The Last Lincolns

We know, of course, that Abraham Lincoln was murdered by John Wilkes Booth, but that terrible crime was only the beginning of the calamities and woe that plagued the Lincolns following the assassination. Tracing the family's descent from that fateful day to the modern era, The Last Lincolns unfolds the forgotten story of their troubles, which did not end with the death of the great president. They had barely begun. A mourning Mary Todd Lincoln is the figure in focus at the start of this riveting American tragedy. Hi-strong and irrational even during relatively happy years, Mary had survived the deaths of two sons only to be completely undone by her husband's killing. After an anguished decade of widowhood in which she lost a third son, Tad; spent money extravagantly while pleading with Congress for financial support; and imposed periods of exile upon herself as she searched fruitlessly for comfort in European resorts and spas -- Mary's eldest son, Robert, engineered her commitment to an insane asylum. Instead of uniting in grief following the president's death, the Lincoln family tore itself apart. In each succeeding generation, their misfortunes multiplied, as discord and disgrace beset the descendents of the 16th president. Robert's son, Abraham Lincoln II, whose prospects seemed limitless, died in 1890 of blood poisoning after poor medical care. In 1897, his sister, Jessie Lincoln, defied her father's wishes and eloped with a ne'er-do-well athlete, only the first in a series of marriages and illicit affairs. The next generation lived variations on the wasteful life of the idle rich. When asked what he did for a living, great-grandson Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith would reply, "I'm a spoiled brat." As a young woman, his sister Peggy delighted in flying airplanes over the Lincoln Memorial and, by the 1970s, had let her family's Vermont estate, Hildene, fall into disrepair. The Last Lincolns brings the story right up to the last generation of descendents: Robert Beckwith and his estranged wife, Annemarie. Bob believed Annemarie's son, born in 1968 and bearing the Lincoln name, was the product of an adulterous affair. Evidence -- uncovered here for the first time -- suggests that a scheme to inherit the Lincoln fortune was orchestrated by Beckwith's chauffeur, who may have been the notorious outlaw and skyjacker D.B. Cooper. The Last Lincolns is a compelling chronicle of the personal legacy of the president who could unite a nation, but not his own family. - Cover flap.