Recensioni
by Stan Prager (11-22-17)
I was only six years old, but I can recall it with great clarity: the principal visited our classroom—the President had been shot. My mother was crying when she picked me up from school; my teacher was crying; everyone was crying. I was too young to remember Eisenhower; John F. Kennedy was the only President I had known. He was THE President. It was hard to wrap my head around the news that he was dead, assassinated—a word I had never heard before. He was so young and handsome, so full of life, so much in command, our savior against the Russians, who I was told wanted to drop nuclear bombs on us and kill us all. And I had a kid’s crush on his beautiful wife, Jacqueline, so much so that I memorized how to print her name. She was on our black and white television that day, her dress covered in blood.
This review goes to press on the fifty-fourth anniversary of that day, November 22, 1963, that ever altered American history. The nation has never been the same since the assassination, and the act itself has never been satisfactorily explained, spawning a wealth of conspiracy theories that still resound in the millennium. Just recently, thousands of classified documents, long shrouded in secrecy, have been released, while some are yet withheld. Like most Americans, I have never accepted the official explanation, that Oswald acted alone. As a historian, I know full well that history is ever replete with irony and coincidence. Still, there has always seemed to be far too many strange circumstances, far too many coincidences, for the Warren Commission conclusions to completely ring true. The mystery clings, but recedes into the past. This year marks one hundred years since Kennedy’s birth, but those of my generation will always see him in a grainy color photo as a vibrant forty-six, flashing white teeth in a wide smile on a ruddy face, seated in a limousine, with an unwittingly wave goodbye to an America about to be damaged so gravely that some might argue it has never fully recovered.
In a remarkable achievement, author Thurston Clarke has adroitly rewound the clock to the time just prior to that great goodbye with JFK’S Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President. I have read more than a half-dozen books on JFK, and I was delighted to find one that actually brought a fresh and surprisingly unique look to a subject that has been covered by so many from so many angles. So much that was Kennedy has become myth; Clarke has presented us with a chronicle of the last days of the living man, and lets us draw our own conclusions.
Kennedy was only President for less than three years, yet his time in office was so tumultuous for America—Bay of Pigs, Berlin Crisis, Civil Rights, Laos, Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis that set us on the edge of nuclear cataclysm—that looking back it seems impossible that so much could have transpired in such a compressed timeline, amounting to a mere 1,036 days. Scion of wealth and notoriety, war hero, intellect, playboy, undistinguished legislator, the dashing and witty Kennedy stumbled into office to push the button on the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion he inherited, then was humiliated in his first summit meeting with Khrushchev, who treated him like a foolish boy. But JFK quickly learned on his feet. He was highly intelligent, had strong instincts, demonstrated flexibility, and ever carried about him a sense of history. His political acumen accorded him that rare ability to be able to peek out from the eyes of his adversaries, and to put that perspective to work to his own advantage. Thus, he deftly negotiated his way out of a looming conflict in Laos, knew where to draw the line in Berlin to protect American interests without provoking war, and—most significantly—brilliantly sidestepped a potential Armageddon with the Soviets over missiles in Cuba so that peace prevailed without dishonor to either side. Kennedy was a markedly changed man after that: the seasoned leader who shepherded the landmark Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to passage was not the truculent cold warrior of three years prior who came to office denouncing a non-existent missile gap. The change echoed beyond that too, in almost everything that informed the remainder of his time in office. Alas, that time was to be very brief, and much hung in the balance.
The standard report card of a new President in the modern era is the “First Hundred Days,” but what about the “Last Hundred?” Is that relevant? Rarely, but as it turns out there are important exceptions. Lincoln’s last hundred included Appomattox, and the light at the end of the long dark tunnel of Civil War, with clues of some significance as to how he might steward Reconstruction. FDR’s final months also edged to the conclusion of a great war, with victory in view but not yet obtained, and hints at how a post-war world might be constructed. Thurston Clarke’s magnificent work demonstrates that Kennedy’s last quarter rivals these in consequence and leaves many more questions.
Clarke does not go there, but many before him have juxtaposed Lincoln and Kennedy, who came to office exactly a century apart, presided over a great existential crisis, and then died at the hands of an assassin. It might be a stretch: Lincoln was clearly the greater figure, the greater President. But there were nevertheless striking parallels in their respective trajectories: Lincoln’s prime directive was to save the union; Kennedy’s was to save the world from nuclear annihilation. This virtually demoted all other considerations into secondary matters, which was a magnet for critics and tarnished their legacies. Ironically, the shared central element was the fate of African-Americans. For Lincoln, it was his failure to embrace and move faster on abolition. For Kennedy, it was his own failure to embrace and move faster on Civil Rights, a direct descendant of Lincoln’s struggle. Both men were solid centrists who continuously fought off pressure from the left and right flanks of their own parties. And both were superb politicians who understood that politics was ever and only the art of the possible. Lincoln came to office with a loathing for slavery tempered by an acceptance of the institution as constitutionally protected; he came to abolition slowly and much later, driven by the events of secession and war. For Lincoln, saving the Union was paramount, with or without slavery.
