NYTimes BOOKS OF THE TIMES Kennedy, and What Might Have Been ‘JFK’s Last Hundred Days,’ by Thurston Clarke By MICHIKO KAKUTANI Published: August 12, 2013 • As the 50th anniversary this November of the assassination of John F. Kennedy looms on the horizon, the debates over his legacy and presidency continue: a procession of “what ifs” and “might haves beens,” accompanied by contradictory arguments, and informed and not-so-informed speculation. Would Kennedy have avoided Lyndon B. Johnson’s tragic escalation of the war in Vietnam? Would he have found a way to propel his stalled tax-cut bill and civil rights legislation through Congress and start a war on poverty, or was Johnson able to achieve these historic goals only through a combination of his bare-knuckled, tactical knowledge of Congress; his personal relationships on Capitol Hill; and his ability to use the momentum of sentiment generated by Kennedy’s death? JFK’S LAST HUNDRED DAYS The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President By Thurston Clarke Illustrated. 432 pages. The Penguin Press. $29.95. Several schools of argument have arisen. The former Kennedy speechwriter Theodore C. Sorensen and the aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. focused on Kennedy’s record and the promise of his vision, creating a sort of bildungsroman portrait of the president, as learning and growing on the job. Debunkers like Garry Wills and Seymour M. Hersh, by contrast, focused on the dark side of Camelot, suggesting that what they saw as Kennedy’s moral shortcomings and recklessness endangered the nation. More judicious and substantive accounts have been provided by Richard Reeves (“President Kennedy: Profile of Power”) and Robert Dallek (“An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963”). Thurston Clarke’s patchy and often reductive new book, “JFK’s Last Hundred Days,” draws heavily on the Dallek and Reeves books, while attempting to advance variations on arguments made by Sorensen and Schlesinger. Mr. Clarke also contends that during that period Kennedy was “finally beginning to realize his potential as a man and a president”; just as “ambition and realpolitik had characterized his congressional career and early White House years, morality and emotion tempered his ambitions during his last hundred days.” Mr. Clarke also contends that during those days, Kennedy began to show his wife, Jacqueline, “the marriage they might have had,” arguing that the death of their premature infant, Patrick, in August 1963 had brought them closer together, and that he seemed to have curtailed his womanizing. In Mr. Clarke’s view, two speeches the president gave in June 1963 — one proposing negotiations with Moscow to draft a nuclear test ban treaty, the other declaring that “race has no place in American life or law” — represented a turning point in his life, when he went from sailing with the winds of political expediency to embracing principle, as he described some of his heroes doing in “Profiles in Courage.” Mr. Clarke made a similar argument about Robert F. Kennedy in his powerful 2008 book, “The Last Campaign,” writing that Robert appeared to begin that campaign as a homage to his brother but came into his own, speaking with an inspirational intensity and rawness rarely seen in politics about poverty, racial injustice and the country’s unhealed wounds. Others, too, have observed that the quick-tempered, hard-boiled Bobby — who’d worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s notorious Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the 1950s and who’d been a tough enforcer on Jack’s 1960 campaign — became a more introspective, empathetic man after his brother’s assassination; grief and a passion for fighting for the poor had changed him. This new book, though, lacks the visceral immediacy of “The Last Campaign,” and Mr. Clarke is less persuasive making a case for Jack Kennedy’s transformation in the last months of his life. The idea of transformation is deeply appealing: we live in a culture that prizes reinvention and second acts. With John F. Kennedy, however, it’s difficult to make a case for dramatic change or to suggest that in June 1963 “he finally began to be more Irish than Harvard, governing from the heart as well as the head.” It’s difficult partly because, as Mr. Clarke points out, Kennedy was “one of the most complicated and enigmatic men ever to occupy the White House”: a man who compartmentalized different aspects of his life and who frequently said and did contradictory things. His most essential quality, the literary critic Alfred Kazin is quoted as saying, was “that of the man who is always making and remaking himself
Posted on: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 06:31:26 +0000
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