I’ll conclude this column with a story that left me more than a little sad. Had another man been president in the autumn of 1962, civilization as we know it might well have ended in a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. He was neither a liberal nor a conservative but a pragmatist, far more concerned about practical results than about ideology.Īnd his calm and measured leadership during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he refused to accept the military’s judgment that an invasion was necessary, quite possibly saved the world from a nuclear Armageddon. He was a leader of uncommon intelligence who possessed the ability to motivate and inspire the American people. Edgar Hoover who was fully aware of the ongoing shenanigans.ĭallek’s overall assessment of Kennedy is very similar to my own. Those escapades, to which the press of the time turned a blind eye, put Kennedy at risk for blackmail and at the mercy of FBI Director J. Secondly, Dallek had nearly unlimited access to the late president’s medical files - files that paint a starkly different portrait of JFK from his public image of youth and health and vigor.įrom the time he was in elementary school, Kennedy suffered one illness after another, with most of them mysterious in both cause and cure to the doctors of the the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s.īy the time he was running for president, he had full blown Addison’s Disease and the treatments for that malady had served to weaken his back which had been injured several times, including when PT-109 was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer during World War II.ĭallek’s analysis: Yes, JFK deceived the press and the public about the extent of his physical ailments and the medications he took to combat them.īut the author tempers that judgment by recognizing the stoic courage with which Kennedy faced that pain and by concluding that neither the physical issues nor the medications affected his performance as president.ĭallek is far less forgiving in his assessment of JFK’s reckless and unending sexual escapades while in the White House. It is not a worshipful hagiography, as were produced by the score by Kennedy friends and staff members in the years immediately following his death, but neither is it a revisionist hatchet job of the sort that became popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Two things about Dallek’s review of the 35th president’s life make it unique. The book received rave reviews from critics and became a best seller, yet despite my predilection for political biography, I had never read the book until I borrowed it from one of the “little libraries” on the Covenant Village campus. Robert Dallek’s biography of John Kennedy, “An Unfinished Life,” was published nearly two decades ago.
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