A Companion to John F. Kennedy

By Marc J. Selverstone

A Companion to John F. Kennedy presents a comprehensive collection of historiographical essays addressing the life and administration of the nation’s 35th president.

• Features original contributions from leading Kennedy scholars
• Reassesses  Kennedy, his administration, and the era of the New Frontier
• Reconsiders relevant Kennedy scholarship and points to new avenues of research
• Considers the major crises faced by Kennedy, along with domestic issues including women’s issues and civil rights

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Mar 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781118608869

Book preview

Introduction

Marc J. Selverstone

Fifty years after his assassination, John F. Kennedy continues to inspire divergent views – sometimes wildly so – about the virtues of his administration and the meaning of his presidency. The disjuncture among and between scholars, journalists, and the American public remains an intriguing aspect of the national conversation about the thirty-fifth president. While serious writing on Kennedy has adhered to a familiar dialectic of initial praise, followed by criticism, followed by some blend of the two, popular appraisals of his presidency have remained almost uniformly positive, a dynamic that was particularly evident during this most recent commemorative moment. Published titles and commentary that appeared in the run-up to November 2013 offered portraits of a courageous and farsighted president, battling ill health, impulsive adversaries, and, at times, ineffective advisors. Yet, even as the literature expands to incorporate new findings about his political and personal affairs, the historical Kennedy remains elusive, a beloved figure of myth and memory and an inspiration to millions, as well as an all-too-human politician, exploiting the trappings of privilege and power, and pragmatic to a fault. This wealth of new material, therefore, while helpful in either detailing or updating our knowledge of his family, his advisors, his last hundred days, his assassination, and his legacy – to say nothing of his policies – has yet to generate a satisfactory consensus about his significance in American life.

Such interpretive instability reflects a persistent tension between the dominant explanations that have shaped our understanding of JFK. Studies celebrating the administration and lamenting its untimely passing focus on his style as well as his substance. These works laud Kennedy for his charm and wit, even for his accessibility; hosting artists and intellectuals in the East Room, instituting the live, televised press conference, inviting the American public to tour the refurbished White House on television, Kennedy opened a window onto the presidency that previously had been closed. The grace he displayed in these and like encounters with the media was more than matched by his coolness under fire when confronting a host of crises at home and abroad. Kennedy kept the United States out of wars, the argument goes, in Cuba, in Laos, and in Berlin, and repeatedly faced down calls to introduce combat forces into Vietnam. Not only did he save the world from nuclear war with his adroit, flexible, and creative response to the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, but he also sought to move beyond the Cold War altogether, offering an olive branch to Moscow and the possibility of a lasting peace. At home, while halting in his initial response to the plight of black Americans, Kennedy came to embrace the cause of civil rights, proposing landmark legislation to achieve long-overdue advances in social justice. And, while he sought to enact additional liberal reforms in the areas of health, housing, and education, his inability to do so owed less to his genuine commitment to these measures than to the hostility of entrenched interests in Congress. In short, this idealist without illusions, this first knight of Camelot, was emerging over the course of his presidency as a wiser, bolder, more visionary, and more successful statesman, guiding Americans – indeed, the citizens of the world – more safely and securely into the New Frontier.

And then it all ended.

The shots that rang out in Dallas – vile and obscene on a human level, disorienting and disquieting for national life – likewise had a profound effect on our historical understanding of Kennedy's thousand days in office. Freezing his administration in time, they allowed former aides and defenders not only to praise what he achieved, but also to lament what might have been. The promise of those unrealized dreams – in civil rights, in social reform, in his handling of wars hot and cold – would be the lens through which supporters traced a history they thought destined to be, yet which detractors maintained never was. Rather than saving the world in October 1962, his critics argued, Kennedy helped to create the context for the Soviet deployment of missiles to Cuba and then nearly sparked the armed conflict he sought to avoid. Notwithstanding his peaceful and constructive overtures toward the Soviet Union, both rhetorical and tangible, he nevertheless pursued a massive buildup of America's military defenses. Prospects for easing tensions with Cuba were belied by persistent efforts to undermine that regime; indeed, Kennedy would continue to pursue regime change throughout the world – in Central America, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and, perhaps most dramatically, in Southeast Asia – right up until his assassination. His newfound commitment to civil rights hardly assured passage of bills as strong as those that made their way through Congress in 1964 and 1965; nor were his other legislative gambits, on matters including taxes, health insurance, and education, as likely to receive congressional backing on his watch as they later would under his successor. In all, his critics would argue, Kennedy was more style than substance, more cynical pragmatist than earnest reformer, the beneficiary of a compliant and fawning press, who never had to confront the social and political explosions that came later in the decade.

These perspectives, which mark the general contours of the literature, fail to capture the complexity of the man and his moment. Accordingly, this volume on the historiography of the Kennedy presidency looks to move beyond these portrayals to highlight more nuanced understandings of key individuals and developments, as well as specific challenges and episodes, large and small. While it touches on matters that predate Kennedy's time in the White House, it focuses primarily on his presidency, addressing the people, themes, and events that helped to shape it. An introductory chapter exploring the major Kennedy biographies establishes the broad parameters of the ways that scholars have understood his administration, his policies, and, more broadly, his life; it also chronicles Kennedy's medical problems as well as his personal peccadilloes. Following a pair of essays that explore Kennedy's political career prior to the presidency – his fourteen years in Congress and the many months of the 1960 presidency campaign – a series of studies examine the roles and impact of key people surrounding him, as well as the institutions and dynamics he either engaged or confronted; these chapters focus on aides and officials such as Theodore Sorensen and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as on JFK's dealings with Congress and the military. A third section looks squarely at the major conflicts the administration confronted – Kennedy's wars, as one scholar has termed them, from Berlin and Cuba to Laos and Vietnam (Freedman 2000). Several chapters follow covering the many regional and global burdens that Kennedy would bear; this emphasis on foreign policy accords with Kennedy's own appreciation of the dominant challenges facing his administration. Domestic concerns, particularly the cause of civil rights, would emerge as increasingly salient during those thousand days, and essays on several of these matters form the penultimate section of the volume. A final chapter on the events in Dallas and the competing theories surrounding them concludes the volume. It hardly ends speculation, however, on the assassination, or, as the other twenty-nine chapters included here suggest, on writing about Kennedy. Given the sustained interest in JFK that has marked the past fifty years, new works on his life, his administration, and his legacy will likely appear regularly in the years to come. Indeed, a reinterpretation of Kennedy's place in American life has surfaced at least once a generation, and portraits of his presidency continue to intrigue the professional scholar and interested public alike.

