Product Description

Where were you when President Kennedy was shot? Nearly everyone who was alive and aware in 1963 can answer that question. No single event stands out so sharply in our memories or shocked us so deeply. But Kennedy's tragic death colored our view of his life, creating a national blind spot that has hindered fair assessment of his administration.

Only now, nearly three decades after his death, have we begun to look objectively at Kennedy, both as a man and as a president. In The Presidency of John F. Kennedy, historian James Giglio provides a succinct, comprehensive, and highly readable assessment of the Kennedy years.

As a man, Giglio contends, Kennedy was indeed charming, witty, intelligent, and handsome, but he was also ambitious and vulnerable-a man who often failed to measure up to his romantic image.

As president, Kennedy did deal effectively with many domestic economic and social issues, but he provided only sporadic and belated leadership in civil rights. He made little effort to combat poverty. He was more adept at managing foreign crises than preventing them, and by 1963, Giglio writes, Kennedy was on a collision course in Vietnam.

Giglio utilizes the latest scholarship and newly opened material from the Kennedy Library to provide up-to-date analysis of a variety of issues (including agriculture, space, organized crime, and the Kennedy assassination) and personalities (Jacqueline Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, Dean Rusk, Chester Bowles, and members of the White House staff and press). His portrait of the Kennedy years is clear, finely tuned, and long awaited.

This book is part of the American Presidency Series.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1179719 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.60 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 360 pages

From Kirkus Reviews
Brisk, solid survey of a brief and controversial presidency, by Giglio (History/Southwest Missouri State Univ.). Elected with virtually no mandate in what Giglio says was a stolen election, Kennedy managed in his ``thousand days'' to put his stamp on the American reality. He soon forged his mandate, Giglio points out, by media mastery and by using supreme political skills that allowed him to give the appearance of firm, virtuous positions while keeping options open as he successfully identified himself with causes (civil rights, anti-imperialism) that in reality he accepted only shallowly, and avoided acting on. Judging gently, supporting his views with precise, well-integrated evidence, Giglio gives a relatively unbiased picture of JFK. We see the future President begin as his father's creature, supported every step of the way by money, influence, and manipulation, and grow into a man learning from traumatic confrontations with Khrushchev (in Vienna) and with American blacks (at a breakfast that left him virtually speechless). Kennedy's Achilles' heel--his unproductive relationship with Congress--is plainly drawn, but his judgment on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis are not seriously faulted, while his creation of the Peace Corps is seen as genuinely historic. Most interestingly, Giglio documents JFK's lifelong physical frailty, superbly concealed in the mythology of the war hero and athlete. A victim of Addison's disease (not to mention satyriasis) for years, Kennedy came close to death as a young man and was also in constant, uncorrectable back pain, often severe. Regularly injected with steroids and pain-killers, he was also receiving, until his death, amphetamine shots from a notorious doctor-to-the-stars. A balanced and thoughtful account that avoids the hagiography or damnation of so many other JFK bios, revealing the man in all his complexity, from his wily, hypnotic charm to his political decisiveness when it could not be avoided. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Ingram
A balanced portrait of the youngest president's term recreates the tensions of the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile crisis, civil rights battles, and the space program. Simultaneous.

From the Back Cover
"The best history to date of the Kennedy presidency. Covering every important domestic and foreign topic, this treatment is at once balanced, comprehensive, authoritative, and readable. . . . With this book, Kennedy studies at last move beyond both apology and revisionism to dispassionate analysis and mature reflection."--Allen J. Matusow, author of The Unraveling of America

"A model of organization, clarity, and reliability-a sober view of those intoxicating thousand days."--Herbert S. Parmet, author of Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon and His America

"A fascinating portrait-balanced, thoughtful, and judicious. Giglio's mastery of the extensive Kennedy literature and his careful weighing of JFK's strengths and weaknesses result in the best account yet of Kennedy's White House years."--Robert A. Divine, author of Eisenhower and the Cold War and editor of The Johnson Years and The Cuban Missile Crisis

"The best overall book we have on the Kennedy presidency. The story is well-told, the analysis intelligent and fair-minded, the research strong. Giglio portrays an imperfect man and leader who shaded truth for political gain and personal pleasure while he advanced the national agenda. A fascinating chapter on Kennedy's daily life and character, including his sexual adventurism and drug injections, rounds out this thorough book. . . . Good reading and good scholarship."--Thomas G. Paterson, editor of Kennedy's Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961-1963 and author of On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking of the Cold War