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TIME: Almanac 1993
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REVIEWSBOOKS, Page 74Jumpin' Jack Flash
By R.Z. SHEPPARD
TITLE: JFK: RECKLESS YOUTH
AUTHOR: Nigel Hamilton
PUBLISHER: Random House; 861 pages; $30
THE BOTTOM LINE: The first volume of a new Kennedy
biography raises but does not settle the character issue.
Life is short. Biography is long. Nigel Hamilton's massive
JFK: Reckless Youth takes the playboy politician only to 1946,
when he was first elected to Congress at the age of 29. There
are thousands of pages to come.
Hamilton, whose previous biographies include three volumes
on Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, is currently the John F.
Kennedy Scholar and Visiting Fellow in the John W. McCormack
Institute of Public Affairs in Boston. He is well connected and
indebted to valuable sources on both sides of the Atlantic. His
acknowledgments read like a Tina Brown guest list. But his book
does not have the consistent gloss of an official bio graphy.
In fact, young J.F.K. emerges as a bright, charming dilettante
to whom everything came a little too easily.
Apart from unsafe wenching, Kennedy was not as reckless as
the subtitle proclaims. He cut up a bit at prep school and
wrote raunchy, callow letters ("Have jewed sled down to $3 and
maybe down more"). But there was none of the wildness usually
associated with offspring of rich, flamboyant families. Instead
we find a likable boy with a cool head and an IQ of 119 who was
more interested in good times than good grades. He was a
competent sailor, played some football and swam competitively
until stomach trouble, fevers and a puzzling weight loss
curtailed his activities.
It is unclear if these symptoms were related to his
Addison's disease, which went undiagnosed until 1947. Hamilton
does not get ahead of the chronology. But leapfrogging source
notes provide a glimpse of the "future," including clinical
details about the persistent effects of gonorrhea. "Gave 600,000
Pen[icillin]," notes a specialist called by the White House
on April 17, 1961, the day anti-Castro Cubans landed at the Bay
of Pigs.
Lechery is an expectedly prominent theme of this biography
of perhaps the randiest American hero since Benjamin Franklin.
J.F.K.'s model was, of course, his father, Joseph P.,
financier, politico and womanizer who, foreshadowing his second
son's White House trysts, brought his mistress home. An old chum
reports that Jack's favorite phrase was "Slam, bam, thank you,
ma'am." Inga Arvad, the Danish-born journalist who was Kennedy's
lover during the early 1940s, remembers "a boy, not a man,
intent upon ejaculation and not a woman's pleasure." Lem
Billings, Kennedy's oldest friend, is more sympathetic. "I think
he wanted to believe in love and faithfulness and all that but
what he'd seen at home didn't give him much hope. So he sort of
bumped along."
Just so. The Kennedy whom Hamilton pieces together from
interviews, letters and memoirs is a blithe cynic whose wit and
charm are substitutes for intimacy. "Were you ever in love?" a
woman asks him later in his life. His smooth answer: "No, though
often very interested."
Beneath the worldliness there is an anxious young man who
equated his sensitivities and illnesses with unmanliness. He
could have spent World War II in bed with Inga, whom the FBI
suspected of being a spy because she had once socialized with
Goering, Goebbels and Hitler. Instead Kennedy pulled strings to
get into the Navy, where his reputation as a war hero was based
entirely on efforts to save himself and the crew after PT109
managed to get rammed by a Japanese destroyer.
Hamilton is more than fair when describing J.F.K.'s
exploits, most of which were clearly pumped up for future
political consumption. His Harvard thesis was accepted with
lowest honors before Joe Kennedy's influence got it published
in its editorially enhanced version as Why England Slept. Young
J.F.K.'s foreign-affairs expertise seems to have been
embellished to compensate for a glaring lack of interest in
domestic problems.
Paraphrasing sources, Hamilton notes that Kennedy enjoyed
the chase far more than what came after. "Once the voters or
the women were won," he writes, "there was a certain
vacuousness on Jack's part, a failure to turn conquest into
anything meaningful or profound." This was certainly borne out
in the House and Senate, where Kennedy's record was lackluster
and politically expedient.
Hamilton may judge the record less harshly. Although he
has yet to deal with the late '40s and the '50s, he rhapsodizes
about J.F.K.'s postwar idealism, the beginning of "a liberal
spirit that would, one day, define a whole generation of
Americans." This windup, like Hamilton's subtitle, overdoes it.
With his Peace Corps and space program, Kennedy may have
inspired a generation. What defined it was not J.F.K.'s idealism
but his cold-war reflexes that sent U.S. troops to Vietnam.