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 Entertainment | Books | July 2006 
What He Could Do for His Country
 Thurston Clarke - Wire services
| President Kennedy delivers his inaugural address in 1961. (AP Photo)
Two new looks at the president who challenged us to support any friend and oppose any foe.
LET EVERY NATION KNOW
John F. Kennedy in His Own Words
By Robert Dallek and Terry Golway
Sourcebooks. 289 pp. $29.95
JACK KENNEDY
The Education of a Statesman
By Barbara Leaming
Norton. 509 pp. $26.95 |
The generation of Americans who were teenagers and young adults when John F. Kennedy was inaugurated - the idealists who were the most likely to have asked what they could do for their country - is starting to grow old. As the lives that were inspired by JFK's presidency begin to slow, Kennedy may suffer in the opinion polls that have consistently placed him among the four or five greatest chief executives, ranking him up there with Washington, Lincoln and FDR despite his abbreviated presidency and lack of major legislative accomplishments. These books focus on the two outstanding features of his time in the White House - his rhetoric and his statesmanship - and together they make a convincing case against any demotion.
In Let Every Nation Know , Robert Dallek and Terry Golway contend that Kennedy's "inspirational rhetoric," more than his beauty, charm, wit or tragic death, accounts for his continued popularity. To establish this (and, as they acknowledge, "to win new converts to the Kennedy mystique among the millions of Americans who were born after 1963"), they have selected and analyzed 31 examples of his oratory. These include press conferences, campaign debates and his most important speeches, such as two classics in June 1963, his carefully prepared "peace speech" at American University (in which he reminded Americans and Russians of their shared humanity, saying, "We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal") and his largely extemporaneous televised address on civil rights the next day (in which he told Americans, "We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution"). Not a bad 48 hours' work.
The speeches chosen concern a range of topics: civil rights, the space program, Kennedy's Catholic faith, arms control, the importance of the arts in American life, the Cold War. They were written and delivered under different circumstances, and Kennedy's own contribution to them varied (as did that of his principal speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen). But most of these speeches assume that the American people are literate, conversant with their own history, want to be inspired and have "better angels" that JFK could summon forth; many ask Americans to make sacrifices, sometimes very specific ones; and any one of them is superior to any speech delivered by any of the presidents who have occupied the White House since 1963, with the exception of Lyndon B. Johnson's March 1965 "We Shall Overcome" speech and some of Ronald Reagan's best orations.
Dallek (the author of the splendid JFK biography An Unfinished Life ) and Golway (the author of Washington's General ) examine each example of Kennedy's rhetoric, from his 1960 campaign through to Dallas, in chapters that are arranged chronologically, provide historical context and quote the most noteworthy passages. (Unfortunately, they have not included a complete transcript of each speech.) The perhaps unintended result is a terse and judicious narrative that may be the best concise account of the Kennedy presidency ever written. But if their superb text is not enough to convince post-1963 Americans that JFK deserves to be ranked among the greatest presidents, the audio CD of his speeches that accompanies the book virtually makes the case on its own and will be a revelation to anyone whose familiarity with his oratory is limited to his magnificent inaugural address.
The Kennedy accomplishment at the heart of Barbara Leaming's Jack Kennedy is his statesmanship, most notably his adroit handling of the crises resulting from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's threat to deny the Western powers access to Berlin and his decision to install nuclear weapons in Cuba. The 1962 missile crisis came closer than any other Cold War confrontation to precipitating a nuclear war. It did not because Kennedy rejected the advice of some of his most trusted advisers, who urged him to launch a preemptive attack on Cuba, and instead placed a naval quarantine around the island, thereby leaving Khrushchev a way to back away from the nuclear precipice while saving face. A different president could have easily decided differently, triggering a nuclear exchange that would have left millions dead and visited a destruction on American cities immeasurably worse than the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Instead, JFK chose diplomacy.
Leaming, the author of biographies of Orson Welles and Katharine Hepburn, argues that he made this and other crucial foreign policy decisions because of his voracious reading habits as a teenager, his admiration for Winston Churchill, his experiences in London during the two years preceding World War II, the close and enduring friendships he formed with the young English aristocrats he met in London during this period - especially his friendship with David Ormsby Gore, which began a 25-year conversation about how the leader of a democratic nation should counter threats to its survival by a totalitarian state - and, finally, because of the wise counsel accorded to him by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and Ormsby Gore, who became the British ambassador to the United States during JFK's administration.
Leaming offers this thesis in an intellectual biography that encompasses Kennedy's entire life. Some of the early chapters seem padded, and she indulges in unnecessarily lengthy descriptions of Kathleen Kennedy's social life in pre-war London. But once John Kennedy becomes president, Leaming's narrative soars. She does a masterful job of weaving together his sordid private life, his statesmanship, his negotiations with the Soviets and his conversations with Ormsby Gore and Macmillan. So effectively does she build suspense over what decisions Kennedy will make that one reads on despite knowing the answers.
At times, though, Leaming oversells her case. She leaves the impression that Robert S. McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk and other senior advisers wielded little influence on JFK compared to his "kitchen cabinet" of Brits. Some of her remarks ("In Bermuda, Macmillan began the process of guiding [Kennedy] to act as a statesman") make him sound like a British puppet. Still, she wheels out some big guns to support these statements, quoting Robert F. Kennedy as saying that Ormsby Gore was "almost part of the government." She also discounts aspects of Kennedy's statesmanship that do not have an obvious antecedent in his prewar experiences in London, such as his interest in the emerging nations of the Third World and his brave and early denunciations of the French colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria. But these are cavils when weighed against her accomplishment: an intellectual biography of JFK that not only furthers our understanding of the forces shaping his character but also manages to be lively and suspenseful.
Thurston Clarke is the author of "Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America" and the forthcoming "A Prayer for Our Country: Robert Kennedy's Last Campaign." |
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