, while it's quite possible that he did have an affair with Jackie, we just CAN'T know. (See: Evan Thomas.) This is a huge event for Bradford to just arbitrarily declare truthful. She seems incapable of admitting, "Well, there's no solid evidence but it's possible..." rather jumping to conclusion after conclusion.

Much of what she writes flies straight in the faces of other accounts I've read. So I must conclude that she picked and chose what she wanted to present as fact.

Look--there's a lot of fact here. But there's also a lot of murkiness, and sometimes, I suspect, fiction, even if it wasn't intentional on Bradford's part. The writing is really engaging, which is why I'm giving this three stars. (That, and the aforementioned fact. This isn't all made up, by a long shot! It's just not very well researched.)

So: read this, with that grain of salt I was talking about. And then check out some other Kennedy bios for greater detail and more objective writing.