Three subjects dominate this account of the Kennedy presidency: Cuba, Vietnam and Kennedy's tension-filled dealings with the Soviet prime minister, Nikita S. Dallek's first three books all concerned foreign policy, and ''An Unfinished Life'' accords Kennedy's overseas challenges a fuller and more engaging treatment than most domestic policy issues receive. Dallek addresses all the negatives, but his consistent assertion that Kennedy's policy record as president decisively trumps his personal peccadilloes is cumulatively quite persuasive. ''An Unfinished Life'' may be a third-generation synthesis in Kennedy biographies, following the initial romanticized celebrations of ''Camelot'' and then a shelf full of hostile tomes in which one presidential girlfriend, Judith Campbell Exner, and the Chicago gangster Sam Giancana played larger roles than Cabinet members and Congressional leaders did. Dallek confronts Kennedy's ''reckless womanizing'' directly, yet succinctly, and concludes that Kennedy's myriad dalliances ''were no impediment to his being an effective president.'' And Mimi, like Marilyn Monroe and other rumored Kennedy paramours, receives little more than a passing mention.
''Kennedy courageously surmounted his physical suffering,'' and medical problems ''did not significantly undermine his performance as president,'' Mr. Dallek views Kennedy's medical records as more a testament to the young president's stoic fortitude than evidence of political deception and historical cover-up. Johnson, instead offers an impressively judicious and balanced account of Kennedy's life and presidency. Dallek, a professor of history at Boston University and the author of several well-respected scholarly books, including a two-volume biography of Lyndon B. Dallek's success in winning access to those long-sealed documents was not singular he similarly persuaded a former Times reporter and onetime Kennedy White House press aide, Barbara Gamarekian, to release closed portions of a 1964 oral history in which she described Kennedy's 18-month sexual affair with Mimi, a young White House intern recently identified as Marion Beardsley Fahnestock, now a 60-year-old Manhattan church administrator.īut ''An Unfinished Life'' is no salacious exposé. Kennedy would disclose, based on newly opened medical files, that the president had suffered far more dire health problems than American voters and previous biographers had ever known. The New York Times reported last November that Robert Dallek's coming biography of President John F.
0 kommentar(er)
