Yet another book on President Kennedy? It's true but Mark Updegrove, the author of four previous books dealing with U.S. presidents, tries to cut through the myth and the conspiracy theories with this effort.
Updegrove, who served as the director of the LBJ Presidential Library for eight years and now heads the LBJ Foundation, doesn't shy away from acknowledging that Kennedy was badly outplayed by Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev at their first meeting.
The Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba is also outlined but, as Updegrove noted, JFK didn't suffer a loss in popularity as a result. For a man who barely outdistanced Richard Nixon in the 1960 election, JFK gained appreciably in the office.
It's worth noting that Kennedy was supposedly more worried about his own military when it came to the Cuban missile crisis than the Russian response.
Coming out of that showdown, Kennedy clearly established himself as a leader but other trials showed him to be more worried about politics than civil rights. Updegrove credits Bobby Kennedy who attended a meeting of leading African Americans for counseling the president to take action when the south was aflame in the 60s.
On Vietnam, Updegrove says there's nothing in the record to indicate that Kennedy would have pulled out any sooner than his predecessors. Overall, it's hard to believe that the Kennedy tenure was only three years when you stack up all the issues faced in that time.
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