Richard Reeves - President Kennedy

Amongst the plethora of good books written about John F. Kennedy, this has to be one of the best.  The book was engrossing to me from start to finish.

Jack Kennedy was born into wealth and privilege, the second son Joseph Kennedy, a Boston Irish Catholic who was a self-made millionaire.  He never had to work a day in his life in a real job.

This book is organized around particular days in Kennedy's Presidency.  In this way Reeves covers all of the major events of JFK's thousand days in the White House.

Reading this book reminds me of how dangerous the world was during Kennedy's tenure.  World War III could have started, really, over Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis.  It is due to no small measure to JFK's actions that war was averted.  The world owes this man a debt that can never be repaid.

JFK could not stand to be alone.  He compartmentalized his life: different friends for different purposes.  How did he keep up with all of it?  He was a serial philandeerer.  He lived off of a huge trust fund.  Must have been nice.  He cried when the Bay of Pigs invasion failed as he should have.  He was a pragmatic rather than a feeling liberal.  Everything was political, and things like the civil rights movement was a practical problem to be solved rather than a moral issue despite his famout civil rights speech in the summer of 1963.