What might have been

An Unfinished Life
John F. Kennedy
1917-1963
By Robert Dallek
Copyright 2003
Little, Brown and Company
ISBN 0-316-17238-3
838 PP w/ Illustrations
Hardcover $30.00 US $45.00 CD

I grew up hearing about JFK from my father(even though,God love him, voted for Nixon in 1960)and to this day, some 46 years after his assassination in Dallas, he still remembers in vivid detail where he was and what he was doing at the exact moment the news came out that he had been shot and killed.

Truth be told, Kennedy has always been a hero of mine. He's on my list alongside FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, Washington and Lincoln as one of the greatest American presidents. I admired his heroics in WWII, his courage and fortitude during the Cold War, staring down Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the aura that surrounded his administration.

But as they say, things are not always what they seem, and I slowly learned that my hero, was not exactly perfect. In fact, he had a number of human foibles just like the rest of us. But in a way that made him even more of a hero to me because now I understood that despite being flawed, at the end of the day, he listened to others and then to himself, and he did what he thought was right, and in so doing he led us through some incredibly rough times in our nations history.

I've oftentimes wondered what the world would be like today had he lived and been re-elected in '64? Would we have gone to war in Vietnam? Would the Cold War have ended sooner? Would we still be keeping an embargo against Fidel Castro and Cuba clear into the 21st Century? How much of an imprint on politics in this country could he have made and would we be in a better situation of foreign policy and understanding of other cultures and peoples given his amazing knowledge on the subject? I wanted to know his personal views and more details about his life than having to piece them together from the dozens of other biographies out there, so when I came across the book at a local seller, and read the first two chapters I snapped it up.

I first read Robert Dallek in the late 1990's when his two volume biography of Lyndon Johnson (Lone Star Rising, and Flawed Giant) came out, and from reading that I knew that in Kennedy's case, Dallek wasn't going to paint a varnished, perfect picture or whitewash the truth as has been done in previous bios I've read.

Here we are presented with a man, who even though he came from a privileged background still had to overcome personal obstacles to achieve his goals. His medical problems alone from childhood, and his injuries to his back in WWII alone would have made a lesser man give up his cause. His religion too was another obstacle, one that dogged him repeatedly during his campaign, but yet one that made him bring the issue to the forefront of discussion and debate before ultimately proving that just because a person was Catholic, it meant he was unfit for office. We're given a sense of the man inside the man, his personal feelings, his hopes and fears, and when put all together, we're given a man who achieved greatness in his short lifetime.

All in all, the book is very well researched, and detailed in its prose which was drawn from numerous sources and contemporary views from Kennedy's family and friends. It get's a little hard to follow all the detail in some passages, but overall the book flows smoothly and is a engaging and engrossing look at the man who led us into the "New Frontier".