Opening paragraphs.............

The immense wealth and security of the Kennedy family in twentieth-century America must be measured against the horrid poverty of their immediate ancestors.  For those who lived, worked, and died on the subsistence farms of mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, life itself hung on the annual harvest of a single crop - the potato, which was the basic food for much of the country.  A family had to survive an entire year on those pulled the previous fall.  If a new crop failed, as it did in what's known as the Great Famine, the people starved.

-Chris Matthews,  Bobby Kennedy:  A Raging Spirit