In JFK’s Last Hundred Days, Clarke echoes the now familiar reproach to Kennedy’s slow journey to the championing of Civil Rights as the great moral cause of his day, although he was indeed moving in that direction. But Clarke does not have to spell out what the great body of his narrative quietly underscores: like Lincoln’s devotion to the Union, for Kennedy—especially after the close call of the Missile Crisis—there was no greater issue than the prospect of nuclear war and how to avert it. Still, it was hardly his only focus. With a 58% approval rating, Kennedy fully expected to be re-elected in 1964, and he was mapping out strategies that looked beyond the need to depend upon the support of the solid bloc of southern Democratic segregationists in Congress, especially with regard to Civil Rights. And that is the great ghost that looms over the narrative. What would Kennedy have done, or strived to do, had he lived?
We know what did happen after he was gone: escalation in Vietnam, race riots, massive protests, a near breakdown of society, violence and more assassinations (including JFK’s brother and political heir), two consecutive failed Presidencies led by men—Johnson and Nixon—Kennedy had privately confided that he thought unfit for office. America cannot help but collectively wonder how history might have been written had JFK not gone to Dallas, but such musings must be informed by the man he was becoming in the months leading up to that day. In the wake of the related yet diametrically opposed extremes of the Missile Crisis and the Test Ban Treaty, for JFK literally everything was on the table. He looked to developing a more permanent détente with the USSR. He considered long-term accommodation with Castro: if Fidel divorced himself from the Soviet orbit, he might treat Cuba as a kind of Caribbean Yugoslavia. For his domestic agenda, he looked beyond a sometime recalcitrant Congress to the aftermath of the next election for both tax cuts and Civil Rights. He wondered whether he could replace LBJ—who lacked Kennedy’s confidence and remained isolated in the administration—on the ’64 ticket. It seems likely that part of his strategy in undertaking the somewhat thorny trip to Dallas was to gauge whether he could carry Texas without Johnson.
The greatest controversy has always swirled about the potential fate of American involvement in Vietnam had Kennedy lived. There is no new material in Clarke’s book, but what there is reinforces what we already know. In his famous interview with Walter Cronkite, as well as his private comments, it seems clear that Kennedy was seeking a way out. The changing relationship with Khrushchev could present opportunities to do just that. The model of both Laos and Berlin demonstrates that Kennedy liked to have that “Big Stick” Theodore Roosevelt once brandished, but—to the frequent consternation of his more hawkish generals—he was reluctant to use it except as last resort. A decorated combat veteran who nearly lost his own life in the Pacific, JFK decried more than once the casual eagerness of those who would lightly spend American lives in war. Ambivalent about blessing the coup to topple Diem that was urged upon him, JFK was truly horrified by Diem’s death—only weeks before Dallas—which seemed to steel his determination to look to pull back the growing corps of “advisors” and seek a non-combat solution. Given all of this, it seems highly unlikely Kennedy would have countenanced the commitment of ground troops in Vietnam, certainly not on the kind of pretext Johnson was to use in the Gulf of Tonkin.
If the subtitle of Clarke’s work— The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President—hints at a kind of fawning, court biography, that is not at all the case. The author clearly admires his subject, but hardly overlooks Kennedy’s many flaws, especially his addiction to serial philandering that ever put his Presidency, and his chances for re-election, at risk. Nor, as noted, does he excuse JFK’s tone deafness to the clarion call of Civil Rights, which won his sympathy but hardly unqualified commitment. Clarke skillfully places all of it in carefully nuanced context, and lets the narrative speak for itself.
That narrative—a numbered countdown of days that just barely contains a palpable sense of impending doom—is ever ominous, bookended early on by the death of Kennedy’s infant son (like Lincoln once more, Kennedy lost a child in the White House), and the assassination. Famously, Kennedy compartmentalized his life, and Jackie—despite the glamour and prestige in her role as First Lady—was frequently the sad and lonely occupant of one of those walled chambers. The tragic death of their baby seems to have brought Jack and Jackie closer together than ever before. Yet, like Lincoln before him, JFK could not really devote the appropriate time to mourn, or to comfort his wife; the fate of the nation, even the world, demanded that he ever be present and in command. Of course, Kennedy himself could only approach each day and ponder his options, while the reader is fraught with the terrible knowledge of how the story will end.
