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

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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

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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 know from whence it will hereafter begin.

Participants:

Fredrik Logevall is Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs and Professor of History at Harvard University. He most recent books are JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 (Random House, 2020); and, with Campbell Craig, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity, rev. ed. (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2020). His book Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (Random House, 2012), won the

1 See, for example, Robert Dallek, John K. Kennedy, An Unfinished Life 1917-1963 (New York: Penguin Books, 2004) or Alan Brinkley, John F. Kennedy (New York: Times Books, 2012).

2 To cite but two amidst his numerous publications and even greater roster of accolades, Embers of War: the Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012) received the Pulitzer Prize, for example, while Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) garnered the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations Stuart L. Bernath Prize.

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Pulitzer Prize for History and the Francis Parkman Prize, among other awards. A native of Stockholm, Sweden, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Jeffrey A. Engel is the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.

Elizabeth Cobbs is the Melbern G. Glasscock Professor of U.S. History at Texas A&M University and author of American Umpire.

Mario Del Pero is Professor of International History and Head of Graduate Studies for History at SciencesPo Paris. He is currently writing a book on a group of Texan evangelical missionaries in early Cold War Italy.

David Milne is based at the University of East Anglia and is the author of America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (Hill and Wang, 2008) and Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (FSG, 2015). He is currently writing a biography of the Chicago Tribune journalist, Sigrid Schultz, for Oxford University Press.

Michael S. Neiberg is Professor of History and Chair of War Studies at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His published work specializes on the First and Second World Wars in global context. The Wall Street Journal named his Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I (Harvard University Press, 2010) one of the five best books ever written about that war. In October 2016 Oxford University Press published his Path to War, a history of American responses to the Great War in Europe, 1914-1917 and in July 2017 Oxford published his Concise History of the Treaty of Versailles. In 2017 he was awarded the Médaille d’Or du Rayonnement Culturel from La Renaissance Française, an organization founded by French President Raymond Poincaré in 1915 to keep French culture alive during the First World War.

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Review by Elizabeth Cobbs, Texas A&M University

JFK’s Café Américain

The archetypal American hero is an anti-hero. An unsentimental loner. “I stick my neck out for nobody,” Humphrey Bogart tells the French gendarme in Casablanca (1942). Ironic and self-deprecating, the most interesting man in the world makes ladies swoon and gentlemen throw back their shoulders. His allure lies in their suspicion—no, hope—that a noble heart beats underneath that immaculate white dinner jacket.

John F. Kennedy has similarly fascinated generations of scholars and popular readers. The 35th president mirrored the panache, wit, and nonchalant sex appeal of Bogart’s Rick Blaine. Yet mirrors reverse reality. Kennedy professed to stick his neck out for others, leading wary observers to suspect his debonair exterior hid a cynical heart—and hope it did not.

So, for example, we wonder if Kennedy genuinely felt for people of color, or was merely forced into a corner on civil rights. Whether he believed his own anti-imperialist rhetoric, or used it to cloak an American empire. Whether his endorsement of the 1963 Equal Pay Act reflected true respect for women, or if he was just another shallow cad. Whether he would have ended or escalated the tragic war in Vietnam.

I consumed Fredrik Logevall’s exciting, two-part biography like a bag of potato chips that is gone too soon. This initial volume examines the first thirty-nine years of Kennedy’s short life, and so does not address questions that assumed primary importance during his presidency, like the above. Instead, it plumbs questions about him as a younger man that reveal the development of his character. Did Kennedy act prudently and selflessly as captain of a patrol boat in the Pacific during World War II, or take unnecessary risks with sailors’ lives and accept undue glory afterwards? Did he write Profiles in Courage, or hang another man’s Pulitzer Prize citation on his wall?3 Was he his own person, or mostly his father’s creation? And speaking of his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., did the family millions flow from bootlegged whiskey and illegal stock manipulation or did they merely reflect the hard work and clever guesses of a savvy businessman?

It would be unfair to readers (and Logevall) to reveal the answers in this review. Suffice it to say that Logevall’s historical sleuthing is absorbing in itself, and reflects the author’s own scholarly rectitude. At each turn in a tale that boomerangs around the globe, from Boston to Berlin to the Blackett Strait in the Solomon Islands, 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.

Logevall also tells a family story that is highly convincing to anyone who grew up in a large Catholic family, including this reviewer. Birth order and pecking rights make a difference in the lives of each person in a complex, communal household. So do the avoidable mistakes and unavoidable tragedies that befall other family members and thereby shape the individual’s understanding of hardship and deepen his capacity for empathy. John F. Kennedy came from a lucky, wealthy, happy family in a comparatively affluent country. Yet he also watched his father cheat on his mother, his oldest brother perish in a suicidal quest, his younger sister suffer a lobotomy, and his next younger sister die in plane crash. He discovered that his childhood best friend—another household fixture—was homosexual at a time when such an orientation courted disgrace and even imprisonment. Kennedy’s loyalty and affection for Lem Billings nonetheless lasted a lifetime. The world of the Kennedy clan mimicked the dreams, hypocrisies, and inconsistencies of the human species itself, pulling itself up by its

3 John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (New York: Harper, 1956).

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bootstraps and stumbling over its own flaws. An ability to stomach life’s ambiguities, combined with a steadfast commitment to the commonweal, proved important qualifications for public service.

