JOHN F. KENNEDY: AN UNFINISHED LIFE
by Robert Dallek
ISBN 978-0-945707-43-1 $35.00
849 pages including sources, notes, bibliography, index, and illustrations.
In this riveting tour de force, Boston University history professor Dallek delivers
what will most assuredly become the benchmark JFK biography for this
generation. A master of the art of narrative history, Dallek is also the first
biographer since Doris Kearns Goodwin to be granted unrestricted access to key
Kennedy family papers (most importantly, the Joseph and Rose Kennedy
Papers) in the JFK Library. This is a substantial and significant trove to which
Dallek brings a refreshingly critical eye. He has also mined many nuggets of key
information from the papers of JFK's colleagues, doctors and friends. Thus
Dallek has a significant new ground to break on a range of fronts including but
not limited to Kennedy's health, politics, personal recklessness and love affairs.
Dallek's revelations about JFK's health, based on previously unavailable medical
files maintained by Kennedy's personal physician, have already received
significant publicity from The Atlantic excerpt in December 2002. But here Dallek
expands on that information and reveals (for the first time) the full extent of the
medical coverup orchestrated by the Kennedy family: a coverup that involved the
destruction of key medical records even after JFK was in his grave. On the
political front, Dallek uses new inside information from a Kennedy associate to
reveal the detailed mechanics (and enormous scope) of the use of Kennedy
money to purchase the West Virginia primary in 1960. At the same time, Dallek
has new evidence on both Jack's philandering and his recklessness. Example: During the same 1960 campaign on which his
father spent millions, JFK risked it all by inviting an underage cheerleader to his
hotel room. As is appropriate, close to two-thirds of this biography covers Kennedy's
truncated presidency. In one of the book's most important sections, Dallek marshals new
evidencethat JFK did not view with favor the expansion of the war in Vietnam, and that he
most likely would not have sanctioned such an expansion. Throughout the book,
Dallek stops short of worshipping his subject. He is a Kennedy admirer, but he
never allows this admiration to cloud either his focus or his truth telling. Dallek is
to be thanked for providing the thoroughly researched, well-sourced, responsible
and readable biography that has for so long been wanting in Kennedy
scholarship.
From Publishers Weekly, May 2003
