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Reviews in American History 31.4 (2003) 645-656



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Why Another Kennedy Book?

James N. Giglio


Robert Dallek. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003. x + 838 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00.

"Why another Kennedy book?" Robert Dallek asks in the opening line of An Unfinished Life. As he well knows, much has been published on Kennedy since 1991, including books by Thomas Reeves, James Giglio, Irving Bernstein, Nigel Hamilton, Richard Reeves, Seymour Hersh, and Geoffrey Perret, most of which benefited from the abundant primary sources at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in Boston. Dallek, a renowned biographer of Lyndon B. Johnson and authority on the modern presidency, justifies his study largely on the availability of new material, including "written contemporary documents, telephone and Oval Office tapes, . . . and oral histories" (p. ix). No source has proven to be more significant than the Kennedy medical records. Additionally, he has incorporated recent specialized studies on the Kennedy presidency. As a consequence, Dallek has produced both a bestseller and the most comprehensive study of JFK's life since Herbert Parmet's two volumes more than twenty years ago. 1

Dallek seeks to understand Kennedy by placing him in the context of his time, class, family circumstances, and physical and emotional difficulties. His parents' impact on young Kennedy was enormous. Besides his considerable assistance, Joe Kennedy preached to Jack—and his siblings—that winning was everything. By example he also revealed that women were sexual objects. Rose, JFK's mother, following the conventional wisdom of the time, emphasized discipline over affection in child rearing. She was often inaccessible to Jack in adolescence, a time when he most needed her. Consequently, he felt unloved as a teenager. Her excessive religiosity, sanctimoniousness, and toleration of her husband's infidelity contributed further to Jack's unflattering perception of women. Not only did he match his father's womanizing, but he also found it difficult to show genuine affection toward the opposite sex. Out of that stressful family environment, which included a favored, robust older brother, the physically slight and extraordinarily bright young Kennedy expressed his rebelliousness by being sloppy, tardy, and irreverent. Only after [End Page 645] his junior year at Harvard did he begin to live up to his intellectual potential, which resulted—thanks to some skillful editing—in the publication of Why England Slept (1940). Dallek covers familiar ground here, relying largely on the works of Doris Kearns Goodwin and Nigel Hamilton. 2

Dallek gives considerable attention to Kennedy's physical ailments. As Hamilton and others have done, he first portrays a young Kennedy suffering from an assortment of infirmities, beginning with scarlet fever at the age of two. Entering his teenage years, Kennedy was in and out of hospitals and the Lahey and Mayo clinics for chronic colitis, stomach problems, and an undisclosed blood condition, which some physicians mistakenly diagnosed as leukemia. The gastrointestinal problem resulted especially in embarrassing and painful medical tests, which Kennedy vividly described to school friend LeMoyne Billings. Kennedy's indomitable spirit, reflected in his self-deprecating wit and his boastful descriptions of supposed sexual conquests while hospitalized, comes through despite a belief that doctors were measuring him for a coffin. Dallek underemphasizesthe extent to which Kennedy was becoming understandably self-absorbed about his health, a characteristic that extended to his later life. Moreover, after an extensive medical examination at the Mayo Clinic in February 1939, a leading physician explained to his father that Jack's chronic colitis most likely resulted from psychosomatic or emotional problems. Sara Jordan, at that time the leading gastroenterologist at the Lahey Clinic who treated Kennedy for gastrointestinal problems into the 1950s, came to the same conclusion in correspondence unavailable to Dallek. 3 Assuming the correctness of that diagnosis, the aforementioned pressures of being a Kennedy could have been a contributing factor.

Dallek is the first scholar to use the Kennedy medical records at the Kennedy Library. After several years of seeking entry, he received permission in 2002 to do so from the donor committee representing the Kennedy family...

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