As Logevall tells the story, John F. Kennedy was also blessed with a second son’s understanding that he would never be top dog. Younger, weaker, and less combative than his older brother, he learned to take blows on the chin without complaint and avoid disappointment by refusing to take life too seriously. He did not need to be the star. Illness also shaped his outlook. Logevall plumbs an extraordinary record of physical ailments that threatened Kennedy’s life from high school onward, and the dry gallows humor that flourished as his frail constitution failed him. Health complications of every type dogged the boy, who may have missed more school than he attended. Hospitalized again and again for diseases that defied diagnosis, Kennedy learned the patience of a patient—and how to laugh off adversity and humiliation. As Mayo Clinic doctors and nurses invaded his adolescent body, he joked to best friend Lem Billings, “I had only two enemas today and feel kind of full.” Or, when a physician gave the sixteen-year-old a surprise rectal exam, “I’m just a shell of the former man and my penis looks as if it has been through a wringer” (108-109).

John F. Kennedy learned the hard way that bad luck is often undeserved. Life was rough. God did not “render to everyone his just due.” Yet instead of this experience confirming any impulse towards self-pity or self-indulgence, Kennedy’s unassuming temperament was such that it deepened his compassion for others. Many had it worse. At sixteen, he penned a high school essay that Logevall believes encapsulates the life philosophy that Kennedy later brought to the White House. The essay concerned inequalities of wealth, but could easily have applied to other disparities or injustices. “How much better chance has [the] boy born with a silver spoon in his mouth of being good than the boy who from birth is surrounded by rottenness and filth,” he marveled. “This even to the most religious of us can hardly seem a ‘square deal’” (97).

Kennedy’s first published work echoed the same theme. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Kennedy used his senior year as a Harvard undergraduate to explore a major foreign policy issue and make a significant historical contribution. (Roosevelt commenced a pathbreaking book on the War of 1812)4. Why England Slept elucidated the social forces that sapped British resolve when the island nation needed it most, as world war again loomed.5 Unlike his father, Logevall argues, Kennedy concluded that America’s fortunes were bound up with the rest of the world, and neither appeasement nor isolation were honorable or even practical options for great countries. The misfortunes of others were of vital interest to all in the family of nations. Not a surprising deduction for a good son from a large Catholic clan.

This book employs a measured yet effortlessly engaging tone that echoes Logevall’s own assessment of Why England Slept, struck as he was by its “impressive source base, by the acuity and authenticity of the analysis, and by the commitment to making historical judgements only on the basis of carefully examined evidence” (254). Aficionados of the Kennedy saga may not learn many additional facts, and historians will not debate any unusual new arguments. But one closes the book satisfied that its shrewd, independent hero had a compassionate heart—and reluctant to find themselves at “the End.”

Fortunately, the sequel is forthcoming.

4 Theodore Roosevelt, The Naval War of 1812 (New York: Collier, 1882).

5 John F. Kennedy, Why England Slept (New York: W. Funk, 1940).

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Review by Mario Del Pero, Sciences Po Paris

It’s difficult, perhaps impossible, to find a historian whose prose is as elegant, rich and yet accessible and sharp as Fredrik Logevall’s. Logevall writes beautifully; there is no other way to put it. This graceful writing style is particularly tailored, indeed perfect, for the biographical genre as this stunning volume one of his long awaited JFK clearly proves. Logevall’s treatment of John F. Kennedy is as good a biography as it gets. It is exhaustive, precise, engrossing, leaving no bases untouched in describing his early life or in engaging with the monumental literature we already have. And yet, it is also original and even provocative in challenging some ingrained assumptions and stereotypes, particularly when it comes to the relationship between Jack and his father Joseph, and how it was altered by the premature death, during World War II, of Kennedy’s towering brother, Joseph Jr.. Logevall skillfully manages to avoid some very common pitfalls of the ‘biography-of- great-men/women canon,’ first and foremost to get too enamored with the subject of his book (his is a very sympathetic account of Kennedy, that is true, but he is too good a historian – and a writer –to slip into hagiography). Logevall also escapes the other common peril of biographies, namely of becoming so absorbed with the protagonist to lose sight of the larger context: JFK, on the contrary, admirably intertwines the story of a man and a family with those of the United States and the world. With all its achievements, successes, contradictions and dramas, the story of the Kennedy dynasty, and of its most renowned member, offers a prism through which examining and making sense of the historical trajectory of the United States, and its rise to global primacy in the twentieth century. The coming of age of Jack Kennedy that Logevall so meticulously details becomes that of the country he will eventually lead.

But there is more in this biography, beginning with the fact that – at least in this volume one – Jack’s is not the only biography. Multiple characters are on stage, and Logevall spares no energy (and, at times, literary bravado) to describe them. The book is punctuated with biographical snapshots: flashy vignettes that are often worth the reading in themselves. Kirk LeMoyne ‘Lem’ Billings, Kennedy’s lifelong best friend from boarding school, had “ancestors on his mother’s side who arrived in America aboard the Mayflower in 1920” (103), Logevall informs us. “Handsome and bespectacled, with curly blondish hair and a piercing nasal voice, Billings was tall and strong at six-two and 175 pounds, not all that coordinated but big enough to play first-team football and be a regular on the crew team,” (103) he writes. Inva Argad, the “effervescent Dane” (295) with whom Jack had an intense, although short-lived, affair in the early 1940s, is described as a “stunningly gorgeous blond and blue-eyed, with high cheekbones and a flawless complexion, a woman who turned heads wherever she went” (295); “a slight gap between her front teeth somehow only added to her mystique” (295), Logevall continues, leaving all of us with gaps, small and big, in our teeth wondering why that doesn’t apply to our ‘mystiques.’ “He was all of twenty-six years old when he arrived in Boston to seize the foundering operation,” Logevall writes of Bobby Kennedy, when discussing the 1952 Senate campaign; “Tanned and wiry, with a toothy smile and a mop of unruly hair, he set the tone from the start” (508). And these are just three purely illustrative examples among the several dozens the reader will find.

For a good part of the book one character – the unscrupulous, hard driven, serial philanderer family patriarch Joseph – occupies the center stage as much, and sometimes more, than Jack himself, to the point that one has the impression of reading two biographies for the price of one. In this enthralling mosaic of personalities and stories, the only little flaw is that at times Joe Jr.’s are a bit underdeveloped. This is all the more surprising given how central he is in the interpretation Logevall puts forward, namely that Jack was in all regards his own man and not the backup for his elder sibling (anticipating one of key arguments of the book, Logevall writes in the preface that “on matters of politics and policy, JFK was always his own master,” xvii). The independence of Kennedy is putatively detectable in his “pronounced international sensibility” (xvi), his frequent travels, his musings on the state of world affairs, his precocious writings, such as Why England Slept, his undergraduate thesis which he successfully published in 1940.6 And contrary to a widely shared assumption, Logevall shows how Jack was already outdoing his elder brother well before Joe Jr.’s death. Implicit in Logevall’s narrative is the argument that the fatally dangerous missions Joe Jr. undertook during the war, which ultimately cost him his life, originated also from his desperate need to prove his worth in the competition with Jack, although the primary driver was possibly the desire to

6 John F. Kennedy, Why England Slept (New York: W. Funk, 1940).

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reassert the image and prestige of the Kennedys, which had been badly shaken by Joseph’s pro-appeasement and often undiplomatic stance during his stint as Ambassador in London.

Throughout this first volume, Jack Kennedy’s autonomy – first and foremost from his father – are constantly stressed and discussed, 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. Jack was not there simply to replace Joe Jr. and fulfill his father’s dream of Kennedy’s political greatness, as is often believed; it was his own decision and his own campaign, Logevall argues (although, just as in later campaigns, Joseph’s willingness to open his checkbook certainly helped). And Jack’s life, according to Logevall’s narration, was a testament to this independence: his meager academic results being matched by his voracious curiosity and early passion for history and international results; his nonchalant attitude to life contrasting so strikingly with the ferocious ambition of his father and his elder brother (or, for that matter, of his mother Rose); his juvenile vagaries and dilemmas offering such a remarkable contrast with what appeared to be the binary certainties of the abovementioned two (which, in the case, of Joe Sr. contributed to decisions bound to have devastating consequences: the few pages Logevall dedicates to the patriarch’s decision to authorize the lobotomy of his cognitively deficient daughter Rosemary, in 1941 are simply excruciating to read.

The second interpretative thread that runs through the book, is that the trajectory of Jack Kennedy is somehow illustrative of that of the United States. “The more we understand Kennedy and his coming of age … the more we understand the United States in the middle decades of the century … a principal theme of this book is the degree to which Kennedy’s life story tracks with major facets of America’s political and geopolitical story” (xvi), Logevall maintains. World War Two and the trials they - the U.S. as much as the Kennedys - had to face and endure shattered their early complacency and frivolity. The conflict produced an accelerated and even brutal transition to maturity and adulthood. The United States became a power that finally dared to speak its name and act accordingly. Jack Kennedy, who barely escaped alive, returned almost physically incapacitated but forged by the conflict and with a remarkable, and electorally convenient, story of war heroism to tell, first with via an article of John Hershey on the New Yorker that, thanks to old Joe’s persistent maneuvering, reached millions of Americans in an abridged Reader’s Digest rendition.7 Kennedy “emerged from his war experience hardened, wiser, more mature, and with self-confidence for having performed his duties and earned the esteem of his men,” (366) Logevall writes; “Thrown together with individuals from vastly different backgrounds and economic circumstances, he developed a greater appreciation for the diversity of the American national experience” (366).

Kennedy as his own man on the one side, and his tale as that of a nation coming to terms with what it was, and accepting the consequences (i.e.: world leadership) on the other: these are the two overarching themes that Logevall uses to connect all the dots of JFK’s epic and provide its rich narrative with a coherent interpretative frame. And yet, one could in a certain way argue with both themes, or at least qualify (and muddle) them a bit. This is undoubtedly a sympathetic account of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Yes, the young Jack’s frivolity, lack of direction, intellectual superficiality – as well as his unlikely spelling and poor grammar – are duly and thoroughly expounded. Logevall strives to give us the full and comprehensive picture of a boy and later a man who, yes, dated one or more girls per day, enjoyed boys’ camaraderie and rituals, cared little or nothing for the majority of subjects he had to study, spent weekends and holidays hopping from one fancy resort to the other, but who was also insatiably curious, a voracious reader, an immensely fast learner, and someone ready to always test his assumptions and the common wisdom of the time. This kaleidoscopic and ever changing nature of Jack is juxtaposed to the binary stiffness of both Joes, Sr. and Jr. and used to distance Jack from his father (writing on the 1952 Senate campaign, Logevall once again emphasizes how even that occasion proved that “John Fitzgerald Kennedy, keen student of government and history, was his own political boss,” 507; earlier, on page 284, Logevall drily notes that already before the war Jack had been “his own man in a way that his brother would never be”).

7 John Hershey, Survival, “The New Yorker,” May 1944, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1944/06/17/survival, accessed 21 February 2021.

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Perhaps so. But the Kennedy that often emerges in these pages does not seem to be particularly troubled, doubtful or, for that matter, sophisticated. Jumping from the shores of Massachusetts to Palm Beach, from Hollywood to London, very frequently in the most recent convertible and with a friend/valet and a woman on his side, Jack Kennedy seemed to exude a patrician confidence that very often bordered on the sense of entitlement coming from being who he was. Logevall has dug admirably into the historical record and at times (such as in the case of Kennedy’s 1939 trip to the Middle East and Eastern Europe) one senses that even in such a voluminous and thorough biography, the lack (or loss) of documents leaves holes and blind spots. Leaving that aspect aside, this reader is left with the impression that yes, Jack Kennedy might have entirely been his own man, with a “penetrating and analytical mind at work, as well as a historical knowledge honed through immersion in books” (219), but that all things considered he was not that deep of a man. In other words, introspection and self-doubt do not seem to have been his forte.

The second and final remark involves the portrayal of Kennedy, and his life, as paradigms of an America that was bound to project globally its unmatchable power and dominate world affairs. At a closer look, one could counter-argue, however, that in many ways the Kennedys and their very Kennedyesque universe embodied and symbolized the end of an age more than the opening of a new one (an end ultimately sealed by Jack’s tragic end).Yes, Kennedy’s life coincided with the age of the ascendancy of the United States to the pinnacle of world power; but it also coincided with the waning of the political influence of the privileged liberal Eastern Coast elites to which the Kennedys belonged. This elitist, patrician, and highly patriotic America – the closest the country had to its own aristocracy – was ready, indeed eager, to seek glory and even the ultimate sacrifice, in war. The four sons of President Franklin D. Roosevelt all served with distinction in the conflict, and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., whom Kennedy eventually defeated in 1952, even resigned from Senate in 1944 to take part to the conflict (thanks to his heroic deeds he received France’s Légion d’Honneur and Croix de Guerre, and the Bronze Star Medal). For the Roosevelts, the Lodges, and the Kennedys, the war was a meeting with destiny: a call to fulfill who they were and who they were meant to be; so much so that in a few cases, as for Kennedy or for Roosevelt’s second son, Elliot, they had to rely on connections, and their privileges, to avoid being rejected for medical reasons. Their world was indeed the “Camelot” that former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy would subsequently celebrate in her famous interview with Theodore White after her husband’s assassination.8 A Camelot populated with handsome men and beautiful women: by the Kennedys, yes, but also by the innumerable “Lem” Billings and Inva Argads that adorned their lives (one loses count in this book of how many gorgeous and fabulously wealthy people took part in John F. Kennedy’s saga). A royalty of sort, in other words, as the paradoxical anglophilia of many of Joseph Kennedy’s sons and daughters (and of his own wife) also shows. The Second World War and its aftermath, the upheavals and transformations of both international affairs and U.S. politics and society, ultimately shattered the social role, intellectual certainties and political privileges of this aristocracy.

That said, Fredrik Logevall has given us a little gem of a biography. Or, better, half a gem. The most difficult part is yet to come in volume two: adding something, and challenging ingrained interpretations, to the libraries of books we already have on Kennedy’s presidency and his enduring mythology.

8 Theodore H. White, For President Kennedy : an Epilogue, “Life Magazine”, 6 December 1963, https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/THWPP/059/THWPP-059-009 accessed 22 February 2021.

