18 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2020HE ENSORCELLS US STILL.They all do, the
whole impossibly glamorous, snakebit
Kennedy tribe, from the Irish Catholic fam-
ine refugees scrambling for footing in for-
biddingly Protestant 19th-century Boston
to the imperious patriarch building a fabu-
lous fortune while pushing his children to
the summits of power and fame in 20th-
century America, until second son John
Fitzgerald Kennedy briefly bestrode the
world as president of the United States —
before becoming the third of the patri-
arch’s four ill-starred offspring to suffer a
violent, premature death.
Other authors, conspicuously Robert
Dallek in his 2003 biography of Kennedy,
have ably chronicled this epic saga, but
none has told the tale of the 35th presi-
dent’s formative years better or more thor-
oughly than the Harvard history professor
Fredrik Logevall in “JFK,” the first of two
projected volumes. Here he brings the
story up through Kennedy’s failed bid for
the Democratic vice-presidential nomina-
tion in 1956, setting the stage for his eleva-
tion to the presidency four years later.
Inevitably, the patriarch dominates the
first half of the book. Colossally wealthy by
his mid-30s, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. reared
the nine Kennedy siblings in a cocoon of
sybaritic luxury, flagrant privilege and fre-
quently libertine license. But he was also
solicitous, supportive and, it must be ac-
knowledged, seriously and high-mindedly
patriotic. With his sons in particular he en-
couraged — indeed demanded — their
vaulting political ambitions. “Say what one
will about Joseph P. Kennedy,” Logevall
concludes, “it’s not every multimillionaire
father who takes such broad interest in his
children, who believes in them so fervently
and who, together with his wife, instills in
them, from a young age, a firm commit-
ment to public service.”
Among the several myths that Logevall
debunks is the notion that Jack Kennedy
turned to a political career only after the
favored first son, Joe Jr., supposedly the
principal vessel for the family’s political
aspirations, was killed in action over
southern England in 1944. All to the con-
trary, Logevall meticulously documents
Jack’s steadily deepening interest in poli-
tics — especially geopolitics — beginning
in early childhood. He “gobbled books,” his
mother recollected; his sister Eunice re-
membered him as the only family member
“who looked things up.” (His reading while
bivouacked in the Solomon Islands during
World War II was Tolstoy’s “War and
Peace.”) From an early age, and increas-
ingly over time, Logevall repeatedly in-
sists, Kennedy read widely and well,
thought for himself, decided for himself,
laid out his own life course and in countless
ways was his own man and no one else’s,
assuredly not his father’s.
Logevall painstakingly reconstructs
Kennedy’s several youthful trips abroad,
where he sowed some wild oats, to be sure
(there is plenty of that in these pages, more
than enough fornicating and philandering
to sate even the most prurient reader’s
taste), but more consequentially, made use
of his father’s abundant connections to in-
terview statesmen and political leaders in
Europe and beyond. Toward the end of a
seven-month junket that ranged from Mos-
cow to Jerusalem, the 22-year-old Ken-
nedy, Zelig-like, was in Berlin in August
1939, accurately predicting the imminent
outbreak of war, and shortly thereafter sit-
ting in the visitors’ gallery at Westminster
to witness Prime Minister Neville Cham-
berlain proclaim Britain’s belligerency. Ev-
erywhere he took notes and everywhere
he grew in wisdom and conviction. “It was
the kind of exposure and training,” Lo-
gevall writes, “that no future president
since John Quincy Adams had enjoyed at
so young an age.”
