Book Review: JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956
| DOI | 10.1177/00207020211065787 |
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Author | Jack Cunningham |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
International Journal
2021, Vol. 76(4) 606–622
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00207020211065787
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Book Reviews
Fredrik Logevall.
JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956.
New York: Random House, 2020. 816 pp. $20.00 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-81298-702-7
Reviewed by: Jack Cunningham,(stewartjohncunningham@hotmail.com), Universityof Toronto,
Canada
John F. Kennedy remains a vivid presence in the popular imagination almost sixty years
after his assassination, yet we have had to wait until now for the first installment of a
comprehensive biography, drawing on the rich holdings of the Kennedy Library in
Boston, many of them only recently released. The first efforts at biography, by his aides
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Theodore Sorensen, were published within a few years of his
death and cast his life in a roseate hue. But a reaction was inevitable, and twenty-five years
later the revisionist tide crested in Thomas C. Reeves’s1991A Question of Character,
which depicted the thirty-fifth president as a pathological philanderer and monster of
narcissism. With this volume, Fredrik Logevall goes beyond the sterile debate between
keepers of the flame and debunkers, offering a dispassionate, thoroughly documented
account of Kennedy’s ascent to national prominence, set against the background of
America’s emergence as a world power and the tumult of the early Cold War.
Logevall begins with a richly textured portrait of the wealthy, close-knit Boston
Irish family that nurtured Kennedy—above all, his demanding father, Joseph P.
Kennedy Sr. The elder Kennedy was a self-made and astute businessman who pre-
served his fortune by liquidating his assets on the eve of the 1929 stock market crash,
and an ardent Democrat. Appointed by Franklin Roosevelt as Ambassador to the Court
of Saint James, he proved an indefatigable isolationist and indeed an appeaser until the
outbreak of the Second World War, and thereafter a standard-bearer for isolationist
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