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Loading... JFK: Reckless Youth (edition 1993)by Nigel Hamilton
Work InformationJFK: Reckless Youth by Nigel Hamilton
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  HenrySt123 | Jul 19, 2021 |   nandadevi | Jul 22, 2015 |  gilsbooks | May 17, 2011 |
 He has had hagiographers aplenty, pals and sycophants. Revisionists, debunkers and cynics have also sat in judgment. Finally, after 29 years of fevered and fruitless speculation about his death, John F. Kennedy has a biographer... To assess the first 29 years of Kennedy's life, Hamilton had to confront a major myth. For 50 years, as societal tensions defined other American families as dysfunctional, the Kennedy legend was marketed as the embodiment of family. Large and loyal, loving and laughing, this gang of handsome siblings seemed secure, united by a deep religious faith and strong parental devotion, plus millions of dollars. Kennedyland, a theme park of family values, has flourished in the American imagination; Hamilton has dismantled it.  Mr. Hamilton has mined remarkable new sources, ranging from hundreds of personal letters to extensive F.B.I. files; he has also drawn creatively on materials earlier authors possessed but used only in part or not at all. By the very detail and depth of the revelations, the flashes of brilliance and consistency of insight, "JFK: Reckless Youth" easily takes its place beside the best of recent Presidential portraits, including Geoffrey Ward's Franklin Roosevelt, Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson and the similar, less well-known triumph of British scholarship, Piers Brendon's Dwight Eisenhower. In the process, Mr. Hamilton enters into an extraordinary literary intimacy with the young man who was to be the most haunting President of recent times. Distinctions
"JFK: Reckless Youth is the first volume of a monumental new biography of John F. Kennedy - a book that will astonish, entertain, and inform all those interested in the life of America's thirty-sixth president." "Who was the real JFK? Reckless Youth is filled with intriguing new material on virtually every aspect of JFK's early years: his Boston-Irish background; his beloved grandfather Honey Fitz; his draft-dodging, swindling father, Joseph P. Kennedy; his parents' disastrous and dysfunctional marriage; his loveless upbringing; his expulsion from boarding school; his false starts at college in London and Princeton, followed by his triumphant career at Harvard; his protracted struggle against his father's defeatism and isolationism before Pearl Harbor; his ceaseless career as a playboy; his lifelong battle with illness, and the origins of the deadly disease that would plague him in later days." "In retelling JFK's extraordinary life story, Nigel Hamilton has finally succeeded in getting beyond the many accretions and distortions of recent years. Here at last - often in JFK's own inimitable words - is the real John F. Kennedy, at once roguish and intelligent, reckless and yet possessing fine judgment. Based on a wealth of never previously published letters and documents, and access to more than two thousand interviews, Hamilton's portrait of the tormented, fun-loving, deeply amorous, and yet ambitious youth who was John F. Kennedy is profoundly touching. JFK's courage, despite debilitating ill health, in joining the Navy and insisting on service in PT boats comes to a dramatic climax with the saga of PT 109 in the Solomons - the only American vessel ever rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer. Against this legendary backdrop Hamilton reveals for the first time the intimate story of the greatest love of JFK's early life: his passionate romance with a suspected enemy spy, Inga Arvad."
"The Kennedy that emerges from this volume is, behind his playboy facade, vastly more driven and more serious than historians have ever before portrayed him. As Hamilton shows us, though Joseph Kennedy reluctantly transferred the family's political mantle to his second son in 1944 and "bought out" the sitting congressman for Massachusetts' 11th District, the presidential dream that the ambassador had reserved for his eldest son was in fact JFK's own secret ambition, confessed to his mistress many years before his brother Joe's tragic death." "In this absorbing, riveting family saga, we see the true Jack Kennedy, warts and all; a symbolic, relentlessly honest, yet sympathetic story of the struggles of youth and early manhood that will not only entrance its readers but will also forever alter our understanding of this century's most popular and charismatic American president."--Jacket. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)973.922History and Geography North America United States 1901- Eisenhower Through Clinton Administrations J.F. KennedyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.46)
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Wikipedia in English (1)
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It must be conceded that the author repeats more than necessary what a dysfunctional family this was. Does the reader need to be reminded quite this often that “the Ambassador” was a tyrant and an isolationist, or that Rose primly refused to acknowledge what was going on in the lives of the children she abandoned to a series of nannies and boarding schools? This might explain why the author was shut off. Or perhaps it is his devotion to detailing one trait in which Jack did take after his father, his overactive sexual life of compulsion mixed with indifference toward his conquests. Then again, it might be his revelation of the lengths to which JFK’s Addison’s and venereal disease were covered up, not only in his lifetime, but long after his death. Since the protagonist is not even thirty when the book closes, he was clearly just getting up to speed. What more revelations were to come?
Hamilton does a good job untangling myth and reality in the PT 109 incident, and shows the uses to which it was put to launch JFK’s career. One might regret that the author devotes less attention to Kennedy’s political opinions than to other matters, but this leads to one of Hamilton’s contentions, an insight he shares with other observers: Kennedy relished the process of politics, but had a detachment from political stances. This, often seen as simultaneously his greatest strength and weakness as a politician, is traced by Hamilton to an emotional stunting for which his parents were to blame. Yet while it might be true that Kennedy did not care about domestic political issues, Hamilton traces his precocious awakening and grasp of international affairs. In part because of his father’s position, but also in no small measure to his own wit, initiative, and inquisitive nature, Kennedy personally met statesmen of the older generation, many of whom spotted his potential. Even here, though, Hamilton sees the psychology of Kennedy’s family of origin at work. One constant of Kennedy’s entire career was a resolute anti-communism. Hamilton suggests this was rooted in the ways Stalin reminded JFK of his father.
A big book, but despite some repetitiousness, a fascinating read. Recommended. (