President Kennedy's Promises

By Anna M Carroll and Anna M. Carroll

In 1963, shortly before his assassination, President Kennedy promises Mariska Bakunin, a poverty-stricken Chicago Ukrainian child, he will find her father lost in one of the massive mental hospitals of mid-twentieth century America. Kennedy also promises the nation he will close these institutions as they have imploded into horror.Kegs Addams, wealthy daughter of a federal judge and a mother who was mentally-ill and disappeared when Kegs was six years old, shows up in Mariska's neighborhood as the Welfare worker. Kegs wants to escape the chilling memory of her mother. She tried to accomplish this by mastering foreign languages. Now, graduating from college, she plans to enter President Kennedy's Foreign Service and become an American diplomat. When her father's illness delays her plans to enter the Foreign Service, Kegs reluctantly takes the Welfare job to help her overburdened best friend, Maggie Cahan. Mayor Richard J. Daley's 1963 Chicago is ablaze with Kennedy's New Frontier, Puerto Ricans arriving in the first airborne migration, African-Americans fleeing Jim Crow's South, hill people leaving the depleted coalfields of Appalachia for jobs in the city, and Gypsy roamers settling down. New waves of the uprooted are settling in the city with earlier refugees from war-ravaged Europe. Mariska Bakunin and her pals: ten-year-old Jes s Montez, a Puerto Rican boy trying to assume a man's responsibilities; and Nelda Anthony, a mute, failure-to-thrive Gypsy child of unknown age, shadow Kegs as she wanders through their neighborhood. From those she comes to know in the neighborhood, Kegs learns the promise and price of flight from one's homeland. From the young psychiatrist, Dr. Dan Shannon, Kegs learns the high cost of fleeing from oneself and how the human mind protects and sometimes fails its owner. President Kennedy's Promises takes the reader on a road trip through a neighborhood of a major American city, the mind of a young woman struggling to come of age, and the ties that bind the social classes.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1544095759
• ISBN13: 9781544095752
• Release Date: May 2017
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 310 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"