It is said that Lincoln dreamt of his own death in the days that preceded it. There are disturbing harbingers here, as well. It seems eerily prescient when Kennedy muses about his odds of being murdered, once even play-acting his own assassination. He confided to a friend that death by gunshot would be best because “You never know what’s hit you.” As he jousted with the generals—especially LeMay, who to JFK’s horror advocated for first use of nuclear weapons and privately disparaged the President as a coward—Kennedy thought a military coup possible, and perhaps even likely. He read himself into the plot of the recently published novel based on just this scenario, Seven Days in May, which he took as a forewarning of what might befall him. An Ian Fleming fan, Kennedy was also reportedly at work on writing a kind of James Bond style thriller of a coup masterminded by Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. For some reason, no drafts of this effort survive …
In The Phenomenon of Man, Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin speaks to the process of “becoming,” in which an individual evolves and is transformed each day into a changed human being who has been informed by all of the days that preceded that one. Thurston Clarke’s fine study clearly shows that Kennedy was, on each and every day, likewise “becoming” and transforming. That is, until November 22, 1963.
On the 54th Anniversary of the Assassination, my review of: "JFK’S Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President,” by Thurston Clarke ... https://regarp.com/2017/11/22/review-of-jfks-last-hundred-days-the-transformatio...
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Garp83 | 6 altre recensioni | Nov 22, 2017 |
Garp83 | 6 altre recensioni | Nov 22, 2017 | 
Many of the minor events that are covered in Lord's book are picked up here, but sometimes with interviews with the people 50 years later, as well as photographs of some of the people. Like Lord's book, Clarke finds that the survivors memories and histories showed a complete disbelief that the attack was happening. Honolulu 1941 was a very different world than Honolulu 1991 and we get a good sense here just how different society and perceptions were and how they are now.
The big takeaway here is how much racism played a huge part in allowing the Pearl Harbor attack to succeed.
Excellent book that I'd recommend to history buffs.
Because JFK's LAST HUNDRED DAYS is as much about what might have been as it is about what happened. The John F. Kennedy of the autumn of 1963 was a man who was finally hitting his stride as President after nearly two and a half years of one crisis after another: The Bay of Pigs; the Berlin Wall; catching up to the Russians in space; Oxford, Mississippi, the steel companies, Vietnam, and the showdown with Khrushchev over the missiles in Cuba. According to Clarke, JFK had weathered the storms and trials of his first term and was looking forward to setting the agenda as he prepared to campaign for a second term; this Kennedy wants to achieve detente with the Soviet Union, forge a new relationship with Castro's Cuba, get America out of the mounting quagmire in Southeast Asia, make the struggle for equal rights for black Americans the foremost moral issue of its time by passing the toughest civil rights act since Reconstruction, and pass legislation that would spread more of the bounty of America's great prosperity to the middle class while helping more of those at the bottom rise out of poverty. In short, John F. Kennedy was a great man on the verge of doing great things.
The problem with Clarke's assertion is that it is the same one made by virtually every other favorable biography written about Kennedy, starting with those by former aides Theodore Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger, which came out within two years of Dallas. This is the great myth of JFK admirers: that all the great turmoil of the 60's would never have come to pass if he had only come back from that trip to Texas alive. No war in Vietnam, the Cold War resolved with peace and brotherhood between the races at home. The problem with this picture is that it ignores some of the hard realities of the time: JFK would certainly have passed a Civil Rights bill, although maybe not until his second term, but he most definitely would have had to contend with the same forces of white backlash that bedeviled LBJ in his own second term and made George Wallace a force to be reckoned with along with Nixon's "Southern Strategy." There was no politically viable way the United States was just going to "cut and run" and leave South Vietnam to the Communists, it should be noted that all American plans for getting out of there were contingent on the South Vietnamese becoming self sufficient in fighting off the North, something that never happened, not for Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon and there is no reason to believe JFK would have fared any better. There is also no reason to believe the Soviet Union would have voluntarily given up what the Red Army had shed much blood to take in World War II, and certainly not a little more than ten years after Stalin's death when the country was still ruled by men who had risen to power in the dictator's shadow. The true end of the Cold War would have wait until Gorbachev and a new generation of leaders in the Soviet Union.