In this regard, the memorial to the fallen president – the eternal flame that marks his gravesite in Arlington National Cemetery, conceived by his widow, Jacqueline – is a fitting symbol for his legacy, both historical and historiographical. It represents the timelessness of his inspiration, which fired the optimism of so many in the United States and around the world, leading many Americans to pursue lives of public service, to believe that their country could rise to new heights, and to labor so that their nation might more fully realize the promise of its creed. As evidenced during this fiftieth commemoration of his presidency, Kennedy's spark continues to burn within the generations that lived through his era. Insofar as it speaks to the better angels of our nature, and to the enduring themes of an American ethos, it may fire the imagination of generations yet to come.

But the Arlington tribute also symbolizes the timelessness of Kennedy's life, especially his political life. It evokes a president, and a presidency, forever young. His term cut short, Kennedy would never age, would never have to confront another domestic or foreign challenge, would never have the story of his administration written from its constitutional beginnings to its natural end. The writing of that story, which would have offered competing assessments in any event, would now incorporate a more open-ended, speculative element, which itself would shape the narrative of what had actually come to pass. Beyond the drama of the history that Kennedy made and lived through, it is this feedback loop that carries with it the potential for a richer, more expansive, and more creative historiography that may yet allow for a better understanding of the Kennedy years and the Kennedy legacy.

References

Freedman, L. (2000) Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, & Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press.

Part I

The Biographies

Chapter One

Writing Kennedy

James N. Giglio

More so than any other twentieth-century president, arguably, John F. Kennedy, despite his abbreviated tenure, has captivated scholars and the general public alike.¹ As a rule, books on Kennedy sell well. This is partly due to the Kennedy mystique popularized by Theodore White's idyllic essay in Life magazine immediately following the Kennedy assassination, which reflected Jackie Kennedy's Camelot characterization. If Kennedy had only lived, many Americans continue to believe, the nation's social turmoil that followed would never have occurred. The evolving scholarship focusing on Kennedy's life and presidency has taken a more measured view, as it has transitioned from the Camelot approach of the 1960s and the anti-Kennedy revisionist works beginning in the 1970s to the more balanced studies that followed. This chapter covers the historiography of Kennedy's life and presidency and my own contributions to it.

Much had already been written on Kennedy by the time I was asked, in 1983, to write the Kennedy volume for the American Presidency Series, published by the University Press of Kansas. This literature included two best-selling, gracefully written works from Kennedy insiders: Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s Thousand Days and Theodore Sorensen's Kennedy, both published in 1965. While Schlesinger, a Kennedy administrative assistant and unofficial court historian, covered the presidency in encyclopedic fashion, Sorensen's intimate account as White House special counsel provided the closest thing we have to a Kennedy memoir. What they had in common was an adulation of the Kennedy presidency, which contributed to the public view of Kennedy's presidential greatness. While other insider books soon followed – which several scholars have labeled the Camelot School of Kennedy historiography – the inevitable backlash of revisionism set in by the 1970s, depicting Kennedy as a Cold Warrior in foreign policy and inept in implementing his domestic agenda. Based primarily on published sources, the two best examples of early Kennedy revisionism were Henry Fairlie's The Kennedy Promise and Bruce Miroff's Pragmatic Illusions.

Not until Herbert Parmet's two-volume biography appeared in the early 1980s did we have a balanced appraisal of Kennedy based on the recently opened Kennedy papers, first located at Waltham, Massachusetts, and then stored at the Kennedy Library in Boston. Thus began what I have chosen to call postrevisionism in Kennedy studies. Parmet's Jack (as Kennedy was most often known) focused on the rise and prepresidential career of Kennedy and was followed by JFK, which covered Kennedy's presidential campaign and presidency. Parmet, a noted political historian at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, characterized Kennedy's presidency as one in which style overrode substance. He viewed him as a moderate conservative domestically and a Wilsonian in foreign policy who sought to make the world safe for diversity (Parmet 1983: 354, 132). Even though Kennedy's achievements, according to Parmet, were relatively modest, they remained an important part of his legacy. These included the Peace Corps, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, his response to the Soviet threat in Berlin and Cuba, and his belated commitment to civil rights.

My challenge involved adding to what was already known about the Kennedy presidency. Other writers had neglected or too briefly treated several aspects of the Kennedy presidency, including agricultural policy, the space program, Kennedy's relationship with the press, his private life in the White House, and the administration's war against organized crime, which I thought at the time might have had something to do with his assassination. The opening of previously closed documents on the Berlin and Cuban missile crises, as well as on the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, afforded additional opportunities for new perspectives, as did various oral histories and recently published books. Through the Freedom of Information Act, I managed to open the White House Gate Logs, which identified visitors to Kennedy's office or private residence, confirming the frequent visits of Max Jacobson, the amphetamines doctor, and Judith Campbell Exner and other women accused of having sexual relations with Kennedy (see Giglio 1992).

I also adopted a method of evaluating the Kennedy presidency that others had not used. I systematically looked at the domestic and foreign problems that faced the nation when Kennedy took office in 1961 and then turned to the ones remaining when he was assassinated on November 22, 1963. I concluded that Kennedy left America better than he found it and that he had grown in office during his final year. Even though he failed to accomplish most of his major domestic legislative agenda, he did promote economic growth, kept unemployment and inflation low, laid the foundations for major tax cuts, improved conditions on the agricultural front, implemented the first public housing program since 1949, reduced discrimination against women, and made his belated commitment to civil rights a moral issue that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 under President Johnson. He also updated traditional New Deal commitments such as social security and the minimum wage.

While he had inherited foreign crises in Berlin, the Congo, Laos, and Vietnam, only Vietnam remained virulent at Kennedy's death, thanks to his efforts. Even so, as all scholars agree, his sponsorship of the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961 represented his most significant failure. It not only worsened relationships with Castro's Cuba but also arguably, in concert with subsequent efforts to destabilize Castro through Operation Mongoose, contributed to the Soviet Union's decision to place ground-to-ground missiles in Cuba capable of destroying most American cities. While failing as a crisis avoider, I argued, Kennedy excelled in managing the missile crisis of October 1962. His cool, measured response, when hawkish advisors sought air strikes, led to the missile withdrawal and the subsequent emerging détente with the Soviet Union that included the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of September 1963. Most scholars have agreed that Kennedy's handling of that crisis represented the high point of his presidency.

I concluded that Kennedy merited an above-average ranking – the only president to serve fewer than four years to have been ranked that highly, according to the scholar-based Murray-Blessing Poll of 1988. In the process, I found more positive aspects to the Kennedy presidency than Parmet. Regardless, most reviewers found the two books balanced and readable.

