John F Kennedy: An Unfinished Life
By Robert Dallek
Penguin 2003
Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

Still incomplete

Widely touted as the definitive book on JFK, ‘An Unfinished Life’ falls short of being a full portrait, and if you still believe Oswald wasn’t alone, that’s just too bad.

The Nation
Published in June 2004
Back-cover blurbs for Robert Dallek’s “An Unfinished Life” include the Guardian’s “easily the best modern account” and the Sunday Herald’s “it could also be the last word”. The New York Times Book Review says, “Thanks to Dallek’s findings, things make sense at an entirely new level.”
The tributes have been almost universal, but they only leave me wondering if there is a media bias after all (though I’m still not sure which way it’s leaning).
Dallek too often in these 800 pages brushes aside the sins of the Kennedys (father Joe and son Jack), the womanising, bullying and shady deals, JFK’s war-hero and Pulitzer-hero status.
And arguably the Kennedy question of most interest – who killed him? – is given the “Oswald, case closed” treatment with a smugness and dispassion that’s bound to infuriate those who’ve proven (as a joint committee of the US Congress was forced to admit in 1976) that there was more than one gunman.
Soundly justifying yet another book on JFK with his access to previously unavailable medical records, Oval Office tape recordings and recent testimony by key players, Dallek sticks close to his central premise that Kennedy was a potentially great president.
The title only hints at the length he goes to in establishing not just how much Kennedy accomplished but how much further he was poised to go in his inevitable second term. With a few glaring exceptions, Dallek masterfully aligns the facts about a terribly flawed man and stumbling, often hesitant president who was nevertheless daily growing stronger in his job and seemed on the verge of becoming sublime.
“An Unfinished Life” starts off engagingly enough with JFK’s 1947 visit to Ireland with his sister Kathleen, ostensibly a fact-finding tour on the Marshall Plan, but also a chance to get acquainted with his roots. It segues nicely into the family history.
The usual chronology follows, with conservative acknowledgements of the nasty bits: Joe’s philandering, corrupt business ploys, forcing a pre-frontal lobotomy on his daughter Rosemary (without telling his wife) and pig-headed insistence on appeasing Hitler.
But jump ahead, and Dallek puts cynics on notice of his unwavering faith in Camelot when he resolutely reaffirms JFK’s heroic performance as a World War II skipper. It’s left to brother Joe Jr to question why Jack’s patrol boat was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer, but Dallek brushes that aside as jocular sibling rivalry.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ biography says she urged her husband write a book, suggested the topic and even the title, recruited scholarly buddy Ted Sorensen to goose along the composition and herself helped research what would become “Profiles in Courage” and win JFK the Pulitzer Prize in 1956.
Dallek owns up to the squabble over where the book really came from, even admitting that Kennedy henchman Arthur Krock lobbied the Pulitzer committee, but it was, he insists, the “work of a committee” and winning the prize was “largely a case of good timing”. Regardless, JFK is henceforth annoyingly referred to often as “the Pulitzer prize-winning” this or that.
Four years later, Chicago Mayor Joe Daley’s political “machine probably stole Illinois from Nixon” to help Kennedy become president, but we’re not told why (or at whose behest) Daley’s machine did so. In the event, JFK didn’t need Illinois’ 8,800 votes, and there’s “no proof” of graft regarding the 46,000-vote margin in Texas. Kennedy beat Nixon by 118,574 votes out of 69 million cast. Why? The main reason was that he was a Catholic, Dallek says, offering intriguing evidence for a claim that seems bizarre today.
Dallek’s new information about Kennedy’s Oval Office taping system is mostly useful to him in setting the scenes. For the reader, it boils down to JFK nobly wanting to ensure that future historians needn’t ask “how did that happen?” However, there are, Dallek finds, three tapes cut and spliced – possibly to hide covert operations or something to do with Marilyn Monroe or Judith Campbell Exner – “and a small number destroyed or lost”.
Ah, Marilyn. So swiftly dismissed as a “maybe” on a page that’s not even included in the index for “JFK, sex life of”. Nor will the index lead you to the pages about his affairs with a New York prostitute who was one of Christine Keeler’s V Girls and with Suzy Chang and Ellen Rometsch, the East German who slept with the president and attended naked pool parties at the White House.
Dallek, talking about Kennedy’s chronic backache, explains that he was a compulsive womaniser because of deep-seated psychological factors, but insists his fractured philandering was “no impediment to his being an effective president”.
Nor was the still startling volume of drugs that JFK ingested to keep going, which are documented here at length with only cursory questions about the medical advice he was getting.
Much later, Dallek notes that Robert Kennedy believed any of several entities could have murdered JFK and felt guilty about having provoked one of them – Castro. LBJ clung to the conspiracy tenet too, though he publicly endorsed the Warren Commission’s findings because he didn’t want any avengers fomenting a lethal confrontation.
In the face of these beliefs, Dallek rests on the reprehensible laurels of “Case Closed”, a 1993 bestseller by Gerald Posner aimed at putting the kibosh on the conspiracy theories once and for all. It did no such thing, as Dallek well knows, but he chooses to lament that the public, “inflamed” by Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “JFK”, remains obtuse.
“The fact that none of the conspiracy theorists have been able to offer convincing evidence of their suspicions,” he writes unconvincingly, “does not seem to trouble many people. The plausibility of a conspiracy is less important to them than the implausibility of someone as inconsequential as Oswald having the wherewithal to kill someone as consequential – as powerful and well-guarded – as JFK.”
Toward the end, you can’t fault Dallek when he addresses “those who believed that another five years in the White House and a post-presidential career might have allowed Kennedy to shield the country from losses and defeats, avoiding the doubts and cynicism flowing from the assassination and the Vietnam War and bringing benefits that would have served countless millions at home and abroad”.
“An Unfinished Life” is an excellent effort, shining best in its thorough readings of the American civil-rights struggle and Vietnam when it was still just a worrisome foreign affair. Dallek also comes close to matching the best books on the 1962 missile crisis.
There are some interesting anecdotes, too, although I’m not sure they’re fresh. Kennedy, pushing hard for tax cuts to fend off a future recession, called Senator Albert Gore (father of the recent vice president) a “son of a bitch” for delaying hearings. JFK, incensed at Soviet domination in space, was also pushing hard for a moon landing – despite the fact that two-thirds of Americans opposed more massive
spending, was told by Nasa chief Jim Webb that the US space programme was about understanding the environment up there. If it wasn’t about beating the Russians, Kennedy snapped, “I’m not interested in space!”
But Dallek, ultimately, takes a shot too far and piles rhetorical wool on the myth he’s spent so much time bringing down to earth: “Kennedy’s 1,000 days spoke to the country’s better angels, inspired visions of a less divisive nation and world and demonstrated that America was still the last best hope of mankind.”
To be sure, Nixon was still lurking in the wings, but such patriotic bosh is a disservice to reasoned biography.