A fastidiously diligent researcher, Lo-
gevall pays scrupulous attention to Jack’s
prep school and college essays, including a
close reading of the Harvard senior paper
that became Kennedy’s first book, “WhyEngland Slept,” which analyzed the timid-
ity of Britain’s political class in the face of
indifferent or hostile public opinion. Lo-
gevall pronounces it a “thoughtful and co-
gent... original contribution to knowl-
edge.” He later describes Kennedy’s best-
selling “Profiles in Courage” (whose actual
authorship has long been contested) as an
“ode to the art of politics” that, he valuably
reminds us, “extols both compromise and
courage.” From all the carefully marshaled
evidence a picture emerges of an uncom-
monly curious, sometimes frivolous but in-
creasingly earnest young man on his way
to shaping an informed, cleareyed, unsen-
timental sense of the world and his nation’s
place in it.AND ITS PLACE IN HISTORY.Kennedy’s gen-
eration came of age in the mid-20th centu-
ry’s agonizingly long season of Great De-
pression and world war. The former
touched the Kennedys lightly if at all. But
the latter blighted the father’s diplomatic
career, claimed the life of the eldest son and
made a hero out of the commander of
PT-109. It also catalyzed Jack Kennedy’s
comprehension of what was at stake in the
modern contest of nations, and deepened
his skepticism about the utility of war it-
self, especially after the advent of nuclear
weapons. It instructed him about the dis-
tinctive characteristics of his allotted his-
torical moment, and left him convinced
that the time had urgently arrived when
America had to cast off its isolationist lega-
cy and don the mantle of global leadership.
In this he decidedly detached himself from
the views to which his father so unremit-
tingly clung.
This is the heart of this richly detailed
and instructive book. And it is where Lo-gevall’s expertise as a Pulitzer Prize-win-
ning scholar of international relations
comes advantageously into play — and
where his book’s subtitle, “Coming of Age
in the American Century,” is brought
tellingly into focus. To the biographer’s in-
sights he adds the historian’s perspectives
about the several episodes in which the
young Kennedy’s worldview took shape:
his father’s tortured tenure as ambassador
in London while the Munich crisis un-
folded and the debate over “appeasement”
took on ugly intensity; the American com-
mitment to sweeping international re-
structuring at war’s end; the vexing role of
domestic politics — notably the red-baiting
antics of Senator Joseph McCarthy — in
the nascent Cold War; and the postwar
struggles over decolonization, not least in
Indochina, where Congressman Kennedy
in 1951 saw at first hand the futility of
France’s effort to crush Vietnam’s determi-
nation to be independent.
Logevall artfully melds the biographical
and historical approaches. Though crafted
as a kind of bildungsroman, “JFK” delivers
something more than the traditional story
of the callow wastrel’s maturation into the
admirable adult. Here phylogeny closely
replicates ontogeny. John F. Kennedy’s in-
dividual journey of separation from his fa-
ther’s isolationism tracked the progression
of the United States in midcentury from pe-
ripheral international player to hegemon.
The global stage where a president could
bend the arc of world history remained
Kennedy’s preferred arena and the presi-
dency his obsession. The domestic issues
that lay in a state governor’s province he
once dismissed as “little more than ‘decid-
ing on sewer contracts.’ ” This was the
mind-set he brought to the White House,
and in some ways this entire book can be
read as an elaborate prolegomenon to Ken-
nedy’s most important foreign policy ad-
dress, at American University in June
1963, where he urged a realistic reapprais-
al of the Cold War and laid the foundations
for the hotly contested policy that became
known as détente.
But that’s getting ahead of the story.
How Logevall will deal with Kennedy’s
presidency remains to be seen, though
there are more than a few hints here. The
author declares in his preface his commit-
ment “to play it straight, to look the man
right in the eye, not up in adulation or down
in disdain.” But there is much more adula-
tion than disdain here, as when he praises
Kennedy’s “magnetic leadership,” while at
many controversial points — Kennedy’s
relations with Joseph McCarthy, for exam-
ple, or the authorship of “Profiles in
Courage” — treating him perhaps a trifle
too generously. It looks as if even this sober
scholar has been at least a little ensor-
celled. And who among us would not wel-
come some of that Kennedy-esque en-
chantment now — not to mention some of
his knowledgeable and enlightened state-
craft? 0The Charmer
Jack Kennedy’s early years were a combination of youthful exuberance and high-minded seriousness.
By DAVID M. KENNEDY
JFK
Coming of Age in the American Century,
1917-
By Fredrik Logevall
Illustrated. 816 pp. Random House. $40.
John F. Kennedy at the Democratic National Convention, 1952.PHOTOGRAPH FROM ASSOCIATED PRESSDAVID M. KENNEDYis a professor emeritus of
history at Stanford University and the author
of “Freedom From Fear: The American Peo-
ple in Depression and War, 1929-1945,” which
received the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2000.