Interest in Kennedy continued for the remainder of the 1990s, partly due to the opening of additional source material and the growing fascination with or appreciation of Kennedy. The latter especially involved the general public who, in various polls, ranked Kennedy as America's most popular and greatest president. To many observers, Kennedy was arguably the last president that a majority of Americans trusted. His tragic death left in its wake not only an elegant widow and two attractive children but also realizable dreams and promises that soon soured as the social fabric unraveled in the face of the escalation in Vietnam, the social protest movement, and the urban riots of the late 1960s, followed by Watergate and other contentious developments of the 1970s and 1980s. Kennedy consequently remained relevant in the 1990s as many more historians explored his life and death.

Three books on Kennedy's presidency soon followed my 1991 effort, two of which were best sellers with sales of 100,000 or more. President Kennedy: Profile of Power, by Richard Reeves, made the greatest splash and was the most comprehensive. Reeves, a well-known syndicated columnist, eschewed the typical thematic chapter approaches of Parmet, myself, and other scholars on such topics as civil rights, the missile crisis, and Berlin. Instead, he sought to focus on issues the same way the president confronted them: collectively and in competition with one another, stressing the interrelationship of events and problems. Reeves was interested in what Kennedy knew and when he knew it and what he actually did – sometimes day by day, sometimes hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute (Reeves 1993: 13). This sort of narrative approach provided a more realistic view of the presidency and the difficult choices facing Kennedy, but dealing with diverse matters collectively made for challenging reading even when chapters were thoughtfully organized.

According to Reeves, the major issues in 1961 were in foreign policy. Kennedy dumped civil rights and other domestic problems onto Attorney General Robert Kennedy and other associates. The following year, Kennedy initially turned more to domestic issues such as the economy, medical care for the elderly, space exploration, and the steel crisis; by that fall, the civil rights movement and the missile crisis dominated the president's day. In 1963, the frenetic pace continued with Kennedy tangling almost daily with such diverse matters as the tax cut bill, the mounting civil rights crisis, nuclear test ban negotiations, and the Vietnam War, which assumed much more importance on the eve of his death. Reeves did not ignore Kennedy's personal life. He portrayed a physically flawed president who nevertheless found time to engage in extramarital activities.

Even though Reeves concentrated even less on domestic affairs than did Kennedy, he convincingly showed that, in Kennedy's mind, the struggle with communism would be the focus of the history of his times (1993: 278). As Kennedy once said, Domestic policy can only defeat us [politically], but foreign policy can kill us [literally] (Schlesinger 2007: 515).

What sort of president was Kennedy? Reeves depicted him as a gifted politician who reacted to events with varying degrees of success. To Reeves, the missile crisis probably represented his greatest achievement, in part because it made him more credible around the world and more popular at home. Even when Kennedy failed, he covered himself with plausible explanations. He was much better in dealing with concrete matters than with broader, long-range issues, according to Reeves. Unlike Camelot School and many postrevisionist historians, myself included, Reeves concluded that there was little evidence of growth in Kennedy's presidency, for he continued to make mistakes in 1963. Reeves's polished style, his effort to uncover new documentary material, and his extensive and skillful interviewing provided a significant contribution to the literature.

Two years earlier, in 1991, Thomas Reeves (no relation) also attracted national attention, with appearances on the Today show and in other public media. An accomplished biographer of Senator Joseph McCarthy and President Chester Arthur, and professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside, Reeves focused on what he perceived as Kennedy's lack of character, including his womanizing, his arrogance, his deception, his insensitivity toward others, and his relentless pursuit of power, which Reeves argued characterized his political career. To Reeves, character began with integrity, which he defined as compassion, generosity, prudence, loyalty, responsibility, humility, and perseverance. Kennedy lacked these qualities, Reeves argued, because of a father who preached winning at all costs and a mother too detached from domestic life and too frequently absent from home. All of this created a Kennedy that most Americans did not know.

Reeves argued that Kennedy's lack of character negatively affected his presidency. He accused Kennedy of being pragmatic to the point of amorality, saying his sole standard seemed to be political expediency (Reeves 1991: 415). That made him morally indifferent to social justice and caused him to intervene at the Bay of Pigs just enough to ensure disaster (Reeves 1991: 276). In the end, his response to the 1962 steel crisis proved less a victory for the working man than an eventual win for business. Meanwhile, Kennedy's secret war in Laos expressed his willingness to use power illegally and showed [his] macho aggressiveness, his eagerness for deception and risk, and his moral indifference (Reeves 1991: 284). Reeves did concede that good character does not ensure presidential success – Jimmy Carter being a case in point. And he did not judge Kennedy always a failure in decision-making. Kennedy's unwillingness, for example, to send American combat troops into Cuba during the Bay of Pigs and into Vietnam subsequently drew Reeves's approbation, as did Kennedy's handling of the missile crisis and his efforts to deintensify the Cold War and seek meaningful disarmament (Reeves 1991: 417).

In the end, Reeves's attention on Kennedy's alleged flawed character was overwrought, and his sometimes indiscriminate use of published sources revealed nothing new about Kennedy's womanizing. His allegation that Judith Campbell Exner acted as a courier for the mob has never been substantiated. Nor did the White House Gate Logs suggest that Max Jacobson treated Kennedy with amphetamines after May 1962, as first conveyed in Jacobson's unpublished autobiography. Unlike other Kennedy presidential studies published during the decade, Reeves's book contained no manuscripts from either the Kennedy Library or from other research libraries, save for oral histories.

If Thomas Reeves's biography was more akin to the revisionist studies of the 1970s, Irving Bernstein's Promises Kept, which only addressed Kennedy's domestic presidency, represented a 1990s version of Camelot historiography. Written by a political scientist whose previous work chronicled the history of the labor movement in America, Promises Kept began with a scorching indictment of revisionist Kennedy scholarship for failing to acknowledge the domestic successes of Kennedy's presidency. Bernstein emphasized how much Kennedy had grown by 1963 – calling him a president of great stature – while proclaiming the inevitable adoption of his major programs had he lived (Bernstein 1991: 298). He relied on the statistical evidence of Kennedy staffer Larry O'Brien to make the overall case for Kennedy's legislative achievements. The book ignored much of the controversial side of the Kennedy presidency, gliding over matters such as the administration's sanctioning of the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. Not only did Bernstein fail to analyze the president's motives but also Kennedy was totally absent in long stretches of the detail-laden narrative, as the author delved deeply into issues of structural unemployment, women's rights, and civil rights. Bernstein included a gratuitous chapter on the Peace Corps but provided no coverage of Kennedy's farm program. With Bernstein's book, Kennedy historiography had come full circle.

