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Captains and the Kings is a 1972 historical novel by Taylor Caldwell chronicling the rise to wealth and power of an Irish immigrant, Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh, who emigrates as a penniless teenager to the United States, along with his younger brother and baby sister, only for their parents to die shortly afterwards. Joseph Armagh befriends a Lebanese immigrant, and both are taken under the tutelage of an American plutocrat. An inter-generational saga focusing on the themes of the American dream, discrimination and bigotry in American life, and of history as made by a cabal of the rich and powerful, through Armagh's attempt to make his eldest son, who eventually becomes a senator, the first Catholic President of the United States. It was one of the top 10 best-sellers of 1972, as ranked by The New York Times Best Seller list. Caldwell drew heavily on aspects of the Kennedy family, John D. Rockefeller and Howard Hughes, although she did write in the epilogue that the "Armagh family" is fictional and was not meant to lampoon nor criticize.