These things were the forces of history, and no leader, not even one as gifted as John F. Kennedy could have turned them aside.
What Clarke's book does give us is a portrait of a man and a family overcoming problems that would have sunk people of lesser character. The book opens with the birth JFK and Jackie's third child, a premature son named Patrick, who lived only a few days; how this tragedy affected Kennedy and his wife and their relationship is one one of the most interesting parts of Clarke's narrative. It has always been hard for biographers to square the admirable qualities of John F. Kennedy with his relentless and heartless infidelity; until the last months of his life, he seemed to possess an utter moral blind spot when it came to sex. Yet the death of his son seems to have made him rethink his behavior and let him grow closer to Jackie. There is also the matter of his precarious health and the sometimes questionable treatments he sought for the effects of Addison's Disease and chronic back pain. It appears that in those last months, Kennedy had at last rounded a corner as he appeared to be in the best health in years. Still, as the fall of 1963 passes and the days hurdle toward a fateful trip to Texas, John F. Kennedy was a man sitting two power kegs concerning secrets in his private life and his health; who knows if they would have detonated and come out sooner if he'd lived.
Clarke spares us an account of the assassination itself, skipping instead to a moving look at the way America and the world mourned Kennedy; it is by far the best part of the book. And Clarke gives us many surprising details about our 35th President: a fling with Marlene Dietrich when she was past 60, but still in great shape; a rich fantasy life and a love for reading James Bond style fiction; he watched no television except for football games. All these things help humanize a President who has become an icon to most Americans.
John F. Kennedy possessed a great sense of history, that he would be the subject of so many books would no doubt have pleased him, if not the reason why. I think he would have liked Thurston Clarke's book very much.
2 Schmerguls | 9 altre recensioni | Jun 30, 2014 |
Schmerguls | 9 altre recensioni | Jun 30, 2014 | 
After a slow start in South America, Clarke gets into his groove in the small, doomed island nations, such as the Maldives and Kiribati. His thoughts on the (lack of) future for the Maldives is particularly sombre and poetic and made me look at a Maldives visit before it disappears beneath the rising sea and its customs, culture, history and geography are lost forever.
His African visit also had its highlights, including a pre-slide into anarchy Somalia where his biggest problem was being chased by locals trying to sell him fake Nazi memorabilia. The fact that he also visited a pre-war Rwanda is also of interest to those seeking to picking up hints on how a nation can slide into civil war and anarchy.
While sections on Singapore and Indonesia were less interesting, overall, this is one of the better travelogues I've read in my time.
1 MiaCulpa | 1 altra recensione | Jun 12, 2014 |
MiaCulpa | 1 altra recensione | Jun 12, 2014 | I did succeed, however, which is impressive, considering the amount of biographies I have read about Kennedy. I love how Clarke picks up on the president's habit of doodling when bored or pensive, boxing in or underlining key words, or drawing boats to amuse himself. And reading about the president's 'homage to James Bond', roping in Secret Service agents to stage his own death while under the surveillance of two reporters, made me smile and shiver at the same time.
In fact, Clarke's constant references to occasions when Kennedy joked about assassination or talked to friends about death got to be almost conspiratorial in frequency and placement - like Kennedy might have had a premonition about exactly when and how he would die. Freaky, in hindsight. This is what I prefer to read about in Kennedy biographies, though - who he was, not what he was - and Clarke balances his political review with enough personal details to keep me interested. Like LBJ's observation that Kennedy, 'was always seeking to conciliate; he was always seeking to understand other people and what their motives were. He could never quite accept the fact that other people would not always return his good will'.
Fellow fans of Kennedy will appreciate Clarke's honest and accessible account of the President's last one hundred days, from August to November 22, 1963, but there are far more extensive (and damning) biographies out there which cover the same ground as part of the bigger picture. Clarke is definitely pro-Kennedy (and anti-Johnson), which satisfies my own taste, and he has a comprehensive, easy-to-read style, only the 'countdown' to Dallas makes for a jumpy narrative. An effective summary of JFK's all too brief presidency, closing with the eternal question, 'What if ..?'
http://lifelongdewey.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/352-ask-not-by-thurston-clarke/
More specifically, Clarke begins his journey in Guyana, a country that few of us know much about. In fact Clarke spends too much time there as this initial section of the book drags just a bit. Things pick up, however, when he crosses the Atlantic and sets off of into the Congo, Rwanda, and Somalia. This part of the book moves quickly and is especially vivid. It’s also of some historical interest as Clarke experiences these countries just before the horrific events that have befallen all three in the years since.