Many specialized books that covered some aspect of Kennedy's life or his presidency also appeared during the 1990s. At least two deserve special attention because of their significant contributions. The first, JFK: Reckless Youth, authored by Nigel Hamilton in 1992, treated, in considerable detail and controversial fashion, the first twenty-nine years of Kennedy's life. Hamilton was a British freelance writer whose father, Sir Dennis Hamilton, served as editor in chief of the London Times. The junior Hamilton's credentials included a three-volume official biography of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery of World War II fame. He intended to replicate that feat with Kennedy, but the project soon ended abruptly following the Kennedy family's dissatisfaction over his preliminary portrayal of Kennedy's parents. He finally left the project upon the completion of the first volume, after complaining that the Kennedys had failed to deliver on their promises of cooperation.

Still, Hamilton went beyond the work of Parmet, Doris Kearns Goodwin (The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, 1987), and others in adding to what we know of Kennedy's early life, despite being denied access to the Joseph Kennedy family papers (only Goodwin then had privileged access), Kennedy's medical records, and other restricted material at the Kennedy Library. Hamilton instead relied on the voluminous correspondence and oral history of K. LeMoyne Billings, Kennedy's close friend since prep school; the correspondence and unpublished memoirs of Inga Arvad, supposedly Kennedy's true love; extensive interviews with Kennedy's contemporaries; and Kennedy's naval medical records. Hamilton also quoted extensively from Kennedy's letters and other writings, enabling Kennedy to illuminate himself to the reader.

What emerged was a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary individual. Hamilton argued that John Kennedy was a victim of parental abuse. He depicted his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, as a notorious womanizer whose only imparted value supposedly was winning at all costs, while his mother, Rose, was frustrated, unaffectionate, sanctimonious, and often unavailable, a view that Goodwin and others would deem harsh. To Hamilton, the Kennedys' troubled marriage had an adverse effect on JFK, who disliked being touched even though he craved sexual conquest. Additionally, Kennedy suffered from an array of serious and mysterious illnesses. Doctors once told Kennedy that he had leukemia! To Billings, an adolescent Kennedy described in detail the painful and embarrassing medical tests at various clinics. What unfolded was an incredible paradox of an individual seemingly seriously ill but extremely vibrant. That indomitable spirit came through in Kennedy's mischievousness, in his self-deprecating wit, and in his boisterous letters to Billings.

Hamilton contended that Kennedy steadily matured despite his mediocre academic performance at Choate School and at Harvard. His Harvard senior thesis, published as Why England Slept, represented a tour de force (Hamilton 1992: 335). Unlike his aloof, limited older brother, a clone of an impulsive and isolationist father, John Kennedy projected, according to Hamilton, the effervescence of his maternal grandfather, Honey Fitz, and he exhibited a growing independence, especially in his views on foreign relations. Hamilton hinted that this sibling rivalry caused John Kennedy to strive for success. At the time of his brother's death in August 1944 in a risky airplane mission over France, he was outstripping Joe Jr. in achievement. Whether Joe had lived or not, John Kennedy seemed destined for public office and, to Hamilton, likely to be more successful than his older brother.

Unlike several scholars, Hamilton sided with those naval officials during World War II who had absolved Kennedy from blame for the ramming of his PT boat by a Japanese destroyer. He came out of the war an authentic hero for saving the lives of his crew and as one able to draw people to him from every walk of life. Hamilton also wrote favorably of Kennedy's brief excursion into journalism in the postwar period and his determined effort to win a congressional seat. At the same time, Hamilton did not ignore Kennedy's negative side. Kennedy's attitude toward women was best summarized by his favorite expression from adolescence, Slam, bam, thank you, ma'am (Hamilton 1992: 358). His innumerable affairs led to his contracting gonorrhea in 1940. Six years later, Kennedy supposedly impregnated a campaign staffer. Hamilton also noted a subtle change by 1946, when Kennedy became more selfish, insensitive, and detached. He also seemed obsessed with the threat of Russian communism.

Although Hamilton provided a convincing picture of Kennedy, he provoked controversy for the way he had depicted the Kennedy family. Others have written as critically of his parents without such reproach. But, in calling Joseph Kennedy yellow for his refusal to enlist in World War I, Hamilton ignored the father's Irish-American sensibilities and his abhorrence of war (Hamilton 1992: 35). Hamilton was also too harsh in his treatment of the father's relationship with his son John, as his own evidence occasionally demonstrated a different story. In short, this book sometimes lacked sensitivity and emphasized the salacious, confirmed by such section headings as Hot Screw and Tangling Tonsils with Inga (Hamilton 1992: 109, 356). There was scarcely mention of John Kennedy's pending Addison's disease, a topic that Hamilton had planned to explore in the second volume. Despite the aforementioned limitations, Hamilton made a major contribution to understanding John Kennedy's evolution to manhood.

The Crisis Years, by Michael Beschloss, also appeared in 1991. The book is massive in length and as significant as Reckless Youth, and its freelance author remains to this day a popular presidential historian. One of his previous books, Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair (1986), provided an excellent foundation to explore Kennedy's relationship with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. Relying on oral and written reminiscences of Soviet figures and previously untapped Kennedy-related manuscripts, Beschloss explored in depth, more so than previous accounts, the tumultuous relationship between Kennedy and Khrushchev – the latter impulsive, ideological, mercurial, and old enough to be Kennedy's father, and the former much more pragmatic, uncertain, and inexperienced. Despite their differences, both leaders felt considerable pressure at home, particularly from hardliners. Both also revealed a lack of understanding about each other's problems and, accordingly, miscalculated badly. Yet what came across in the end was their humanity, expressed especially in their fears of a nuclear holocaust and their desire for peace and security. By the fall of 1963, this dynamic was reflected in the Limited Test Ban Treaty and an emerging, albeit shaky, détente.

Beschloss devoted about 25 percent of his study to the missile crisis, for which he relied heavily on the available transcripts of White House meetings as well as the testimony of scholars and former participants, including Soviets who participated in conferences with their American counterparts in the 1980s and early 1990s. Additionally, he devoted two chapters to the Bay of Pigs and three to Berlin. Consequently, seven hundred pages aside, this study provided no comprehensive study of US foreign policy, despite Kennedy's and Khrushchev's assertions that the Third World represented the new battleground of the Cold War. Indeed, Vietnam commanded only about twelve pages and Africa much fewer.

Among Beschloss's revelations included the assertion that Kennedy's father might have persuaded the president to proceed with the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation. Once it was underway, Kennedy called his father a half dozen times a day. Had this been publicly known at the time, it would not have helped the administration, Beschloss wrote (1991: 108). Regarding the Berlin crisis of 1961, Beschloss convincingly suggested that Kennedy probably signaled the Soviets that he would permit a wall as a partial solution to the continuation of a divided Berlin. Arguably, Kennedy's most provocative act occurred in October 1961, when Undersecretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric's speech alluded to the United States's overwhelming nuclear power. By rubbing [Khrushchev's] nose in the fact of Soviet inferiority, Kennedy violated his own rule against backing an enemy into a dangerous corner, according to Beschloss (1991: 351). Khrushchev's political vulnerability and his concerns about a future first strike caused him to put offensive missiles in Cuba by October 1962. Hence, Beschloss claimed that Khrushchev sought to increase Soviet nuclear power on the cheap to combat a deficiency in intercontinental ballistic missiles. Kennedy's sanctioning of Operation Mongoose, which included CIA sabotage operations against Cuba following the Bay of Pigs, added to Khrushchev's concerns that the United States might invade Cuba.

Beschloss acknowledged Kennedy's talent for crisis management and his push for a nuclear test ban treaty in 1963. Yet, unlike most other scholars, he saw Kennedy as more dangerous than Eisenhower. Partly because of his perceived softness on communism, his narrow election victory, his alarm at Khrushchev's national liberation speech of January 1961, and his belief that great crises make great men, Kennedy relied on provocative rhetoric and action, which initially overshadowed his peaceful instincts. Unlike a secure and mature Eisenhower, who understood the Soviet leader's dilemma, Kennedy exposed the myth of Khrushchev's nuclear supremacy and escalated spending on conventional and nuclear forces, which hardened the Soviet position in 1961 and 1962 in the face of what was thought to be an American threat, and spawned an enormous arms race that led to Soviet near nuclear parity by 1970.

Beschloss argued that no Kennedy epiphany resulted from the missile crisis. Instead, his facing down the Russians had strengthened him at home politically, enabling him to speak of peace with the Soviets, which he best expressed in his American University address in June 1963. Khrushchev called that the best speech delivered by an American president since Roosevelt. Despite promising beginnings of détente, manifested by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the selling of surplus wheat to the Soviets, Beschloss concluded that, by mid-November, rapprochement with the Soviet Union had faded because of continuing problems over Berlin and mutual mistrust.

The twenty-first century ushered in several other Kennedy biographies and presidential studies, beginning with Geoffrey Perret's Jack: A Life Like No Other in 2001. Biographer of Douglas MacArthur, Ulysses Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower, Perret provided the first Kennedy biography since Parmet's two volumes in the 1980s. He added to what we already knew about Kennedy's personal life by mining the Joseph Kennedy Papers and other sources at the Kennedy Library, as well as utilizing personal interviews and the materials provided by journalists Joan Blair and Clay Blair Jr., to include their much ignored work of 1976, The Search for JFK. The Blairs were the first to explore in depth the young Kennedy and how a domineering, unscrupulous, absentee father, a devoutly religious absentee mother, and a bullying older brother had shaped his life (1976: 610). Because of the lack of cooperation from the Kennedy family and the unavailability of sufficient documentary materials, the frustrated Blairs ended their quest on Kennedy following his surgeries during the mid-1950s. Their transcriptions of some 150 interviews and their other sources, deposited at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, became an important part of Perret's study.

In a book of some four hundred pages, Perret devoted only around 25 percent to the Kennedy presidency, without providing any major interpretations or adding much to what scholars already knew. Perret gave more attention than others to Kennedy's health, his dalliances, and other aspects of his private life – sometimes using questionable autobiographies and popular biographies as his sources.

He also attributed many of Kennedy's physical problems, which began in adolescence, to emotional stress deriving from a lack of parental warmth and unconditional love, as well as from competition with an older brother. Unlike Hamilton, however, he resisted depicting Kennedy's parents as negatively impacting on his personality. Without adequate primary sources, Perret correctly attributed Kennedy's gastrointestinal problems, which began in the 1930s, to nonorganic causes, although he incorrectly argued that these ended after the death of Joe Jr.² Perret also focused on Kennedy's other disabilities, including an unstable back attributed to a birth-related congenital leg-length discrepancy. He convincingly pinpointed the first instance of back distress to a 1937 European excursion with Lem Billings, when the two attempted to push Kennedy's Ford convertible off an Italian beach. Prior to that, Perret explained, Kennedy had never complained of back pain. Perret also highlighted Kennedy's superior intellect, which was not always appreciated in prep school. At Choate, Kennedy had created his own way of educating himself by wide independent reading, a practice that was dismissively disregarded by his teachers. Only after the publication of Why England Slept (1940), whose thesis Perret challenged, did Kennedy's father, for instance, appreciate how resourceful he was.

Throughout, Perret concentrated (more than any other previous biographer) on the Kennedy style that captivated Americans, including Jack's coolness, his detachment, his lofty idealism, and his youthful vigor. Kennedy modernized the presidency, and he and Jackie transformed the White House into the nation's cultural center, all of which Americans remembered as part of Camelot. In reality, Perret viewed Kennedy as a complex and contradictory personality in which image did not conform with reality – not with his health problems, his drug dependency, his recreational sex, his marriage difficulties, and his emotional makeup. Perret referred to him as a melancholic romantic who lived life to the fullest because of his fear of early death. Like so many Kennedy biographers, Perret had nothing to say about Kennedy's assassination except that Lee Harvey Oswald had been the assassin.

Despite a Newsweek photograph of former President Bill Clinton reading Jack in flight, Perret's book drew little national attention. That cannot be said about Robert Dallek's epic An Unfinished Life, which outsold any other previous Kennedy book by a considerable margin, including the 1965 Schlesinger and Sorensen best sellers. It represented the most inclusive biography since Parmet's two volumes. Indeed, in 2003, Dallek, a renowned historian of Lyndon B. Johnson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and author of several books on the modern presidency, was seemingly in demand everywhere for book promotions from C-Span, PBS, and other television networks, as well as the print media, including a featured essay in the Atlantic Monthly. At that time, I presumed to ask in a review of Dallek's book for Reviews in American History: Why Another Kennedy Book? (Giglio 2003b: 645) Paradoxically, this turned out to be the only review in a major historical journal, as the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History inexplicably – and unprofessionally – ignored the book.

Dallek placed Kennedy in the context of his time, class, family circumstances, and physical and emotional difficulties. His Kennedy comprised a synthesis of Hamilton, Goodwin, and Perret. Dallek amply covered Kennedy's later medical problems, especially during his presidency, where he made his greatest contribution, the result of his gaining entry to the Kennedy White House medical records at the Kennedy Library. He received permission in 2002 from the donor committee representing the Kennedy family on condition that a physician accompany him in the archives. Dallek chose Dr. Jeffrey Kelman, a specialist in internal medicine and physiology. Dallek's efforts contributed to my own access in March 2003, accompanied by Dr. Bert Park, a neurosurgeon and author of The Impact of Illness on World Leaders (1986). My decision to return to the study of Kennedy had come from the invitation of the University Press of Kansas to publish an updated, revised edition of my The Presidency of John F. Kennedy. My concentration on Kennedy's medical problems soon became a two-year endeavor that involved several trips to the Kennedy Library and consultation with many medical specialists following my two-day library stay with Dr. Park.