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Review by David Milne, University of East Anglia

On a book-to-duration ratio, John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s presidency is surely the most written-about in U.S. history. But quantity and quality bear no relation, as tends to be the case when the protagonist is so polarizing. One problem is that so many Kennedy books inhabit the extremes of hagiography and polemic. Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s A Thousand Days and Seymour Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot are obvious examples of former and latter.9 But many other accounts – Theodore Sorenson’s Kennedy vs Garry Wills’ The Kennedy Imprisonment – follow the same process of either affixing a halo or a pair of horns.10 Kennedy aficionados are credulous saps or cynical boosters; Kennedy haters are conspiratorial, mean- spirited, and driven by the same performative iconoclasm that led Christopher Hitchens to write an entire book denouncing Mother Theresa.11

Some excellent books, both thematic and conventionally biographical, have been published on John F. Kennedy. Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life is a fine, diligent work, though it spends relatively little time on Kennedy’s pre-Senatorial career.12 Herbert Parmet, James Giglio, and Hugh Brogan have all written illuminating studies, though all were necessarily constrained by lack of archival access.13 Fredrik Logevall’s book is on an altogether different plane. The research is fresh and extensive, the writing evocative and incisive, and the judgments judicious. This is a model how to write political biography.

That Logevall’s JFK is a triumph owes much to the fact that the author possesses a set of attributes that mark him out as an excellent fit as biographer. The first is that he did not come to the project as a biographer. Logevall is a historian who has accumulated vast expertise on the rise of American power in the twentieth century, and the consequences, both constructive and needlessly destructive, that this process unleashed.14 Kennedy’s life is contextualised in panorama; Logevall is too good a historian to miss the wider currents in U.S. politics and world affairs that shaped the choices Kennedy made (and those that were made for him.) For this reason, the book also reads as a compelling account of the rise of the United States to global supremacy.

But H-Diplo roundtables tend to fall flat when reviewers merely offer praise. Instead, I will identify some areas where Logevall’s assessment might be perceived as overly generous to Kennedy (père et fils). Here it might be worthwhile to mull the hypothetical question of who would have been happier upon reading the book: Schlesinger/Sorenson or Hersh/Wills. The answer is almost certainly the former grouping. This does not make the book unbalanced – far from it. But it does provide this reviewer with an outlet for constructive criticism.

9 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965) and Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little Brown, 1997).

10 Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965) and Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (Boston: Little Brown, 1982).

11 Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice (London: Verso Books, 1995).

12 Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 (New York: Back Bay Books, 2003).

13 Herbert S. Parmet, Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial Press, 1980), James N. Giglio, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy, 2nd Edition (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), Hugh Brogan, Kennedy (New York: Longman, 1996).

14 See Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) and Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012).

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The main issue I will raise is the acuity of John F. Kennedy’s foreign policy judgment from 1945 to 1956. Logevall is generally admiring of Kennedy’s deep engagement with global affairs in this period. He raises points of criticism, but Logevall’s overarching point is that Kennedy was a more serious and nuanced thinker in this period than his critics have allowed. He marshals some strong examples to bolster his case. In 1951 after a visit to Indochina, for example, Kennedy observed that no success was possible unless the ‘natives’ were promised self-determination by a set date. He returned from the trip convinced, as Logevall writes, that “colonialism was a spent force and that Communism could never be vanquished exclusively or even principally by military means” (497). Overall, though, the position that Kennedy was a perceptive analyst of the Cold War through the 1950s is a difficult one to maintain.

During his presidency, Kennedy made multiple errors born of conventional Cold War machismo, but he demonstrated a laudable capacity to learn on the job and, crucially, not to approach all crises as a Munich-style test of resolve. The distance Kennedy travelled from his inaugural address, a beautifully crafted speech that nonetheless channelled the maximalist crisis logic of NSC-68, to his June 1963 speech at American University, in which he called for a fundamental “re-examination” of attitude toward the Soviet Union, is far. I am looking forward to reading the second volume for many reasons, but first among them is Logevall’s analysis of Kennedy’s intellectual journey.

Kennedy was not so thoughtful and multidimensional in the fifteen years that followed the Second World War, however. 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. Kennedy believed in what became known as the domino theory. In January 1954, as Logevall recounts, Kennedy warned that the loss of Indochina to Communism would unleash catastrophe: “undoubtedly within a short time, Burma, Thailand, Malaya, and Indonesia and other new independent states might fall under the control of the Communist bloc in a series of chain reactions” (575). Three months later, Eisenhower famously unveiled his ‘falling domino’ principle.

The lessons that Kennedy drew from the Second World War – that the United States must reject ‘appeasement’ and stoutly repulse the expansionism of its principal enemy – dominated his approach to international affairs, perhaps all the way up until the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. One might say that it was only when Kennedy discarded the Munich analogy as a reflexive point of reference that he truly began to demonstrate foreign policy wisdom.

