Think you know JFK? This biography will open your eyes
It is the singular achievement of this magnificent new biography of John Fitzgerald Kennedy that it has taken one of the most scrutinised lives of the 20th century and made it feel fresh. Harvard historian Fredrik Logevall scrapes away the encrusted layers of myth, rumour and cliché; the result is a generous portrait of the young Kennedy, one that is attentive to his contradictions and weaknesses even as it seeks to understand what it was that made him so extraordinary.
Making Kennedy new is no mean feat. JFK was the first television president and his appearances on the small screen fostered an intimacy with an American public, who then experienced the unifying trauma of his public murder. Ever since, adherents of the cult of JFK’s “Camelot” have competed with the gossip peddlers who rake through his promiscuous private life, not to mention the conspiracies about his assassination.
One of the ways Logevall gets away from all this noise is by dividing his biography into two. This first volume takes us from Kennedy’s birth in 1917 to 1956, when he was shaping up for his run to become the youngest ever president. The events that define the Kennedy presidency – the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination in Dealey Plaza, Dallas – are not part of the story told here. This is liberating, as it allows the reader to get to know the young Kennedy from the cradle up, rather than backwards from the grave. It also gives Logevall the time and space to place his subject in his full social and political context, something one expects from the author of the brilliant Embers of War, which unpacked the origins of the war in Vietnam.
It’s a story that begins in the Irish famine which drove Kennedy’s great-grandparents to seek a better life in Boston, where both grandfathers became influential Democrat politicians: PJ Kennedy was a state senator and party power broker, while John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald was a charismatic congressman and mayor of Boston. These two influential families were brought together by the marriage of Joe Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald. Jack was the second of their nine children.
Joe, the demanding patriarch, looms over this book as he did over his children’s lives. At Harvard his Irishness was met with Protestant snobbery, but being excluded from the elite only fired him up, and in the freewheeling world of Twenties finance he made himself rich through the then-legal practice of insider trading. He got out of the market just before the Wall Street Crash and Logevall estimates that in 1935 he was worth $180 million, the equivalent of $3.6 billion (￡2.7 billion) today.
The Kennedy family were compulsive letter writers and their voices are brought to life by liberal quoting from their correspondence. It reveals a life of remarkable privilege, in which wealth of experience was prized as highly as the millions in the bank. The young Jack was an indifferent student, scruffy and forgetful but sharp of wit, sometimes to the point of cruelty. He was a gifted sportsman but had serious problems with his spine, and suffered from colitis and Addison’s disease, and was frequently admitted to hospital. On a number of occasions he was so bad the last rites were read.
His father’s money and influence allowed Kennedy to be an eyewitness to history: he attended the papal coronation of Pius XII, met King George VI and had tea with a 12-year-old Princess Elizabeth, witnessed a Mussolini rally in Italy and was pelted with rocks by storm troopers in Hitler’s Munich. He watched his hero Winston Churchill deliver rousing speeches in the Commons against the Nazi menace, he covered the founding conference of the United Nations as a reporter, and met Truman and Eisenhower at the Potsdam Conference in 1945.
The central drama of Kennedy’s early life is how he emerged from his father’s shadow (although he unthinkingly adopted his habit of philandering). Joe Kennedy’s own political career was ended by his commitment to isolationism. As one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s most important donors, Joe had secured the post of Ambassador to the United Kingdom. There were rumours of a presidential run. Then the collapse of the policy of appeasement and Joe’s ill-disguised scepticism about Britain’s ability to hold out against the Nazi war machine caused his reputation to sour. He never recovered from accusations of cowardice and defeatism.
While Jack’s older brother parroted the paternal line (seasoned with anti-Semitism), Jack understood his father’s mistakes and learnt from them. He inherited from his mother an intellectual curiosity at odds with his father’s hard streak of philistinism. At Harvard he explored the reasons behind Britain’s policy of appeasement in his senior thesis, which was subsequently published as Why England Slept, a book that, for the work of a 23-year-old, was astute.
When the US entered the war, he volunteered for the navy, and was decorated for helping save his crew after their torpedo boat was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer. The account of Kennedy’s actions, which included a four-hour swim in which he towed to safety a wounded member of his crew by a strap held between his teeth, became the founding story of his political career: the war hero who put others first.
When his older brother was killed on a daring mission to fly an explosive-packed plane into a Nazi rocket base, Jack became the focus of Joe’s thwarted political ambitions. Aided by his father’s wealth, Kennedy was elected to Congress at only 29, and to the Senate six years later. Yet, in Logevall’s words, he “transcended the narrow, selfish vision of his father and elder brother, in the form of a pluralist, liberal internationalism – idealistic yet infused with pragmatic realism – that would in time resonate with a broad cross section of Americans.”
What makes JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 such a superior biography is this sense of the larger stakes. Logevall has the biographer’s ability to pick out the details that shaped the man, but also the historian’s drive to explain why Kennedy so captured and shaped the American postwar moment. Kennedy continues to live large in the national imagination: a recent poll by YouGov had him as the third greatest president, behind only George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. This is not due to his achievements in the White House, where his domestic and foreign policy met with mixed success, but because of what he represented: a youthful, confident America that, while often self-regarding, was fundamentally outward facing and optimistic.
In this moment of presidential debasement, little wonder that there is such nostalgia for JFK. Thanks to Logevall’s work, we can now see him with clearer eyes.
JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century,? 1917–1956 is published by Viking at ￡30, ebook ￡12.99. To order your copy for ￡25, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop
