JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President. By Thurston Clarke. Penguin Press; 448 pages; $29.95. Allen Lane; £20. Buy from Amazon.comAmazon.co.uk
FOR Americans of a certain age, memories of November 22nd 1963 remain painful. Their dashing young president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas. Shock and mourning ensued.
The loss may have been all the harder because Kennedy had been growing steadily on the job. His first year in office was marked by the ignominious Bay of Pigs, his failed effort to eject Fidel Castro from Cuba. A year and a half later, the Cuban missile crisis brought America and the Soviet Union to the terrifying brink of nuclear war. But by the autumn of 1963, Thurston Clarke argues in this study of the president’s final days, Kennedy had begun to “realise his potential as a man and a president”. His confidence was rising. Having narrowly avoided nuclear war, he was determined to have peace. Finding like-mindedness in Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, he secured a treaty that banned nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space and underwater. It was, Kennedy told the nation, “a step away from war”.
Vietnam also dominated his final months. Even while half-heartedly encouraging a coup that toppled and killed Ngo Dinh Diem, the South Vietnamese leader, Kennedy seemed determined to draw down the American presence and avoid a future quagmire there. He spent time, too, on civil rights and the space race. He began planning his re-election and even laid the groundwork for secret talks with Mr Castro.
His relationship with his glamorous wife, Jacqueline, also improved. In August 1963 their second son, Patrick, was born prematurely and died within days. After that, Mr Clarke shows, Kennedy was more solicitous towards his wife. Evidently he cut back on his reckless womanising, though whether this would have lasted will never be known. “I think we’re going to make it. I think we’re going to be a couple,” the first lady told a friend not long before the fateful trip to Dallas. Kennedy’s lifelong health problems also diminished.
Mr Clarke is a good storyteller, and his account—one of many JFK books timed for the 50th anniversary of the assassination—offers an enjoyable snapshot of the day-to-day workings of the presidency. One moment sees Kennedy holding a meeting on poverty in Kentucky; the next finds him romping with his children, Caroline and John. The format also affords passing glimpses into Kennedy’s views on issues such as the space race (“a hell of a lot of dough to go to the moon,” he griped) and getting out of South-East Asia (“my number one priority”).
The book’s core argument—that Kennedy came into his own during his final 100 days—is not entirely persuasive. His biggest triumph had come when he averted a nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis. The nuclear test-ban treaty was significant, and it gave hope to cold war-weary Americans. But whether Kennedy could have sustained improvements to his marriage and his health, and got a strong civil-rights bill past Southern segregationists in Congress, is less clear-cut.
Ultimately, finishing the job fell to a man Kennedy despised. Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, a former majority leader of the Senate, was disparaged by the Kennedy White House as “Old Lyin’ Down” and “Uncle Cornpone”. But after Kennedy was shot, the ambitious and often ruthless Texan took the reins and pushed through a host of Kennedy initiatives, including an important bill that banned discrimination in schools and other public places. Johnson also led the nation further into Vietnam. Had Kennedy lived—had his last 100 days in office come in 1968-69, not 1963—things would have been different.