The contrast with his father is instructive on the supposed lessons from history. It is to John F. Kennedy’s credit that he disagreed with Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.’s view that backing Great Britain in a war against Nazi Germany was futile. Yet Joe Kennedy maintained consistency on the issue of threat inflation in the post-war era and was arguably a more clearsighted analyst of Cold War superpower competition than his son. At a speech at the University of Virginia in December 1950, Joe Kennedy said that Communism was neither “monolithic nor eternal” and would likely fall of its own accord. “What business is it of ours to support French colonial policies in Indo-china or to achieve Mr Syngman Rhee’s concepts of democracy in Korea?” asked Kennedy, “We can do well to mind our business and interfere only where somebody threatens our business and our homes” (481).

Here, then, is an area where I disagree (mildly) with the author. Overall, though, Fredrik Logevall is a persuasive and compelling biographer of a reticent, thoughtful man who is hard to reach – encased, as he is, by so much myth and opprobrium. JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century is a biography that inspires confidence.

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Review by Michael S. Neiberg, United States Army War College

For social historians trained in the 1990s as I was, history mostly represented the study of large patterns, often centuries old and invisible to the actors themselves. To focus too much on one individual, no matter how famous or seemingly important to a given era, was to risk missing or minimizing those larger patterns. History to my generation was less the old-fashioned story of how a few ‘great men’ directed the course of events, and more the story of how little relevance they actually had amid the wide sweeps of change caused by factors like demography, disease, and culture. Most social historians would probably still maintain that we gain maximum value from seeing great men and women as expressions of their time and place rather than their own characteristics. But the age of Donald Trump seems a clarion call that we may have underestimated the importance of key leaders at key moments. Whatever else President Trump did, he proved that some individuals do indeed have the power to bend the arc of history and either entice others to follow them in their endeavors or work hard to thwart those endeavors.

It seems appropriate, therefore, for scholars to return to the political leaders of modern history and study them anew. Perhaps for this reason, ambitious, archivally-based biographies of Charles de Gaulle (by Julian Jackson) and Joseph Stalin (by Ronald Suny) have recently appeared from scholars not previously known as biographers.15 The first of Fredrik Logevall’s projected two volumes on John Kennedy fits into this scholarship, using voluminous primary sources, mostly but not exclusively from the Kennedy Presidential Library, to set Kennedy (born in 1917) within the rise of the American Century. Volume One ends in 1956, when Kennedy, then not yet forty years old, decided to run for president in four years’ time.

Reconstructing a life such as Kennedy’s challenges a biographer to shatter myths and find a way of ascribing wider meaning to the life of a single individual. Logevall achieves the latter by starting the book not in Boston but Berlin in August 1939. There, John Kennedy, college student and son of the United States ambassador to Great Britain, watched with his own eyes as the start of the Second World War in Europe unfolded before him. In a letter to his friend Lem Billings, Kennedy noted the role that miscommunication and misperception were to play. “England seems firm this time,” he wrote, “but as that is not completely understood here the big danger here lies in the Germans counting on another Munich [Agreement] then finding themselves in a war when Chamberlain refuses to give in” (xii).

One hopes that Logevall will return to this letter when he discusses its meaning for Kennedy’s reading of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in Volume Two. A few days later, Kennedy, accompanied by his mother, his brother Joseph Jr. (who was destined to die in the war), and his sister Kathleen, sat in the gallery in the House of Commons to hear Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announce that Great Britain was at war for the second time in as many generations.

The choice to begin his biography of Kennedy in Europe is one of many wise decisions that sets this book apart as a model of its kind. It reflects many of the themes to which Logevall will return in the subsequent pages. For purposes of this review, three stand out. First, the Second World War had an enormous impact on Kennedy’s own life and on the role that he later assumed as leader of the most powerful nation in the world. His heroism in the PT-109 episode (with national publicity funded by his father) helped to make his name. Second, Kennedy was in London with two of his siblings, a symbol of the importance of this powerful, wealthy, star-crossed family. Both Joseph and Kathleen died before their thirtieth birthdays but influenced John in critical ways. Finally, while Joseph, Sr. listened to Chamberlain with tears in his eyes as the appeasement policy he supported fell apart, John was falling under the sway of the pugnacious Winston Churchill.

This dramatic moment allows Logevall to give us a glimpse of the John Kennedy he reveals through the course of the book. Smart, curious, and full of energy, the young man wanted to do much more than simply observe the world as it passds him by. He strove to analyze, learn, and develop his own ideas as he did in the anti-appeasement book that he wrote the

15 Julian Jackson, De Gaulle (Cambridge: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press; Reprint edition, October 29, 2019) and Ronald Grigor Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).

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following year, Why England Slept.16 Equally important for Logevall, the episode shows the young Kennedy’s divergence from Ambassador Kennedy’s pessimism about Britain’s doomed fate. John Kennedy may have inherited his father’s womanizing, but he did not remain beholden to his father’s politics. Nor did he stand meekly in his older brother’s shadow as biographers like Robert Dallek have assumed.17 At least from this moment in 1939, he was his own thinker, and clearly a deep one at that. He neither needed his father’s blessing nor his brother's death to clear a pathway into politics. The family’s enormous wealth and deep influence, of course, mattered a great deal, both in opening an initial road for him in the world of Massachusetts politics and later in funding his national ambitions.

