1/29/2024 0 Comments Jfk coming back to life![]() Joe, the demanding patriarch, looms over this book as he did over his children’s lives. Jack was the second of their nine children. ![]() These two influential families were brought together by the marriage of Joe Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald. It’s a story that begins in the Irish famine which drove Kennedy’s great-grandparents to seek a better life in Boston, where both grandfathers became influential Democrat politicians: PJ Kennedy was a state senator and party power broker, while John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald was a charismatic congressman and mayor of Boston. It also gives Logevall the time and space to place his subject in his full social and political context, something one expects from the author of the brilliant Embers of War, which unpacked the origins of the war in Vietnam. This is liberating, as it allows the reader to get to know the young Kennedy from the cradle up, rather than backwards from the grave. The events that define the Kennedy presidency – the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination in Dealey Plaza, Dallas – are not part of the story told here. This first volume takes us from Kennedy’s birth in 1917 to 1956, when he was shaping up for his run to become the youngest ever president. One of the ways Logevall gets away from all this noise is by dividing his biography into two. Ever since, adherents of the cult of JFK’s “Camelot” have competed with the gossip peddlers who rake through his promiscuous private life, not to mention the conspiracies about his assassination. JFK was the first television president and his appearances on the small screen fostered an intimacy with an American public, who then experienced the unifying trauma of his public murder. Harvard historian Fredrik Logevall scrapes away the encrusted layers of myth, rumour and cliché the result is a generous portrait of the young Kennedy, one that is attentive to his contradictions and weaknesses even as it seeks to understand what it was that made him so extraordinary. It is the singular achievement of this magnificent new biography of John Fitzgerald Kennedy that it has taken one of the most scrutinised lives of the 20th century and made it feel fresh.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |