Inside the Kennedy Compound
How a small Cape Cod town became intertwined with one of America’s most famous political families
IN HER BESTSELLING nonfiction debut, White House by the Sea: A Century of the Kennedys at Hyannis Port (Scribner), senior features editor Kate Storey frames the tale of one of America’s most celebrated political dynasties around their idyllic summer home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. “I’ve always been very interested in stories with a strong sense of place,” Storey says. Before taking her current position at Rolling Stone, she was a staff writer for Esquire,
reporting on a wide range of subjects that included the rise and fall of George, John F. Kennedy Jr.’s magazine on politics and pop culture in the Nineties. The stories she unearthed there inspired Storey to go deeper into the Kennedys’ history, and soon she was exploring the unique charms that have drawn generation after generation in their family to Hyannis Port, the small town on Cape Cod where patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. first bought property in the 1920s. Through meticulous archival research and interviews with more than 120 sources — including 12 members of the Kennedy family — Storey learned about everything from the white-pine planks of the houses in Hyannis Port to the visits in more recent years from Oprah Winfrey, Taylor Swift, and other celebrities who have come to enjoy the Kennedys’ view of Nantucket Sound for themselves. The result is a book that one review praised as a “treasure trove of interesting, amusing, and poignant stories and anecdotes.” “I really like stories that allow us to see someone we think we know through a different lens,” Storey adds.