As the book’s subtitle makes clear, Kennedy’s life is a tour through the American Century. His much-publicized heroism in the war, his complex relationship with McCarthyism, his early embrace of an anti-Soviet ideology, his understandings of faraway places like Indochina, and even the emergence of television are reflected in Kennedy’s life story. They form the central organizing schema of the book, namely that by studying Kennedy we not only learn more about him, but we also learn more about the nation and the world he inhabited.

It is to Logevall’s great credit that we never lose sight of the mercurial Kennedy as a person along the way. Kennedy was constantly besieged by illness, always surrounded by admirers (male and female alike), and living in a world of seemingly endless resources. Those resources obviously made possible for Kennedy what would have been impossible for others, but they do seem to have also inspired in the young Kennedy a reflection on social justice. Logevall uncovered a fascinating paper written by a sixteen-year-old Kennedy at Choate in which he recognized how much easier it was for the wealthy to live a moral life. As a consequence, he wondered how those born into poverty and despair could pursue a life well-lived on equal terms.

Logevall has a sharp eye for the key moment. Two stand out, both of which are known to historians, but rarely explored in such depth. The first took place in 1947 on an overnight train from the Monongahela Valley steel town of McKeesport, Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C. After debating worker’s rights and tariff policy, Kennedy and another young congressman named Richard Nixon ate hamburgers and talked about baseball before drawing straws to see who would sleep in the lower bunk. Instead of sleeping, however, the two stayed up all night talking mostly about foreign policy. Read from our own highly partisan age, there is something almost antediluvian in this tale of a lost age when two men from rival parties could have a conversation with one another in a shared train compartment. As Logevall notes, this moment reminded the two men of what they had in common outside of Congress: service in the Navy, the loss of a beloved older brother, and enormous paternal expectations.

The second incident centers on Kennedy’s trip around the world’s hot spots in 1951. He met with President Dwight Eisenhower in Paris then with leaders at the highest levels, including Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Vietnamese Emperor Bao Dai. On this trip he forged a close relationship with his younger brother Robert, who had been in Palestine and Lebanon three years earlier as a correspondent for the Boston Globe. Instead of being the ‘pain in the ass’ that John feared, Bobby proved a smart, insightful companion, pushing his older brother intellectually and politically. The Kennedy brothers went to Israel, India, Pakistan, Thailand, and Indochina where they watched the French war hero General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny try desperately to understand and fight an insurgency led by the Viet Minh.

Both brothers recognized that poverty and injustice throughout Asia and Africa were as much an enemy to American overseas interests as the Soviet Union itself. They also acknowledged that American foreign policy tended to link the United States to the discredited actions of European colonizers like the French they had seen in Indochina. Bobby warned that the United States seemed to be sinking ever more deeply into conflicts “to a point where we can’t back out . . . . It doesn’t seem to be a picture with a bright future” (494). In Okinawa at the end of this trip, John nearly died. A flare up of

16 John F. Kennedy, Why England Slept (New York: W. Funk, 1940).

17 Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John Kennedy, 1917-1963 (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2004).

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Addison’s disease produced a fever of 106 degrees and a certainty in those around him that he would not survive. But survive he did, even going to Korea to see the war there first-hand.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that Fredrik Logevall and I have had several conversations about the use of counterfactual history, essentially the methodology of studying what did not happen to gain deeper insights into what did. I have long been a skeptic of this method, but Logevall has at long last begun to win me over and in ways that return us to the fundamental question about the role of individuals in history. Here we see two examples. First, how might John Kennedy’s policy for Indochina, informed by Bobby’s views, have differed from Lyndon Johnson’s based on their backgrounds and what the brothers saw and learned on their 1951 trip? If one argues that what the Kennedy brothers saw in 1951 led them to different policy choices than Johnson, then the importance of the individual becomes more prominent. If, on the other hand, one argues that American domestic politics, the Cold War, and the slow quagmire of Vietnam led Kennedy into the same basic dilemma, and therefore to the same basic decisions, then it is the setting, not the actor that takes center stage.

Second, let us suppose for a moment that Kennedy had died in Okinawa in 1951 or during an equally frightening episode in Palm Beach in 1954 (priests prepared to administer last rites on both occasions). How different would the history of the United States have been? After reading this book, even a scholar skeptical of counterfactuals is likely to conclude that Kennedy’s death in 1951 or 1954 would surely have produced a different world from the one in which we are now living. To make this argument, of course, is not to assume that Kennedy would not have made mistakes or that he might not have committed the United States to a war in Vietnam regardless of what he had learned in 1951. It is merely to say that the individual in the White House surely matters, and perhaps more than we as historians have tended to acknowledge in our scholarship, if not in our personal politics. Kennedy’s legacy, of course, lasted well beyond the 1960s.

