JFK Volume One review – a superhero made human
over 5 years in The guardian
The first instalment of Fredrik Logevall’s definitive biography reveals a man in sharp contrast to the modern Lancelot of legend
During John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1960, Norman Mailer imagined him on the exalted heights, in the company of Nietzsche’s superman: he had, Mailer said, the deep tan of a ski instructor and the piercing eyes of a mountaineer. In 1963, after Kennedy’s assassination, John Steinbeck described him as a latterday King Arthur, “a man… who put on the shining armour” and for a while enabled “everyone living to reflect a little of that light”.
A caped crusader or a chivalric hero? Perhaps America’s high priest, which is how the historian Theodore H White described Kennedy? Actually, none of the above. In this first volume of Fredrik Logevall’s definitive biography, JFK is all too engagingly and amiably human. Continue reading...
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