I’d recommend this book to all fans of good travel writing, and anyone interested in the day-to-day life of tropical cultures.
A stirring recount of the final days in the life of Bobby Kennedy. 1968 was one of those years that defined a generation and Bobby Kennedy was one of the reasons why and it wasn't just because of his assassination. In a time of severe crisis, Bobby was like a beacon of hope. A man who could bridge the divide between rich and poor, between black and white. He was like a rock star and campaigned with reckless abandon often thrusting himself into the clutches of the crowd.
"What did he have that he could do this to people?" Kennedy was moved by the suffering of others he saw around the country, around the world. A touch of the hand, a smile, the tears in his eyes. You could just feel the compassion, the desire to improve his fellow man. From the outset, Kennedy was running a very different kind of a campaign. As David Wise wrote in the Saturday Evening Post in March 24, 1968: "We take the position that the old rules don't apply. America is in flux, everything is changing. The old way of delegate hunting doesn't apply. We're going to the people."
Thurston Clarke does an admirable job retracing Kennedy's campaign rightly capturing the emotion of each moment in time. Clarke focuses most of his chapters covering Kennedy during the Indiana primary but also covers Oregon and finally California. In the great tragedies of life, Kennedy's most triumphant moment was also the fatal one. It was indeed ominous that Kennedy often cited his favorite poetry from the great Greek tragedies.
We could play what ifs all we want, but there's no doubt that Kennedy would've ensured that LBJ's Great Society was implemented to a full and logical conclusion. The fulfillment of the promise of "permanent prosperity" which FDR had begun. On the other hand, there is no conclusive evidence that Bobby would've beaten Nixon. After all, the backlash vote was a large one and the masterful politician in Nixon captured it easily through what we commonly refer to now as the silent majority.
Love him or hate him, the guy with the moptop was one passionate guy. As his brother Ted so famously eulogized, Bobby was a good and decent man "who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it". In the campaign year of 2008, this is really a great read that will hopefully restore your faith in politics.
2 bruchu | 9 altre recensioni | Oct 25, 2008 |
bruchu | 9 altre recensioni | Oct 25, 2008 | In spite of its star-struck orientation, however, the book is worth reading if the only RFK you know is the “rabid ferret” RFK of the early 1960’s. The contention promulgated in this book is that the Bobby of 1968 was a different man – epiphanized, if you will, by visits to poor families in Cleveland, Mississippi and Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. As the campaign progresses, Bobby seems more and more obsessed with ceasing foreign entanglements and investing the money at home, to cure poverty and promote equal rights.
Obviously this is not the same Bobby as the one that served in the JFK and LBJ administrations. But after reading this book, I became convinced that RFK - at the very least - began responding to all the reinforcement he got by being the only white politician to promise help for Blacks, Chicanos, and Native Americans. I also give him credit for not changing his campaign speeches to pander to his varied audiences, a practice now distressingly common.
How sincere was he? It’s hard to tell from this book. How much of his support was because he was a Kennedy? It sounds like a great deal of it was, even though this author tries hard to establish Bobby as a saint in his own right.
The Kennedys lived a charmed existence, while they lived. They had the money to live life to the fullest, and to evoke, as Jackie Kennedy observed so aptly, the halcyon days of Camelot. The political reality, however, was not as golden. Histories of the CIA demonstrate that the Kennedy brothers were very much taken by dirty tricks and assassinations; in fact, there is considerable evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was only payback for the many attempts on Castro’s life engineered by Bobby. The Kennedys also did not have a stellar record on Civil Rights; Jack paid political debts by nominating white racists to the Southern judiciary; and Bobby authorized the attempted destruction of Martin Luther King, Jr. by the FBI.
So, did Bobby genuinely do a 360 and become the champion of black Americans? This book doesn’t provide the answer. On the other hand, Bobby’s speeches are masterful, inspiring, and radical by today’s standards. If you can access his speeches in another venue, by all means do so. If not, this book is a start.
1 nbmars | 9 altre recensioni | Oct 9, 2008 |
nbmars | 9 altre recensioni | Oct 9, 2008 | Questo sito utilizza i cookies per fornire i nostri servizi, per migliorare le prestazioni, per analisi, e (per gli utenti che accedono senza fare login) per la pubblicità. Usando LibraryThing confermi di aver letto e capito le nostre condizioni di servizio e la politica sulla privacy. Il tuo uso del sito e dei servizi è soggetto a tali politiche e condizioni.
yet is slow reading as all the ends get tied to JFK actually writing most of his words.
Map of the Inauguration seating is fun!