Historian Kazin reviews the new JFK biography by Fredrik Logevall.
Like Kazin I wonder why John F. Kennedy remains so popular. One poll ranks him as our fourth greatest President. Rubbish! This ranking is a remarkable feat. We all remember where we were 11/22/63. Nostalgia ranks high. Yet most Americans remain unaware that JFK achieved little of lasting permanence during his thousand days in White House. Compared to say, FDR, JFK almost pales insignificance.
Perhaps the elegant beauty of his family and Jackie's clever Camelot metaphor carry the day. But Kennedy certainly became much more popular in death than his approval rating at the time of his death. For sure his tragic death touched many hearts and enhanced post presidential ranking.
As Kazin says, the JFK rain rolls on.
JFK groomed himself for high office with his privileged upbringing. He was a spoiled brat of the highest order.
"One can empathize with the Kennedy romance---after all, he was charismatic leader---while still confronting the myopia and moral shortcomings of his career."
JFK was fortunate to be born into a rich family where his father could almost ultimately buy him the Presidency. He was very clever in dealing with his father negative reputation.
"The central question the biographer raises but does not answer, at least in this volume, is whether his travels and self-education nurtured in Kennedy a desire to extend the reformist legacy of the New Deal or taught him instead to the exigencies of cold war politics and the ideological makeup of his party as rose to the top of it."
His near fatal misadventure in the Pacific during WW II is chilling to read about. History could have turned differently had he not survived.
Trying to get the 1956 vice-presidential nomination JFK was no civil rights champions. He dodged a question as to whether the party platform should endorse the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling on school desegregation no doubt because no doubt he had to appease Southern Democrats.
On the first night of he convention he narrated a 28 minute film about the party that did not mention slavery which he partly wrote which praised Andrew Johnson for trying to soothe defeated Confederates which was right out of the Dunning School.
Though losing Kennedy came close to the VP nomination in '56.
Ae time moves on, John F. Kennedy is likely to drop from the lofty perch in glory from which he looks down on his country today.
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