What Dallek and Kelman had found in their own two-day visit spanned the period from 1955 through 1963, much of which involved the records of Dr. Janet Travell, a specialist in the treatment of muscular disorders, who became Kennedy's primary physician for much of that period. The records revealed Kennedy's enormous medical problems, for which he received a considerable number of medications from several specialists, including New York endocrinologist Eugene Cohen and Roger Boles, a gastroenterologist from Boston's Lahey Clinic. No wonder Richard Reeves claimed that Kennedy was more promiscuous with physicians and drugs than he was with women (Reeves 1993: 399).

Dallek revealed that President Kennedy ingested at least seven different prescription drugs daily, including hydrocortisone, fludrocortisone acetate, and Meticorten for Addison's disease (a malfunction of the adrenal glands), and T3 for hypothyroidism, which, as I later noted, accompanies Addison's. Without the daily ingestion of cortiocosteroids, Kennedy would have died from his body's inability to produce hormones to combat infections or other physiologically stressful situations. Kennedy faced life-threatening Addisonian crises in 1947 and 1954 (during back surgery), and arguably nearly one in 1961.

Kennedy also took Equanil for anxiety and tension. The medical records disclosed that, for a short time, Kennedy experimented with the more potent Stelazine for depression. For his gastrointestinal problems he took several antispasmodics, such as Lomotil and Bentyl; for weight gain he took a daily dose of testosterone; and for his allergies he took Chlor-Trimeton.

What complicated Kennedy's medical treatments was his reliance on Dr. Max Jacobson, a New York City celebrity physician, who injected him with a concoction of amphetamines, steroids, calcium, placenta, and vitamins, which especially alarmed White House doctors. Even though Kennedy may have felt energized by the injections, the risks, which Dallek acknowledged, were enormous, particularly since Kennedy already took steroids for Addison's disease. Dallek nevertheless neglected to link Jacobson to the White House medical records, despite references to him there, including Dr. Travell's description of Jacobson as that creep from New York and Dr. Cohen's warnings about him (Giglio 2003: 647).

Next to Addison's disease, Kennedy's most pressing problem, Dallek rightly emphasized, was chronic back pain, which surfaced when he strained an unstable back (probably birth-related) on a European motor trip in 1937, as Perret first noted. He further aggravated it while playing tennis in 1940 and during PT boat service during World War II. Ill-advised surgery in 1944 only worsened the condition; by 1954 Kennedy found the pain so acute that he underwent back surgery once again, despite the risk of an Addisonian crisis. As Dallek and others have suggested, beginning with Parmet, Kennedy's subsequent treatment included procaine injections by Dr. Travell to relieve back spasms, but, in time, even increased dosages brought decreased results. As a consequence, Dr. George C. Burkley, an admiral from the Naval Dispensary in Washington, DC, eventually assumed overall responsibility for the president's health. He, among others, strongly opposed Travell's treatment, and he consequently employed Dr. Hans Kraus, a New York orthopedic surgeon, to engage Kennedy in physical therapy. After undergoing a lengthy conditioning program, first begun in October 1961, Kennedy's back problems, as the medical records documented, lessened markedly, even though he used crutches from time to time.

Nevertheless, in my review, I disagreed with Dallek's explanation of the probable causes of Kennedy's most serious medical problems, which received considerable media coverage, including a cover story in the Atlantic Monthly in December 2002. In that article and in his book, Dallek contended that Kennedy was probably treated with steroids, possibly desoxycorticosterone acetate (DOCA), as early as the 1930s for chronic colitis. That treatment, according to Dallek, likely caused the Addison's disease, first diagnosed when Kennedy suffered an Addisonian crisis in England in 1947, from which he almost died. Dallek then speculated that the steroids also had caused osteoporosis, the supposed source of Kennedy's back problems. Both hypotheses are dubious since no evidence could be found in the medical records that Kennedy had ingested steroids before 1947. Moreover, endocrinologists at the Mayo Clinic and elsewhere have insisted that steroids could not cause Addison's and in fact were used to treat that disease.

Nor did Kennedy have osteoporosis, a deterioration of bone mass and bone density that causes crush fractures of the vertebrae. That diagnosis was refuted by several doctors at the time, as revealed in Janet Travell's medical records as well as later by a physician employed by the Kennedy Library. On my behalf, Dr. Park studied the x-rays of Kennedy's back surgeries, which revealed no osteoporosis. All of this has been further confirmed by doctors from the Lahey Clinic and elsewhere. Park contended that Kennedy's back condition should have been treated with physical therapy. Ironically, Kennedy's back surgeries were not only unwarranted but probably did more harm than good.

What cannot be denied was the considerable chronic pain or discomfort Kennedy felt throughout his public life. Dallek rightly emphasized the courage Kennedy exhibited in dealing with it while confronting world crises. The medical records also revealed, at least to me, how Kennedy's physicians micromanaged, adjusting medication on a daily basis and then often overmedicating for virtually every minor problem. Scarcely a week passed without Kennedy having blood work done. As I later argued, Kennedy became increasingly self-absorbed about his health, asking for more and different medications based on how he felt at a particular time. No doubt this overregulation partly resulted from concern that stress or infection might contribute to an Addisonian crisis, always a major concern, especially since Kennedy denied having Addison's. Dallek was particularly good in detailing the extent of the Kennedys' media manipulation and cover-up of the Addison's disease; this continued even after the president's death, when his brother Robert ordered physicians to destroy Jack Kennedy's medical records – which, of course, they did not.

Dallek made a convincing case, as others have done, that Kennedy's health problems and his medical treatments had no appreciable effect on his presidential performance. If anything, drugs seemed to have enhanced it. During the missile crisis, nobody displayed more energy, coolness, and good judgment than Kennedy; the same occurred in the Ole Miss and other crises. Despite Kennedy's greater reliance on Dr. Jacobson's amphetamines and other drugs during his June 1961 meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna, that dangerous combination, according to Dallek, seemed to have had no deleterious impact.

