Positioned chronologically and literarily between excellent biographies of Truman and Eisenhower on one side, and Robert Caro’s towering work on Johnson on the other, this Kennedy biography is middling.
Kennedy’s story is amazing! His heroic endurance after the PT-109 disaster is epic, and his quote about committing fully to the life of a politician reveals a man more self-aware than often credited.
The most important narratives in Kennedy’s legacy—Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, his legislative wrangling—are told with more clarity and insight in other works. The Best and the Brightest handles Vietnam with sobering depth. Caro’s Master of the Senate shows us 60’s politics with dramatically more nuance. And One Minute to Midnight captures the dread and detail of the missile crisis in a way this biography can’t match.
What’s most frustrating isn’t just the storytelling, but the absences. Kennedy’s failure to meaningfully confront McCarthyism is barely acknowledged. His foreign policy record, often lionized, is left mostly unchallenged—despite flirting with disaster and setting the stage for decades of entanglement. Even the character study falters: Joe Kennedy Sr. is a magnetic, deeply flawed figure, but the thread is dropped once JFK hits Harvard.
Is this really the best we can do for a biography of Kennedy? Given his symbolic role as a pivot point for the Boomer generation and the mythic halo that still clings to his name, I think not.
Perhaps it’s time to turn to Schlesinger’s insider portrait or wait for the second volume of Fredrik Logevall’s more scholarly and restrained take.