Lockdown Reading JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 : Fredrick Logevall

Lockdown Reading 

JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 : Fredrick Logevall

Historian Fredrik Logevall is a professor of international affairs and history at Harvard. He wrote about 35th US President John F. Kennedy before, in his Pulitzer-winning “Embers of War,” about the Vietnam era. But it wasn’t until he undertook a two-volume biography of John F Kennedy that he  explored the man and his life in depth. I remember my teen days, when I was fascinated by his sheer charm. In fact he was most charming political persona on global landscape at that part of time. His broad daylight assassination in 1963 not only shook America but the entire world. 

The first volume, “JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956,” has recently arrived on book shelf’s  this month. It is a marvelous study of the man in context of his times and his family, from his childhood to his decision to seek the presidency.

JFK was a colorful politician, he Was plagued with many health issues, careless about his person, a man of great intelligence and inquisitiveness and charm, a womanizer, a workaholic, a man of unquestionable courage, a family man who did not hesitate to veer from his father's beliefs, the real Jack Kennedy was a very complicated person and everything you thought he was and somehow more than what you thought he was.

I enjoyed it as a biography and as an exploration of the times and the political process.

Kennedy’s life spanned an era in which the United States grew into a superpower, Logevall wrote , “I feel like I can tell these twin narratives, I can tell the story of Kennedy’s rise, and then map it onto the story of America’s rise.” As, he added, it was the first time he had to plumb a subject’s psychology. “I had to go into the psychological dimensions much more; I try to be careful, because I’m not trained as a psychologist. But I hope we get pretty close to a fellow who’s often seen as kind of elusive.”

Logevall drew on the vast resources of the JFK Presidential Library, including some newly available letters, as well as other materials, such as those held in the archives at Choate, JFK’s prep school alma mater. Understanding Kennedy’s family and childhood were important, Logevall said. For one thing, JFK’s long history of illness was a key to the man he became. “It mattered a lot, no question,” Logevall said. “I think that one of the things it did was it made him a voracious reader. There wasn’t a lot that kids could do in those days if they were in bed, other than to read. I also think it instilled in JFK a certain empathy. I think it made it easier for him to put himself into somebody else’s shoes.”

The question is, whether  reading about JFK is still relevant. The answer is a big yes. In the present world political scenario  well as when  USA fighting to retain its position as global leader, understanding JFK’s life and time as well as his way of handling governance issues and triggering economic clout can be a great lesson.“He believed in politics and he believed in government,” Logevall said. “He believed in expertise; he believed in the vital importance of reasoning from evidence. I think those are important messages for today.”

Perhaps the greatest difficulty in writing a biography of Jack , as he was always known by friends, family and journalists, is that he was surrounded by legends. The Kennedys and their courtiers bear primary responsibility for this: Jack’s father, Joe, managed his image as a man of destiny from an early age and later his professional acolytes, particularly Arthur Schlesinger junior, turned instant history into hagiography. Nature lent a hand: Jack and Jackie Bouvier, whom he married in 1953, were a ridiculously good-looking couple and the Kennedy clan were a picturesque bunch.

Myths inevitably provoked counter- myths. Joe Kennedy, the founder of the family’s fortune and America’s ambassa- dor to Britain in the late 1930s, is often presented as a right-wing monster who had his mentally ill daughter, Rosemary, lobotomised when she showed an interest in sex. Jack himself is often portrayed as a spoilt rich kid who went into politics only at his father’s bidding and treated women like trash.

While he taken over presidential office in 1960 , Kennedy embraced an economic model centered on federal tax and spending policies. Originally proffered by the economist John Maynard Keynes, Keynesian economics theorized that federal deficit spending could boost economic growth and lower unemployment.

He  approved a series of stimulus measures to combat the recession, including the extension of social security and unemployment benefits, and a twenty percent increase in military spending. The minimum wage was raised and over $4 billion was allocated for housing construction. Kennedy also announced that he would ask Congress for a $10 billion tax cut unaccompanied by decreases in federal spending. He argued that an economic boom would result from such an approach, and thus tax revenues would be higher despite lower tax rates. While such measures did stimulate the economy and reduce unemployment, they also led to an increase in inflation and set the stage for conflict between corporations and labor unions over wages and prices.

Although he had campaigned on a strong civil rights platform, Kennedy adopted a much more cautious approach once in office. This was partly due to the power of Southern Democrats in Congress, who were threatening to block the president’s entire civil rights agenda. Nevertheless, Kennedy appointed several African Americans to high-profile positions in the federal government and judiciary.

In 1963, he introduced comprehensive civil rights legislation, which Congress was still debating at the time of Kennedy’s assassination. The bill he introduced eventually would be passed as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, during the administration of Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson.

His foreign policy included triumphs, tragedies, and everything in between. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Though Kennedy’s vacillation and indecisiveness about the Bay of Pigs invasion had contributed to the missile crisis in the first place, his determined statesmanship helped defuse tensions and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Kennedy authorized the Alliance for Progress, a major trade and aid initiative designed to encourage democratic reform and prevent violent revolution in Latin America. Kennedy also set the stage for increased US involvement in Vietnam by supporting a military coup in South Vietnam.

The presidency of John F. Kennedy was tragically cut short by an assassin’s bullet on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. Lee Harvey Oswald. There were numerous theories about this broad daylight assassination, Oswald was believed to be an unstable ex-Marine with ties to the Soviet Union and to the Cuban émigré community in Miami. Various conspiracy theories cropped up when Oswald himself was murdered while in police custody, by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner with ties to organized crime. 

There may be many more hidden facts about JFK’s, which I hope will probably be 

uncovered in the next volume of this book.