More significantly, the Kennedy medical records alluded to a potential Addisonian crisis that Kennedy experienced in June 1961, which could have posed a threat to his presidency, politically and otherwise. Worn out from the stress of meet­ing Khrushchev at Vienna, perhaps, Kennedy suffered from strep throat. By June 22, his fever had risen to 105 degrees, which resulted in massive dosages of penicillin for the next two days and the arrival of endocrinologist Cohen from New York. Kennedy was probably the only president to have had intravenous therapy in the White House. While not appearing in Dallek's biography, this episode revealed how seriously Kennedy's health problems could have intruded on his presidency.

Dallek devoted much less coverage to Kennedy's many dalliances, most of which had been amply covered in previous studies. Only four brief references to Judith Campbell Exner existed, despite her links with mobster Sam Giancana. Kennedy's sexual relationship with Ellen Rometsch, a suspected East German spy, received more coverage because of its potential threat to national security. Dallek's reference to a ‘tall, slender, beautiful’ nineteen-year-old college sophomore and White House intern drew considerable news-media attention, however, when she was soon identified as Marion (Mimi) Beardsley Fahnestock, a prep school senior when she first met Kennedy in 1961 (Dallek 2003: 476). She was soon compared with Monica Lewinsky, President William J. Clinton's intern, after Fahnestock admitted her sexual relationship with President Kennedy.

In covering other aspects of Kennedy's life, Dallek was more successful in confirming previous appraisals than in providing new information. As did Hamilton and Perret, Dallek perceived him as much brighter and less rigid than his older brother. He not only viewed Kennedy's World War II experience in the South Pacific as heroic but also considered it to have changed Kennedy's perspective on war. Kennedy witnessed the incompetency, recklessness, and posturing of high-ranking officers in the war zone and the superpatriots at home eager to endanger young American lives abroad. The cynicism he acquired as a junior officer accompanied him into his presidency. Kennedy's brother Joe's 1944 death in an aircraft explosion, Dallek discovered, could have been averted if the British had been alerted to turn off their coastal radar.

Dallek added little to what was already known about Kennedy's time in Congress. He did give Kennedy more credit for Profiles in Courage (1956) than others have done – most notably Parmet – while discarding the lobbying of Arthur Krock on Kennedy's behalf for the coveted Pulitzer Prize. In covering Kennedy's bid for the vice-presidential nomination in 1956, he also overlooked a letter that Kennedy's father had written to son Ted in July that alluded to a planned story in the New York Post on JFK's suspected Addison's disease. Joe Kennedy's advice: I told [Jack] that he should co-operate with the reporter and admit that he had it but that the disease was not a killer as it was eight years ago, and I feel that it should be brought out now and not after he gets the nomination, if he gets it (Giglio 2003: 250–1). Apparently, Kennedy, not his father, made the shrewd political decision to keep it private.

Dallek offered few new disclosures on Kennedy's quest for the presidency in 1960. He argued that Kennedy's huge financial expenditures in the West Virginia primary were technically legal. Rejecting Seymour Hersh's treatment in The Dark Side of Camelot (1997), Dallek maintained that there was no hint of organized crime money being used to buy Kennedy votes. Dallek gave as much weight to Kennedy's personal appeal and his emphasis on economic uplift as he did to his lavish expenditures in that impressive primary victory that made his nomination possible. Nor did Dallek believe that corruption played a major role in Kennedy's victory in November. Yes, Mayor Daley's machine may have stolen Illinois, but Kennedy had enough electoral votes to win anyway. Afterward, Dallek, virtually alone among Kennedy scholars, attributed Robert Kennedy's selection as attorney general not to Papa Joe's pressure but to the wishes of John Kennedy – and Robert – who both disguised their intentions to the very end to mute political criticism.

Dallek incorporated new sources in assessing the Kennedy presidency, including presidential secretary Evelyn Lincoln's diary, the newly released published documents in Foreign Relations of the United States, and other recently opened material at the Kennedy Library and elsewhere. None was more important than the Kennedy tapes – the secretly recorded telephone conversations and meetings in the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room. Dallek used the published transcriptions of the tapes, which covered the presidency through the missile crisis, as well as the unpublished tapes that postdated the missile crisis. He also mined the published transcribed tapes of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) – Kennedy's advisory group during the thirteen-day missile crisis – and Alexandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali's One Hell of a Gamble (1997), which incorporated official Soviet sources, including the Presidium materials on Cuba; the KGB's records of its Washington, DC, and Havana bureaus; and military intelligence files.

Dallek labeled Kennedy a Cold Warrior at heart – one who nevertheless held out hope that, operating from a position of strength, he could negotiate differences with the Soviet Union. Like all Kennedy scholars, Dallek viewed the Bay of Pigs incursion of April 1961 as a terrible mistake while approving Kennedy's decision not to use American forces against Fidel Castro. Nevertheless, the Bay of Pigs elevated the administration's obsession with Castro, whom it viewed as a dangerous communist subversive. Even though Robert Kennedy played a leading role in Operation Mongoose, which soon followed, Dallek claimed that President Kennedy opposed the assassination of Castro for practical, not moral, reasons. At the same time, he judged Kennedy's performance at Vienna in June 1961 critically and agreed with historians who argued that Premier Khrushchev left the meeting thinking Kennedy too intelligent and weak (Dallek 2003: 407). In response, Kennedy built up the national defense, trumpeted America's nuclear superiority, and made clear his intent to defend West Berlin at all costs. Khrushchev responded with the Wall, a tolerable solution to Kennedy – and to Dallek – because it averted possible war and represented an acknowledgment that the Soviets could not easily force the United States out of West Berlin.

Kennedy's greatest success, according to Dallek, occurred as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Khrushchev had placed ground-to-ground missiles in Cuba primarily because he thought a US invasion there was imminent. Kennedy avoided possible war by agreeing not to invade Cuba and secretly promising to withdraw Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Never had he intended an invasion of Cuba; Dallek quoted a Kennedy memo, dated November 5, 1962, to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to underscore that point: I think we should keep in mind the British in the Boer War, the Russians in the last war with the Finnish and our own experience with the North Koreans (Dallek 2003: 572). Despite praising Kennedy's performance, Dallek was mindful that the Kennedy administration's actions contributed to Khrushchev's decision to send missiles to Cuba.

Dallek contended that, if Kennedy had lived, he never would have personalized and expanded the Vietnam conflict to the extent that Lyndon Johnson did. Kennedy's pronouncements and actions, according to Dallek, suggested a carefully managed stand-down approach in which changes would occur following Kennedy's probable reelection, for Kennedy understood the differences between Korea – a case of clear aggression – and Vietnam – a ‘more obscure and less flagrant’ conflict (Dallek 2003: 453). Despite Vietnam becoming a more vexing problem by 1963, Dallek believed that Kennedy had made progress on a number of different fronts – Germany, Cuba, Laos, and the Soviet Union. He called Kennedy's American University address of June 1963, which expressed a vision for world peace, one of the great state papers of any twentieth-century American Presidency (Dallek 2003: 619).

