Faculty Book Review--September 2003
Robert
Dallek's
An
Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963
By
John Van Atta
For those of us old enough to have experienced the events of November 22, 1963, it is hard to believe that nearly 40 years have passed since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. I was a fifth grader in Carbondale, Illinois, at the time. When my father picked me up from school that day, he immediately asked whether I had heard the news. “What news?” I said. The principal at Winkler School had instructed teachers not to alarm children by telling them about the special bulletin that had been broadcast earlier that afternoon. “The President has been shot,” dad replied, but it was not yet known how seriously wounded Kennedy was. I remember sitting with my parents in stunned silence after we got home, as television journalists pressured for an update on Kennedy’s condition. Finally, somebody handed CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite a small slip of paper while he was on the air. Then, staring gravely into the camera, Cronkite announced that the President of the United States was dead.
Any person born after 1960—and that probably includes about half the current population of the United States—has no personal memory of JFK or the time in which he lived. There are, of course, all kinds of books on Kennedy and his era, including a couple recent ones by two different authors named Reeves (Thomas C. Reeves, A Question of Character and Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power). But the latest of the Kennedy biographies, An Unfinished Life by Robert Dallek, does the best job so far of reconstructing the life that Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullets snuffed out in 1963.
Dallek, one of the most distinguished of American historians, is a professor at Boston University and is the author of several previous books, including two masterly volumes on Lyndon Baines Johnson—Lone Star Rising and Flawed Giant. Like those works, An Unfinished Life is massive in both scale and detail—838 pages, including endnotes. Even at that length, little space is given to some key episodes in Kennedy’s life, such as the PT 109 incident during World War II and the assassination in Dallas. Apparently, Dallek assumed other writers have plowed that ground well enough already. What is most strikingly new in the book is the wealth of information, gleaned from previously inaccessible private Kennedy family archives, on the nature and extent of JFK’s physical frailty. Safe to say, had voters in 1960 known all that was wrong with Kennedy, Richard Nixon would have been president eight years sooner. Starting from the time when he was student at Choate, Kennedy lived in constant distress from a variety of ailments—Addison’s disease, colitis, a degenerative spinal condition, and prostatitis, just to name a few. Miraculously, none of this prevented him from serving as a US naval officer, pursuing an unusually ambitious political career, and coping some of the most stressful crises any president has had to face. Nor was chronic poor health enough to distract him from his prodigious (and amazingly reckless) womanizing, a matter that Kennedy and his aides went to considerable lengths to keep from the public, just as they hid the shocking array of medications that had to be administered to him daily.
Dallek’s engaging portraits of secondary figures in the story—especially Joseph, Sr., Robert Kennedy, Jackie, and Lyndon Johnson—give additional zest and depth to the narrative. We have the familiar image of Jack’s domineering, self-serving father, the multi-millionaire Irish-Catholic mover and shaker, who would stop at nothing to see one of sons in the White House. Bobby, the impulsive Attorney General, hot-headed in contrast to JFK’s calm self-possession, obsessively monitors his older brother’s political interests. Jackie, a far more reluctant first lady than others have shown her to be, proves surprisingly uncomfortable living in the public eye and, like Mrs. Lincoln a hundred years earlier, spends so lavishly that even her spendthrift husband is aghast. And not least, LBJ is viewed now from a different angle, a Democratic party leader who very much wanted the vice-presidency in 1960 (after he could not get the presidential nomination) but hated playing second fiddle, despised Bobby, and lacked the superficial credentials needed to win acceptance into the Kennedy inner circle.
JFK’s toughest tests came was in the field of foreign policy—his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War in general, and the emerging dilemma of Vietnam. Here, An Unfinished Life gives the young president deservedly high marks. Regarding the October 1962 threat of Soviet missile installations in Castro’s Cuba, Dallek notes that Kennedy did far better than Europe’s heads of state before World War I, concluding: “His restraint in resisting a military; solution that would almost certainly have triggered a nuclear exchange makes him a model of wise statesmanship in a dire situation.” (574) Also, despite the “cold warrior” rhetoric of Kennedy’s often-quoted inaugural speech of January 1961, his style of patience, caution, and pursuit of peaceable solutions resulted in mostly effective dealings with the Russians. Though careful about speculating on things we can never know for sure, Dallek joins Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and other historians in believing that Kennedy’s balanced judgment and overall grasp of foreign affairs would have avoided the disaster in Vietnam, had he lived to make the decisions on Southeast Asia that the Johnson administration later botched.
On domestic initiatives—the tax cut, federal aid to education, Medicare, and social justice for African-Americans—Dallek exposes the greatest failings of the “New Frontier.” Here too, of course, one can only judge from results of a presidency ended before its proposals could be played out successfully, as many of them were in the fullness of time, under Johnson. In civil rights especially, Southern intransigence and Kennedy’s lack of Johnson-like legislative savvy delayed reform efforts that were already long overdue. In Dallek’s assessment: “Despite Executive Orders and federal lawsuits opposing southern segregation, he was slow to recognize the extent of the social revolution fostered by Martin Luther King and African Americans, and he repeatedly deferred to southern sensitivities on racial matters, including appointments of segregationist judges in southern federal districts.” (707) Instead of acting, Kennedy reacted. It took violence in Mississippi and Alabama for the administration to finally bring a landmark bill before Congress in June 1963, and even then the administration was prepared to water down its provisions to make them more palatable to unreceptive lawmakers.
Perhaps the biggest question (and in this book Dallek excels in addressing the big ones) is that of the Kennedy legacy: How much historical difference did JFK really make? Had he not been elected president, the answer would certainly be “not much.” Despite his glamour and legendary star quality, the pre-1960 JFK simply never had the political resonance of a younger Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, William Jennings Bryan, or Robert M. LaFollette. Without the challenge of presidential power and the responsibilities that came with it, Kennedy might gone on just being the playboy U.S. senator that many had known him to be prior to the 1960 campaign. But that call to greatness, which Kennedy used to inspire so many others of his generation, somehow transformed him as well. In the end, despite so incomplete a performance in office, Dallek finds the Kennedy presidency to have left a message that spoke to the country’s better angels and conveyed dreams of a less troubled nation and world. It is hard not to agree, as we ponder the tragedy—and the historical consequences—of such great potential left unfulfilled.