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John F. Kennedy: A Biography |
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John F. Kennedy: A Biography
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by Michael O'Brien
Sales Rank: 58680
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Discount: 77 %
$14.18
At Amazon
on 4-14-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 992 pages
Published by: Thomas Dunne Books; 1st U.S. Ed edition February 24, 2005
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0312281293
ASIN: B0012BR8MY
Book Dimensions:
9.1 x 6.6 x 2.2 inches
Weighs: 3 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
Publicity for this book claims that until now there has been "no first-class modern biography that takes advantage of the huge volume of new material released from government archives and the JFK Library": somewhere there is a copywriter who missed Robert Dallek's magisterial and bestselling An Unfinished Life (2003), Dallek having been the first Kennedy biographer since Doris Kearns Goodwin to enjoy full, unrestricted access to all materials in the Kennedy Library. That being said, retired University of Wisconsin–Fox Valley History professor O'Brien (Vince: A Personal Biography of Vince Lombardi) offers a serviceable consideration of JFK that's as much a survey of the literature as it is a biography. The majority of O'Brien's footnotes refer to published sources, and this is reflected in O'Brien's prose. For example, his chapter on PT-109 is full of quotations from and allusions to the writings and conclusions of such authors as Robert Donovan, Joan and Clay Blair, and Nigel Hamilton. The estimates and guesstimates of these writers, plus others, are measured and compared, and then O'Brien sums up with his own analysis of JFK's adventure in the Pacific. One thousand pages of this makes for a singularly inclusive—though at times exhausting—summary of JFK scholarship past and present. 16 pages of b&w photographs not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
"Where is the heart in the man?," a contemporary of John F. Kennedy asked, and more than four decades and several hundred books later, it remains a good question. Although Michael O'Brien never satisfactorily answers it, no one else has either, and his diligent, exhaustive, nearly thousand-page, decade-in-the-making biography provides more evidence that this intensely private man, who was so adept at compartmentalizing his friends and emotions, may have placed his heart in a lock box without a key.
Unlike other recent Kennedy biographers (most notably Robert Dallek in his 2003 An Unfinished Life), O'Brien offers no new scandals or revelations. Instead, he lays out every major and minor dispute surrounding Kennedy's life, then presents the theories and interpretations offered by such diverse authors as Dallek, Herbert Parmet and Nigel Hamilton. O'Brien, a retired History professor at the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley, weighs the evidence, considers earlier authors' conclusions and renders a judgment that is usually thoughtful and convincing, sometimes tossing a bouquet to the winner along the lines of "Biographer Nigel Hamilton has provided the most richly detailed account of Kennedy's courtship with [the Danish beauty Inga] Arvad."
Considering the number of Kennedy books that are in our future, it may be rash to credit anyone with having the last word on anything, but it is difficult to imagine anyone improving on some of O'Brien's Solomonic rulings. He refutes allegations that Kennedy bought the 1960 West Virginia primary, pointing out that the FBI, the West Virginia attorney general and the Charleston Gazette all investigated the election, and none "uncovered any noteworthy evidence of wrongdoing by Kennedy's campaign." He reminds anyone tempted to dismiss Kennedy as a lightweight confection of charm and beauty that, by and large, "it wasn't John Kennedy who downgraded issues and upgraded charm" but the media and the public. He is particularly good on the subject of Rose Kennedy, scolding her critics for failing to recognize that "hands-on mothering was not fashionable in her day" and noting that then-popular theories cautioned mothers not to demonstrate physical affection for their children. After considering the evidence that Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage was the work of ghostwriters (especially wordsmith Theodore Sorensen), he concludes that "Kennedy deeply believed he wrote enough of Profiles to claim real authorship. He may have been mistaken in his judgment, but there is no evidence he tried to deceive. He could accept the Pulitzer Prize with a clear conscience."
Unfortunately, readers wishing to explore the basis for judgments like these will discover that O'Brien's publisher, St. Martin's, has decided that footnotes are a quaint anachronism and has excised them from the massive final edition of John F. Kennedy. In their place is a sniveling note blaming "length and production constraints" for their omission and identifying a Web site where they can be downloaded. Anyone who is unsatisfied with this arrangement should search out a set of the bound galleys sent to reviewers; these "constraints" did not prevent footnotes from being included in them.
At times, O'Brien smothers his verdicts with unnecessary details. He includes excerpts from a banal telephone conversation between JFK and Arvad, quotations from favorable reviews of one of JFK's favorite books (a biography of the 19th-century British statesman Lord Melbourne) and the revelation that when Sen. Joseph McCarthy visited the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port in July 1949, he "arrived at Cape Cod on a Northeast Airlines flight."
Other details are more telling. The fierce criticisms that Kennedy and Sorensen lodged against an authorized 1960 biography by historian James MacGregor Burns are a catalogue of Kennedy's weaknesses: a detachment that some might construe as a lack of moral passion ("the impression should never be given that he does not believe deeply in what he says," Sorensen wrote in his critique), his timidity in dealing with McCarthy ("implies it is a much greater issue in his life than it actually has been"), the appearance that he was not deeply religious ("not true" and "certainly unverifiable") and the state of his health. O'Brien slams Sorensen for having "seriously distorted the truth by insisting to Burns that Kennedy was not plagued by illness at Choate" and notes that after this fusillade, Burns made almost two dozen changes in the manuscript, "some of them major."
