H-Diplo ROUNDTABLE XXII-37

H-Diplo ROUNDTABLE XXII-37 Fredrik Logevall. JFK: Coming of the American Century, 1917-1956. New York: Random House, 2020. ISBN: 9780812997132 (hardcover, $40.00). 3 May 2021 | https://hdiplo.org/to/RT22-37 Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii Contents Introduction by Jeffrey A. Engel, Southern Methodist University ...................................................................................................... 2 Review by Elizabeth Cobbs, Texas A&M University .............................................................................................................................. 5 Review by Mario Del Pero, Sciences Po Paris............................................................................................................................................ 7 Review by David Milne, University of East Anglia ................................................................................................................................. 10 Review by Michael S. Neiberg, United States Army War College ................................................................................................... 12 Response by Fredrik Logevall, Harvard University ............................................................................................................................... 15 H-Diplo Roundtable XXII- Introduction by Jeffrey A. Engel, Southern Methodist University Forever young. Thus forever full of possibility. John Fitzgerald Kennedy fits both. Perpetually caught in the prime of his life, head of a young family and a favorite of his nation’s youthful (and plentiful) post-war generation, like those who had been lost in the generation before him, he shall not age, as we must. He died at a mere 46 years old, by far the youngest Oval Office holder ever to have passed from this earth. What might have been, we invariably ask, of a life cut so short? Might the long American war in Vietnam been avoided? Might nuclear disarmament have become more than the dream he espoused in his final months? More realistically if less optimistically, might Congress have passed the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965 in particular without the moral weight of his martyrdom? Would Kennedy have even tried? We must wait to learn Fredrik Logevall’s learned answer to those unknowable questions, at least until the publication of the second volume of his landmark new biography of John Kennedy. Volume one, the subject of this roundtable review, leaves readers with Kennedy’s decision to seek the White House. It leaves us, therefore, at the climax, and thus the conclusion, of his youth. Everything that came before was pre-presidential. Everything after, even the years immediately preceding his presidency, comes with the expectation of Camelot, and for us if not for him, foreknowledge of its end. This is therefore a book about the youth of the president considered ever-young in our historical memory. Nepotism afforded him a young Attorney General and proximity a National Security Adviser slightly younger too, but when Kennedy looked around the room during the Cuban Missile Crisis or as angry police batons met freedom riders down south, nearly all the faces he saw had seen more years than his. Small wonder “vigor” remains his historical hallmark, even as Logevall and other biographers reveal more and more of Kennedy’s physical disabilities. His youth was not only chronological, but performative. We should pay close attention to the praise these four distinguished reviewers heap upon Logevall’s work. Collectively they have many titles to their credit. Uniformly they recognize in Logevall’s biography something remarkable indeed. “Exciting,” Elisabeth Cobbs calls it, as impossible to put down as the salty snacks we know we should resist, but can’t. The book is “Elegant,” “rich,” and “sharp,” in Mario Del Pero’s description, offering a “graceful writing style [that] is particularly tailored, indeed perfect, for the biographical genre as this stunning volume one of his long awaited JFK clearly proves.” The applause doesn’t end there. “A major contribution to our understanding not only of John Kennedy but of the United States in the twentieth century more generally,” Michael Neiberg writes of Logevall’s tome. David Milne dubs it merely, yet profoundly, a “model how to write political biography.” Each found a favorite aspect of the book, and the biographer. Cobbs praised in particular Logevall’s judicious restraint. “Logevall’s historical sleuthing is absorbing in itself, and reflects the author’s own scholarly rectitude,” she wrote. “Logevall fully documents negative claims, carefully introduces both corroborating and contrary facts, wisely adjudicates the evidence, and renders verdicts in moderate, convincing terms. He earns the reader’s trust, which is no mean accomplishment at a time when the public is bombarded with hyperbolic praise or damnation of their heroes. One relaxes, comforted not to hear the whir of an axe grinding off stage.” Such praise is warranted, and indeed each contributor’s ensuing critiques and quibbles appear less from desire than duty. “H-Diplo roundtables tend to fall flat when reviewers merely offer praise,” Milne notes in justification for offering anything else. Del Pero offers a sharp word for Logevall’s depiction of Joseph Kennedy, the family’s hard-driving core, considering his portrait “a bit underdeveloped.” This apparent flaw nonetheless subtly reveals the silver lining of one of the Logevall’s main themes. “Throughout this first volume, Jack Kennedy’s autonomy – first and foremost from his father – are constantly stressed and discussed,” Del Pero notes, “although they fully occupy the narrative’s center stage only when his political career finally took off, with his first electoral campaign, and victory, for a House seat in 1946.” Kennedy was his own man even in his formative youth, Logevall stresses throughout the book, chipping away at the strong historiographic trend to consider © 2021 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US 2 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII- Kennedy’s entire political career the product of his older brother’s failure to return from World War II.1 Joe Sr., we are often told, simply turned his ambition and attention to the next heir in line, but Logevall’s Jack, who was smart enough to take the old man’s financial backing and make use of his rolodex, already had a mind of his own. It was a mind shaped by travel, war, and repeated near-death experiences, Neiberg’s review notes. A peripatetic playboy, the young John Kennedy had both means and access to the wider world as it barreled, seemingly inexorably, towards a Second World War. Unwilling to abide his father’s hope of appeasing rapacious dictators, Germany’s Adolf Hitler in particular, Kennedy was instead “his own thinker, and a deep one at that,” Neiberg observes. Subsequent combat, both in the literal sense and against the maladies seemingly intent upon ending Kennedy’s life even before his untimely demise, sharpened his sensibilities even further, and Neiberg notes in particular Logevall’s ability to reveal the magnitude of hitherto unexplored moments of Kennedy’s pre-presidential journey. One longs to have been along for the ride when the book’s subject shared burgers and an overnight train compartment with an equally young and ambitious new congressman from California named Richard Nixon. Milne’s critique, which is again offered amidst broader praise, concerns Logevall’s overall assessment of his subject’s strategic acumen. JFK saw the world unlike few Americans ever could, but did he really see it differently than most? “He espoused the views of a pugnacious Cold Warrior, criticising Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower for timidity and declining to distance himself from Senator Joseph McCarthy, even as the Wisconsin senator’s accusations grew increasingly deranged,” Milne writes. Most damning of all, “Kennedy believed in what became known as the domino theory,” the Eisenhower-era formulation of Communist expansion that would forever after color any discussion of Kennedy’s own policies towards Southeast Asia. Would he have eventually exited Vietnam after taking his first tentative strides, displaying an intellectual flexibility not unlike his fundamental reexamination of Soviet-American relations that occurred during his presidency? We shall never know, and will have to wait for Logevall’s assessment for volume two. These are thoughtful observations to be sure, but such critiques and questions ultimately fade from view amidst the blizzard of each contributor’s effusive claim for Logevall’s accomplishment. I shall offer one more: if volume two is anything like the first, and given Logevall’s long track-record of brilliance we have no reason to expect otherwise, his portrait of the 35th President of the United States will undoubtedly garner the compliment biographers most yearn to hear: ‘definitive.’2 No one hereafter will deign to write on Kennedy’s youth or presidency without consulting this voluminous study of his life. Which is not to say we shall, with Logevall’s volume two, have witnessed the end of Kennedy scholarship. The life of any leader who is so thoroughly linked with possibility and promise will forever generate new interpretations, conclusions, what- ifs and reflection. Those new works, moreover, will inevitably attract readers equally filled with the wonder of what might have been. No, we do not know how Kennedy scholarship will ultimately end, but we now

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