Book Review: JFK Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956

 

JFK

Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956

by Fredrik Logevall

 Random House Publishing Group - Random House 

Random House

 Biographies & Memoirs  |  History 

Pub Date 08 Sep 2020 

I am reviewing a copy of JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 through Random House Publishing Group and Netgalley:

John F Kennedy was born on May.29.1917 and was assassinated November 22.1963.  He was born in the midst of the First World War, and came of age during the Second World War.  

John F. Kennedy stood at the helm of the greatest power the world had ever seen, a booming American nation that he had steered through some of the most perilous diplomatic standoffs of the Cold War. Kennedy knew political ambition from a young age, and his meteoric rise to become the youngest elected president cemented his status as one of the most mythologized figures in American history. And while portrayals of his dazzling charisma, reports of his extramarital affairs, and disagreements over his political legacy have come and gone in the decades since his untimely death, these accounts all fail to capture the full person.

John F Kennedy was born at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts, is today a national historic site.  When the  boys were Noble and Greenough Lower School The principal of the school, Miss Myra Fiske, had interviewed the boys in the spring of 1924 and liked what she saw.  But soon the Kennedy boys would be taunted and bullied because most of the boys in the school were Protestant while they were Catholics.  Being an Irish and Catholic caused a real stigma in those days.

The Kennedy brothers did not have a room of their own at the family home, instead when they were home from school on the Holidays they would find a room that was available.

At the age of seventeen Jack became sick which the doctors eventually attributed to allergies and likely collitis, he was sent home with the orders to follow a proper diet and to avoid emotional stress.

When Joe graduated from Choate in 1933, there father sent him to the London School of Economics to study with Harold Laski, the distinguished socialist theorist and economist, before matriculating at Harvard.  The recommendation for this came from the recommendation of Harvard Law School Professor Felix Frankfurter.

On September.25.1935 John F Kennedy who was eighteen boarded the French ocean liner Normandie, along with his parents and his sister Kathleen (Kick). They were bound for England.  The prior spring Jack had applied to both Harvard and Princeton and was accepted to both.  He decided he would rather go to Princeton his Father did not disagree but insisted he too spend a year the London School of Economics, as his brother had, under the tutelage of the left-wing economist Harold Laski.  But John F Kennedy once again became sick and was hospitalized for more tests. 

On January. 18, 1936:   Kennedy wrote, “My blood count this morning was 3500. When I came it was 6,000. At 1500 you die. They call me ‘2,000 to go Kennedy.”

He would go on to write again on January 27 “They haven’t told me anything, except that I have leukemia, and a rare blood disorder.

John F Kennedy’s family connections got him into places and positions that he may not have otherwise gotten into Such was the case in October 1941, when he became an officer in the Navy Reserve and was assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C., the same posting Joe Junior had turned down the previous spring.

On January 3, 1947, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, representing the Eleventh District of Massachusetts.  He was almost thirty and looked even younger With his boyish smile and big shock of hair.  A few old hands on Capitol Hill mistook him for a college student on hiatus from his studies and working as an aide.  Kennedy was not bothered or at least did not show that he was bothered by the lack of attention.

In the Spring of 1951, John F Kennedy attended  a dinner party in Georgetown where he met twenty  Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, who at the time was just shy of being twenty two, and had just graduated college.

on January 20, 1953, John F Kennedy attended Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Inaugural Ball with Jacqueline Bouvier on his arms. In June of that same year John and Jacque were  engaged. The engagement was announced on June 23, 1953, and the announcement ran in newspapers all throughout the country.

1954 turned out to be John F Kennedy’s nightmare, the first major problem that year had been with him since his birth and had been made worse by injuries suffered in the South Pacific during the war. He had been in acute pain at various times during 1953, even entering George Washington University Hospital for a few days in mid-July for what were officially deemed “malaria” complications. At his wedding, in September, friends worried that he might not be able to kneel at the altar—or get back up if he did.  The second problem had to deal with McCarthy. For four years, ever since the Wisconsin demagogue burst onto the scene with his notorious speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, Kennedy’s strategy had been to bob and weave, to keep private his misgivings about McCarthy’s charges and tactics and to say as little as possible publicly.

JFK Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956, not only talks about his political career, but talks of the health issues that plagued him throughout his life, as well as his indiscretions, but it also shows the human side of a president that set a new standard for what that means, a president who wanted to move our nation forward in a positive manner, which left him idealized by many, but hated by some too.  

I give JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!