Dallek devoted much less time to domestic affairs, remaining silent, for example, on Kennedy's war against crime, women's issues (including the Equal Pay Act of 1963), and Kennedy's administrative style. He accepted the conventional wisdom that Kennedy proved reasonably successful on the economic front, including his handling of the steel crisis, even though no assurances existed that Congress would soon pass his tax cut bill. Kennedy failed to move a recalcitrant Congress on other major legislative objectives such as Medicare, federal aid to education, and civil rights. His reluctance to push civil rights legislation early was a mistake, Dallek insisted, because it undermined his ability to press the [moral] issue later on (Dallek 2003: 650). If Kennedy had lived, Dallek argued, he would have succeeded in getting his reform agenda through Congress following an almost certain election victory against Barry Goldwater in 1964. In the end, Dallek adopted a holistic view of Kennedy's presidency in which he saw more to Kennedy than just concrete achievements – or unachieved goals: Kennedy's thousand days spoke to the country's better angels, inspired visions of a less divisive nation and world, and demonstrated that America was still the best hope of mankind (Dallek 2003: 711). Dallek declined to rank Kennedy, but he likely considered him at least an above-average president.

Michael O'Brien's John F. Kennedy (2005) garnered much less attention in the wake of Dallek's blockbuster book. O'Brien, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin at Fox Valley, and a biographer of Joseph McCarthy and football coaches Joe Paterno and Vince Lombardi, dedicated ten years to his project, the result of which more than equaled the comprehensiveness and quality of Dallek's effort. In fact, no other biography has matched O'Brien's extensive research, which included a more accurate rendering of Kennedy's medical problems. After studying the Kennedy medical records, O'Brien's team of physicians, drew the same conclusion that Dr. Park and I had months previously – that steroids did not cause Kennedy's gastrointestinal problems and his back problems, as Dallek suggested. No other biography covered Kennedy's personal and public life as president in greater detail or with more clarity. Yet a book of 972 pages in length might have been more than readers wished to absorb following Dallek's lengthy work. The meager marketing efforts did not help either, nor did O'Brien's lack of comparable national reputation and the publisher's decision to relegate the endnotes to its online site.

O'Brien wrote more sympathetically of Rose Kennedy's mothering of a young Jack Kennedy than did Hamilton or Dallek, even though Papa Joe remained a negative influence. O'Brien also favorably chronicled Kennedy's World War II service and gave him more credit for Profiles in Courage than did Parmet, myself, and others. Throughout, O'Brien adopted a balanced approach in assessing Kennedy's private and public life. He covered Kennedy's womanizing more extensively than any previous writer, while suggesting that JFK sometimes put the country and himself at risk by his affairs. But he rejected allegations that Judith Campbell Exner served as a courier between Kennedy and mobster Sam Giancana, or that Kennedy's reckless private behavior mirrored his public actions, as many revisionists would have it.

O'Brien often integrated quotations from the Camelot, revisionist, or postrevisionist historians before leaving it to readers to draw their own conclusions. On more occasions, however, his own thoughtful analysis preceded a final assessment. An example of the latter occurred when O'Brien concluded that Kennedy must have known of, if not encouraged, an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro, a point of view that many historians have been reluctant to accept. Like Dallek and myself, O'Brien's Kennedy grew in office from the disastrous Bay of Pigs of April 1961 – a foundation for future success – to the missile crisis of the following October, when he showed remarkable restraint (O'Brien 2005: 538). As O'Brien quoted one source, Kennedy was the only one determined not to go to war over obsolete missiles in Turkey (2005: 669). By 1963, Vietnam had become an emerging problem in which Kennedy responded more judiciously than his major advisors. O'Brien questioned whether Kennedy would have committed ground forces to Vietnam as Johnson did, but, at the same time, no compelling contemporary evidence existed, he believed, to confirm that Kennedy intended to withdraw US forces following the 1964 election, a position generally held by several recent Kennedy scholars.

On the domestic side, while O'Brien concluded that Kennedy's major legislative proposals failed, he placed the blame on a divided and obstructionist Congress. He quoted Larry O'Brien, Kennedy's special assistant for congressional relations: a myth has arisen that [Kennedy] was uninterested in Congress or that he ‘failed’ with Congress (O'Brien 2005: 585). Kennedy's delayed commitment to civil rights, coming just months prior to his death, reflected, according to O'Brien, a recognition of the difficulties the issue presented inside and outside Congress. But creative pressure from activists pushed him into becoming a civil rights president who sponsored comprehensive legislation in the summer of 1963, an action that O'Brien believed damaged Kennedy's prospective reelection bid for 1964.

What perhaps lessened O'Brien's page-turning narrative was the lack of a concluding assessment of Kennedy. The questions that he posited in the book's introduction – So who was John F. Kennedy? What influenced his development? How should history judge his personality, his character, and his presidency? – remained mostly for readers to decide (O'Brien 2005: xviii). And, like Schlesinger, Richard Reeves, and most other scholars, O'Brien never mentioned the circumstances surrounding Kennedy's assassination.³

Meanwhile, my own Kennedy scholarship continued after O'Brien's study. In 2006, an updated, revised edition of my Presidency of John F. Kennedy appeared. It profited from all of the recently released primary materials housed at the Kennedy Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and elsewhere, as well as the secondary works published since 1991. The new sources included the Kennedy medical records that Park and I first investigated in 2003. As I wrote in 2006, even though Kennedy remained a Cold Warrior who sometimes precipitated crises, he was cautious and prudent in the way he handled the major challenges of his presidency. Even in Vietnam, where he made some serious mistakes, that situation would have been less ominous had he lived. Newly available sources, such as the Kennedy tapes, revealed the correctness of his response to the Soviet missiles in Cuba, in light of a much greater danger than we could have envisioned then or even in 1991. Kennedy had every reason to fear a nuclear holocaust and thus committed himself to the banning of atomic weaponry in his final months.

Increasingly, I also had come to a greater appreciation of the extent to which domestic and foreign policies were interconnected during the Kennedy period, when the Cold War so much dominated national life. Consequently, that interconnection could easily be labeled national policy, which made Kennedy's New Frontier unique. Kennedy understood, for example, that an orderly development of civil rights at home could win the neutrality – if not the allegiance – of the newly emerging nations of Africa. That sensitivity enabled him to broaden the New Frontier to include initiatives as far reaching as the space program, the Peace Corps, and agricultural policy, in addition to civil rights. No other presidential rubric, whether it