JOHN KENNEDY POSES TWO COLOSSAL problems for biographers. His presidency covered the last part of a brief but genuine American golden age, so it may still be too early for historians to read it with eyes unmisted by regret. Second, Kennedy scholars have by now proved that his private life was less than admirable. He was a compulsive womanizer and, like most such men and many presidents, an accomplished liar. A biographer has to decide how far to interpret Kennedy’s public performance as president through the medium of his private foibles.
Richard Reeves, a veteran reporter and author, has solved both problems by ignoring them. He has written a magnificent book that sticks to a narrative of Kennedy’s short presidency; it has almost nothing on Kennedy’s early life or his assassination. Only once does he dwell on the nature of American society in the early 1960s, but that once is memorable: “Some of the glamour of the Kennedys was faked or exaggerated, but it did seem to serve a purpose, teaching Americans how to act and spend all the new money coming their way, giving the newly prosperous some polish…Watching the Kennedys was self-improvement.” And though Reeves doesn’t skip the sex, he makes no judgment about whether bedding those who the White House staff called “happening babes” made Kennedy a bad man or worse president. In terms of the private man, the book will be remembered instead for detailing his struggles with Addison’s disease, which nearly killed him, and with constant physical pain; he was “a medical marvel, kept alive by complicated daily combinations of pills and injections.”
Reeves tries “to reconstruct [Kennedy’s] world from his perspective.” He succeeds triumphantly, forcing us to read the early 1960s in a fresh way. The struggle for civil rights, for example, is turned from a moral imperative to an irritating diversion from foreign policy. The book that emerges could be the story of a French king. This was a man who rarely carried money; who had drawn no paychecks except those from the federal government (and he donated those to charity); who, as only aristocrats can, distrusted those who grubbed around in the world of commerce. The organizing principle of his presidency, too, now sounds ancient; it was, says Reeves, the “business of promoting and winning freedom around the world.”
Judged against the test that Kennedy set himself, Reeves shows that Kennedy’s first year was a fiasco. He was bested by Khrushchev at the summit in Vienna. The Bay of Pigs was a disaster not simply on its own terms, but because it convinced Kennedy that he had to take a stand against communism somewhere else. He chose Vietnam.
And yet–that fateful choice of Vietnam apart–now quickly he learned. if one theme ran through Kennedy’s presidency, Reeves implies, it was the fate of Berlin. To see Kennedy prevent the cold-war dramas of that city from escalating into nuclear war is to see the deftness of an origami master, bending men and nations this way and that to his own design. Early in Reeves’s book, Kennedy lies about hi; health at a press conference a day after his election. But by the book’s end, to remember Kennedy only as a liar would be to think that the glory of a flower was not its bloom, but a few dead, dry petals scattered on the ground.
