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John F. Kennedy: The American Presidents Series: The 35th President, 1961-1963
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About John F. Kennedy: The American Presidents
Product Description The young president who brought vigor and glamour to the White House while he confronted cold war crises abroad and calls for social change at homeJohn Fitzgerald Kennedy was a new kind of president. He redefined how Americans came to see the nation's chief executive. He was forty-three when he was inaugurated in 1961―the youngest man ever elected to the office―and he personified what he called the "New Frontier" as the United States entered the 1960s.But as Alan Brinkley shows in this incisive and lively assessment, the reality of Kennedy's achievements was much more complex than the legend. His brief presidency encountered significant failures―among them the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which cast its shadow on nearly every national-security decision that followed. But Kennedy also had successes, among them the Cuban Missile Crisis and his belated but powerful stand against segregation. Kennedy seemed to live on a knife's edge, moving from one crisis to another―Cuba, Laos, Berlin, Vietnam, Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. His controversial public life mirrored his hidden private life. He took risks that would seem reckless and even foolhardy when they emerged from secrecy years later. Kennedy's life, and his violent and sudden death, reshaped our view of the presidency. Brinkley gives us a full picture of the man, his times, and his enduring legacy. From Booklist Outstanding for clarity even by the standards of the excellent American Presidents series, Brinkley’s overview of the thirty-fifth chief executive vaults to the head of the pack of basic biographies of its subject because of its thoroughness and evenhandedness. It notes all the most meaningful events and persons in Kennedy’s life and all his most salient characteristics, including his lifelong ill health and obsessive womanizing, both of which Robert Dallek soft-pedals in his John F. Kennedy (2011). Moreover, it states conflicting opinions of Kennedy and his actions throughout, though especially in the piquantly titled last chapter, “The Afterlife of John F. Kennedy.” Brinkley’s own evaluation, implicit rather than open, is admirably middle of the road. JFK was not the liberal hero ardent admirers made of him after his death, nor was he the incompetent detractors make him out to have been. Painfully slow to embrace black civil rights and guilty of embroiling the U.S. in Vietnam, he successfully resolved the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and initiated real action on nuclear-arms limitation—no mean feats. --Ray Olson Review "Plenty of long, definitive works exist, but Brinkley takes his job seriously, filling 160 pages with a thoughtful, opinionated biography."― Kirkus Reviews About the Author Alan Brinkley (1949-2019) is the author of The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is also the author of Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression, which won the National Book Award, and The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. He was the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University and also taught at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge. He lived in New York City. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., (1917-2007) was the preeminent political historian of our time. For more than half a century, he was a cornerstone figure in the intellectual life of the nation and a fixture on the political scene. He won two Pulitzer prizes for The Age of Jackson (1946) and A Thousand Days (1966), and in 1988 received the National Humanities Medal. He published the first volume of his autobiography, A Life in the Twentieth Century, in 2000. Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton University, is the author or editor of several books, including Chants Democratic and The Rise of American Democracy. He has also written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and other publications. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