O'Brien's book suggests that there may be little new to learn about the life of John F. Kennedy but that his life still has plenty to teach us. (The same lessons can be gleaned from Parmet and Dallek's shorter, more elegant biographies.) Some passages in John F. Kennedy are such a reproach to the current state of affairs that they leap from the page. We learn, for example, that JFK had a "graceful command of language" and was "invariably sharp, sparkling, and supremely confident" when he answered reporters' questions. Before meeting with a hostile audience of Protestant ministers in Houston during the 1960 campaign, he vetoed suggestions that their questions be screened, even though the event was being televised, saying that it would make it "seem too contrived." O'Brien also reminds us that Kennedy held 64 press conferences during his abbreviated term and "avidly read major newspapers" throughout the day. His administration "opened itself to the press" and "released everything that could be safely released." After meeting with Kennedy at the White House, one newspaper publisher remarked, "I was amazed. He did not dodge a single question." O'Brien writes that Kennedy felt so strongly about his responsibility for the 1961 Bay of Pigs catastrophe that he asked Sorensen, "How could I have been so far off base?" By accepting the blame, O'Brien writes, "Kennedy earned respect from both career [civil] servants and the public."
None of these attributes is part of some Kennedy DNA that can never be replicated, and there is no reason why, if the American people demanded them in a leader again, they could not have them. That O'Brien's book reminds us of this is enough in itself to recommend it, particularly to younger readers to whom this may be news.
Reviewed by Thurston Clarke
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Reader Reviews
This review is from: John F. Kennedy: A Biography (Hardcover)
The very thought astonishes: Almost 42 years have now passed since President John F. Kennedy was slain at age 46 by an assassin's bullet on that freeway entrance ramp in Dallas. To those of a certain age, it seems like only yesterday. Is 42 years enough historical distance to allow an unbiased account of his life and his presidency? Michael O'Brien, a retired history professor from the University of Wisconsin and biographer of several other political figures from the recent past (Philip Hart, Theodore Hesburgh, Joseph McCarthy) has made the effort in this massive (905-page) account of Kennedy's life. It is detailed almost to the point of overwhelming the reader with data; it will probably --- perhaps this is a validation of O'Brien's effort at impartiality -- both please and outrage just about everyone, whether friend or foe of his subject. O'Brien stresses Kennedy's insatiable thirst for information about every problem that came his way, his willingness to listen to everyone whose advice he thought might be worth hearing, and his decisiveness once his mind was made up. He also emphasizes Kennedy's tendency to allow political considerations to color important decisions and the wide gulf that often separated what really went on in his administration from what the public was deliberately led to believe. One of the author's tactics is to assemble a motley chorus of historians, politicians, journalists and acquaintances whose on-the-record public comments tend to back up his own interpretations. Most of the time he will summarize all sides of an important question and then, in cases where controversy still persists, allow Kennedy the benefit of the doubt. For example, O'Brien concludes that Kennedy's Pulitzer-winning book PROFILES IN COURAGE was not entirely ghost-written, as his detractors have claimed, though it did benefit from the work of several other wordsmiths and researchers. Questions of relative emphasis arise as one reads. Kennedy's lifelong history of serious illness is traced in great detail, as is also the influence on him of his imperious father and his ambitious brother Bobby, both important threads in Kennedy's story. But O'Brien gives equal if not greater weight to an exhaustive account of Kennedy's voracious sexual appetite, devoting several full chapters to it and threading it through other sections of his narrative as well. This seems overdone. It would be a shame if public perception of this truly probing and informative biography were to be based mainly on its laundry list of JFK's bed partners. The 1963 assassination itself, too, is dispatched in a couple of pages at the very end of the book. Given O'Brien's penchant for thorough research and multiple interpretations of events, one wonders why he simply ignored the controversy around the event itself and its subsequent effect on world history. One answer might be that no room could be found for such things in this behemoth of a book -- but room might well have been made if less space had been devoted to trivia about his sex life, his dinner parties, and whose job it was to cut his toenails. The author's industrious digging, while often clogging his narrative with unnecessary detail, also turns up insightful quotations that sum up a situation in a few words (Jacqueline Kennedy on her husband's family: "They never relax, even when they're relaxing." A staffer on JFK: "I never heard of a President who wanted to know so much."). O'Brien does not gloss over Kennedy's politically inspired reluctance to denounce Joseph McCarthy, the unprincipled Red-hunting Wisconsin demagogue, or his initial timidity in ducking a leadership role in the civil rights struggle --- but he does give JFK credit for later reversing himself on the latter issue. There is constant emphasis on the young President's wit, charm and youthful energy. One of O'Brien's chorus of historians sums up the author's own viewpoint: "To a large extent, his style was as important as his substance." The book's size has caused the publisher to eliminate O'Brien's footnotes. If you want to consult them you can either go online to the publisher's website or write to the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. It might be worth the trouble. --- Reviewed by Robert Finn
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John F. Kennedy: A Biography
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