Fredrik Logevall thus deserves all of the praise that this book has thus far received. It is a major contribution to our understanding not only of John Kennedy but of the United States in the twentieth century more generally. Logevall’s Kennedy emerges as much more than a playboy scion propelled by a father’s money and a brother’s grief. He was instead a serious man with important ideas about America and its place in a rapidly changing world. I suspect that we have not had a serious biography of Kennedy like this one because since 1963 Americans have needed the mythic John Kennedy more than they have needed the real one. Had he lived, Americans sometimes tell themselves, then the United States could have embraced the social justice movements of the 1960s without experiencing the traumas of the Vietnam War that still haunt it today. His assassination, moreover, provides something for everyone: conspiracy, tragedy, and a myriad of questions left unanswered. Logevall will have to address those questions in volume two. Based on what we have seen from his magisterial volume one, we can only hope he gives us his answers soon.

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Response by Fredrik Logevall, Harvard University

I am gratified by the generous assessments provided by these four marvelous historians, whose own works have done so much to enhance our understanding of the era in question. It means the world to me that all of them like the book and endorse my effort to place John F. Kennedy’s life within the larger story of America’s rise in world affairs during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Such contextualization is of course vital for understanding Kennedy and his coming of age, but I maintain that it also goes the other way: we can better grasp major dimensions of America’s geopolitical and political history in these years by viewing them through the lens of Kennedy’s life and career. As Michael Neiberg puts it in describing what he accurately calls “the central organizing schema” of the book: “by studying Kennedy we not only learn more about him, but we also learn more about the nation and the world he inhabited.”

As the reviewers point out, mine is a sympathetic treatment of Kennedy broadly speaking. But I am trying throughout the volume (and in the one yet to come) to call it straight, avoiding the temptation to look up at him in veneration or down at him in condescension. Hence my pleasure at reading Elizabeth Cobbs’s assertion, rendered in her characteristically vivid way, that “One relaxes, comforted not to hear the whir of an axe grinding off stage.”

I am intrigued by Mario Del Pero’s assertion that perhaps “the Kennedys and their very Kennedyesque universe embodied and symbolized the end of an age more than the opening of a new one (an end ultimately sealed by Jack’s tragic end).” Kennedy’s era, Del Pero suggests, coincided with the demise of the political power of the liberal Eastern Establishment to which Kennedy belonged, even as it also corresponded with the rise of the United States to the summit of global power. It is a provocative claim, but the chronology seems off to me: The Establishment’s decline really set in later—I see scarce evidence of it in the 1938-1956 era that is at the heart of this volume, either in hindsight or in the context of contemporaneous analyses. (Arguably, the Establishment’s power was not seriously threatened until much later, that is, until it lost its near- monopoly over information around the turn of the century.)

David Milne, in his engaging essay, finds it hard to credit Kennedy’s views of the Cold War in the period under study, or indeed beyond; he compares them unfavorably to the assessment of the superpower conflict by Kennedy’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy. Fair enough, though for my money the younger Kennedy’s analysis of the Cold War was more complex and subtle than Milne allows, if not in 1946-1950 then certainly following his two lengthy overseas trips in 1951, which taught him that the easy good-versus-evil verities that worked so well in domestic U.S. discourse did not cut it overseas. In common with many authors, Milne maintains that Kennedy’s 1961 Inaugural Address “channeled the maximalist crisis logic of NSC- 68.” I see the speech differently—apart from one or two oft-quoted early passages, much of it is conciliatory. Did Kennedy in his presidency make “multiple errors born of conventional Cold War machismo,” as Milne claims? Yes and no. He certainly made mistakes, as my second volume will duly show. But I question whether they had much to do with “Cold War machismo” as such.

Milne is surely correct that we should take seriously Joe Kennedy’s critique of the Cold War and of postwar U.S. foreign policy, in particular its chronic tendency toward threat inflation.18 I would only note here that, contrary to the implication in Milne’s essay, I say as much at various points in the book. Of the debate surrounding the issuing of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, for example, I write: “Still others, including Joseph P. Kennedy, maintained that Communism would fall on its own, and that the United States should leave the Greeks and the Turks to their own devices” (449). And later: “Joe Kennedy’s position was in fact a reasoned one, and he held it consistently” (482).

Finally, a word about counterfactuals, introduced by Neiberg near the end of his review. I’m delighted to learn that he and I “at long last” agree: contemplating unrealized alternatives can be highly instructive, reminding us of the importance of human agency and enhancing our historical understanding. (In Neiberg’s elegant formulation, it’s about “studying what did

18 Campbell Craig and I explore this threat inflation in depth in our book, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity, rev. ed. (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).

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not happen to gain deeper insights into what did.”) He brings up two examples that occurred to him in reading my book. Here’s another one that I like to discuss with my students and that features at a key moment in my narrative: the secret three-day debate within the British War Cabinet in late May 1940 about whether to seek a negotiated settlement with Adolf Hitler’s Germany, by way of Italian mediation. The War Cabinet ultimately rejected the plan, but the outcome was anything but foreordained, as Joe Kennedy, then the U.S. ambassador in London, learned first-hand from the principals. What if the decision had gone the other way and Britain had sued for peace? “What would have been the effect on the war,” I ask in the book, “on the course of the twentieth century, on America’s standing in the world? And what would it have meant for Joe Kennedy and his family” (260)?

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