Abstract
John F. Kennedy remains a vivid presence in the popular imagination almost sixty years after his assassination, yet we have had to wait until now for the first installment of a comprehensive biography, drawing on the rich holdings of the Kennedy Library in Boston, many of them only recently released. The first efforts at biography, by his aides Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Theodore Sorensen, were published within a few years of his death and cast his life in a roseate hue. But a reaction was inevitable, and twenty-five years later the revisionist tide crested in Thomas C. Reeves’s 1991 A Question of Character, which depicted the thirty-fifth president as a pathological philanderer and monster of narcissism. With this volume, Fredrik Logevall goes beyond the sterile debate between keepers of the flame and debunkers, offering a dispassionate, thoroughly documented account of Kennedy’s ascent to national prominence, set against the background of America’s emergence as a world power and the tumult of the early Cold War.
Logevall begins with a richly textured portrait of the wealthy, close-knit Boston Irish family that nurtured Kennedy—above all, his demanding father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. The elder Kennedy was a self-made and astute businessman who preserved his fortune by liquidating his assets on the eve of the 1929 stock market crash, and an ardent Democrat. Appointed by Franklin Roosevelt as Ambassador to the Court of Saint James, he proved an indefatigable isolationist and indeed an appeaser until the outbreak of the Second World War, and thereafter a standard-bearer for isolationist Democrats who hoped he would challenge FDR’s renomination in 1940 and keep the United States out of the conflict.
Young Jack was something of an anomaly in the family—bookish, dreamy, and plagued by ill health. But Logevall forces revisions to the myth that he was a reluctant politician, dragooned into the electoral ranks by paternal pressure after his older brother Joe Jr. was killed in a bombing mission. As Logevall demonstrates, Jack had dreamed of a career in public service before his brother’s death, and sounded out useful political contacts on his own initiative, with no need for prompting from his father. Logevall’s chapters on the run-up to war and the early stages of the conflagration treat the diverging views of father and son as a microcosm of the debate between interventionists and isolationists before Pearl Harbor, including a close reading of Jack’s senior thesis, published as Why England Slept, which was in part a defense of Joe Sr.’s views, but also praised Winston Churchill’s prescience over Munich. Breaking from his father’s politics (as Joe Jr., who sedulously parroted Sr.’s views, never did), Jack happened to preserve his future political viability.
But he also acted out of conviction. Logevall mines his diaries and extensive correspondence on his travels to demonstrate that JFK evinced an internationalist worldview from early manhood. On his trips to Europe and Asia, before and after the Second World War, he would take advantage of familial connections to meet local leaders as well as intellectuals, familiarizing himself in some depth with conditions abroad and their implications for American policy. From early on, his interest in public affairs was focused on foreign policy, and during the Second World War he confirmed an expansive view of America’s role in the world. He also conducted himself with remarkable bravery as a naval officer, and Logevall reconstructs the familiar story of PT 109 with skill and brio.
In 1946 the young war hero was elected to the House of Representatives, where he did not cut much of a figure. As Logevall notes, after the excitement of a tough electoral race, Kennedy found being a junior lawmaker boring, with the Democrats in the minority and the freshman Congressman expected to speak up for the local concerns of his working-class constituents. He was something of a playboy and a dilettante, but won election to the Senate in 1952, despite the Republican tide and the popularity of Dwight Eisenhower. Kennedy’s entrance into politics coincided with the emergence of domestic anti-communism as a political issue, and he did not cover himself in glory. Starting out as a relatively conservative Democrat, he was slow to break with Joe McCarthy, and he echoed the charges of the Right that Yalta had been a sellout to the Soviet Union. His twists and turns to avoid condemning the Wisconsin demagogue will make excruciating reading for his admirers, though Logevall notes that McCarthy was both a family friend and immensely popular with the Irish Catholics whose votes were crucial to Kennedy’s political fortunes.
The 1950s saw JFK move to the centre of his party as well as cement a political partnership with his younger brother Bobby, who emerged as his fixer and enforcer. They also saw him become a less reflexive Cold Warrior. Logevall, who made his reputation as a historian of the Vietnam War, chronicles the foreign trips that convinced Kennedy, not least in Indochina, that old-style colonialism was likely unsustainable. In Indochina, he speculated that the nationalist leader Ngo Dinh Diem might be the man of the future. He urged the French to reform their colonial administration, but stopped short of urging an American ultimatum.
Logevall concludes with an exciting depiction of the 1956 Democratic convention, at which presidential standard-bearer Adlai Stevenson, hoping to energize his campaign, allowed the convention to choose his running-mate. Kennedy ran, and came second, delivering a gracious concession speech that exposed him to a national audience. The book closes with Kennedy’s subsequent decision to seek the presidency in 1960.
The brisk, well-paced narrative leaves one eager for volume two. The fundamental question, of course, is how well Logevall explains Kennedy, his thoughts and actions. Much of the mystery remains, but that is perhaps inevitable with a man who compartmentalized his relationships so thoroughly. Still, Logevall brings us closer to a full understanding than we have come to before. His Kennedy, plagued by ill health, is aware of the fleeting nature of all things, including his own life. Perhaps as a result, he approaches things with a pragmatist’s detachment, reluctant to commit himself to any cause and assessing each situation from every possible angle, a quality that served him well in the White House. This may be inseparable from his coldly instrumental view of human relationships: Logevall confirms that Kennedy treated many, notably but not exclusively the women in his life, as disposable. This raises a further question which Logevall does not answer, a question as old as Machiavelli if not Thucydides, that of whether one can be an effective leader without a sliver of ice in one’s heart.