"April 2018"--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-353) and index.

"While Joe Kennedy was grooming his sons for the White House and the Senate, his Stanford-educated daughter, Eunice was hijacking her father's fortune and her brothers' political power to engineer one of the great civil rights movements of our time. Eunice Kennedy Shriver is the reason we no longer lock away children and adults with intellectual disabilities--that we educate them, employ them, and help them thrive. Her compassion was born of rage: at the medical establishment that had had no answers for her sister Rosemary, at her revered but dismissive father, whose vision for his family did not extend beyond his sons, and at a government that failed to deliver on America's promise of equality. In [this book], Pulitzer Prize-winner Eileen McNamara brings Eunice Kennedy Shriver out from her brothers' shadows to reveal an officious, cigar-smoking, fast-driving, indefatigable woman who was a shrewd player in the careers of lack, Bobby, and Ted, a complicated wife to Sargent, an oft-neglected daughter of Rose, and a fiercely devoted but emotionally aloof mother to her five children. Granted access to never-before-seen private papers, including the scrapbooks Eunice kept as a schoolgirl in prewar London, McNamara paints an extraordinary portrait of a woman both ahead of her time and out of step with it: the visionary founder of Special Olympics, a devout Catholic in a secular age, and a formidable woman whose impact on American society was longer-lasting than that of any of the Kennedy men."--Dust jacket.