From a Washington Post obit by Michael S. Rosenwald headlined “Richard Whalen, biographer and presidential adviser, dies at 87”:

Richard J. Whalen, the author of a best-selling biography of political patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy who later served as a speechwriter on Richard M. Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign but quit after becoming disillusioned with the candidate, died in Yorktown, N.Y.

In 1962, Mr. Whalen’s editors at Fortune magazine assigned him a profile of Kennedy, the father of then-President John F. Kennedy. The elder Kennedy had made a fortune in various businesses and circulated at the highest levels of the political elite, but little was known about the arc of his life or how he operated behind the scenes.