John F kennedy: An unfinished Life 1917-1963
by Robert Dallek
(Allen Lane)
Bill Clinton: An American Journey
by Nigel Hamilton
(Century)
In the Kennedy years Washington was seized with an enthusiasm for public service the United States has not seen since. This stemmed directly from John F Kennedy himself, and later from his brother Bobby, and it is this idealism — not the Camelot glamour and Marilyn Monroe and the rest of it — that remains at the heart of the legend.
Yet, by the 40th anniversary of his assassination on November 22 1963, even Kennedy has been turned into just another celeb with feet of clay. Today it is the philandering, the Mafia connections and all the other hypocrisies of what Seymour Hersh called the dark side of Camelot that too many of us think of first.
Barely pausing after completing an admirable two-volume biography of Lyndon B Johnson, Robert Dallek has now turned to the man who put Johnson on the Democratic ticket in 1960.
There must be more books about the Kennedys than about any other family in American history, and many will wonder if there is anything new to say. The good news is that there is, and while nothing will quite supersede the reverential tomes by people who were actually there, Dallek has produced easily the best and most objective modern account of JFK.
Dallek’s selling point is that he has had access to previously unreleased records in the Kennedy Library in Boston, which detail the full misery of the president’s health problems — as well as the immense efforts to which he went to conceal them. How one responds to the mass of detail about Kennedy’s ailments, operations, hospitalisations and medications will depend in part on whether one sees Kennedy more as a scoundrel who lied to the voters about ailments that would make him unelectable today, or more as a dreadfully afflicted man who overcame his indignities to rise to the highest seat of power. On November 22 1963, though, it is appropriate to record that were it not for a back brace, which held him erect, his head would not have provided such a clear target for the third shot that ended his life.
If Dallek perhaps goes out of his way to underplay the genuine sense of newness and excitement that Kennedy ignited, he nevertheless provides a very balanced account of the famous Thousand Days, stressing the limited domestic achievements of the presidency and the distinctly mixed record in foreign affairs. What would have happened had Kennedy lived is, of course, both a fascinating and pointless topic for discussion.
On Cuba, suggests Dallek, Kennedy was on a radical learning curve. The Bay of Pigs was a disgraceful episode, urged on — topically, in the post-Iraq context — by advisers and exiles who exaggerated the facts. At the time of his death, Dallek suggests, Kennedy could have been moving towards a rapprochement with Cuba.
The great unknowable, of course, is how Kennedy might have handled Vietnam, which was the defining political experience of Bill Clinton’s generation and which therefore forms the backdrop to a large section of Nigel Hamilton’s biography. Hamilton’s book takes Clinton only to the threshold of his presidency.
Clinton is a man of paradoxes, and Hamilton (who has also written a successful book on the young JFK) delves into all of them. There are those who see Clinton as he sees himself, as a moderniser who reshaped his party and the role of government in changed times. Then there are those who see him as an emblematic politician of an essentially depoliticised era.
The conventional view of Clinton is that he is a bad man but was a good president. Rather similar to the general verdict these days on John Kennedy, in fact. In both cases there are few who can agree on exactly how these two contrasting judgements can be meshed together, even now. — Â