An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963
An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 By Robert Dallek
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company 2003 | 848 Pages | ISBN: 0316172383 | PDF | 3 MB
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company 2003 | 848 Pages | ISBN: 0316172383 | PDF | 3 MB
It's hard to believe that someone could find anything new to say about John F. Kennedy, but Dallek succeeds in this riveting and well-documented biography. Despite plentiful revelations about Kennedy's private life, the book is very much a political biography, which keenly explores Kennedy's grasp of modern political campaigning. (The account of how the Kennedy machine managed the issue of his Catholicism in the 1960 West Virginia primary is particularly telling.) But he wasn't always sure what to do with power once he had it. His ideas on domestic policy were surprisingly conventional, and his foreign policy seems jingoistic. Kennedy, however, had the ability to change his mind—no small accomplishment for a President—and by the time he died he was a considerably more sophisticated leader. One need not accept Dallek's fanciful, if familiar, conclusion—that, had Kennedy lived, he might have pulled the United States out of Vietnam—to think that J.F.K.'s political career was a work in progress that was arrested too soon.