Forty Ways to Look at JFK by Gretchen Rubin
My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
Gretchen's Rubin's tour de force on the life and presidency of John F. Kennedy, for which her excellent 40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill now seems a warm up, presents a many-faceted view of both Kennedy's meteoric political career and his hidden personal life. As Rubin points out, borrowing Isaiah Berlin's famous comparison, if Churchill was a hedgehog guided by one great idea, Kennedy was a fox, whose perspective constantly shifts. While Kennedy may not have lived up to the stature of his hero Churchill (and after all, who could?), Rubin's multifaceted (often directly, deliberately contradictory) forty chapters paint a picture of a man who transcended his personal limitations -- debilitating illness, chronic pain, compulsive womanizing -- to inspire Americans in a way that they have seldom been inspired before and never since. For a flavor of this inspirational quality, one need only revisit some of Kennedy's old speeches -- on youtube or elsewhere -- to get a sense of his enormous power to lift people above themselves. Whatever the unfulfilled promise of the thousand days, Kennedy confronted Soviet aggression, calmed nuclear tensions, kept the peace, created the Peace Corps, and launched the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in a hundred years. In retrospect, even perhaps his greatest lapse, his constant affairs with the best known and most beautiful women in America, has an Olympian quality to it, unmatched by the furtive indiscretions of an Eisenhower or the tawdry sex play of a Clinton with his trailer babes and interns. Kennedy's enduring legacy is a promise that America can be smart but tough, strong but peaceful, cultivated but virile, inspirational but practical, high-minded but unpretentious, principled but tolerant, sophisticated but popular, American but international, prosperous but generous, and competitive but fair. Rubin's aptly chosen epigraph is a quote from Samuel Butler: "He is greatest who is most often in men's good thoughts." To John F. Kennedy, who died two years before I was born, I am grateful for the many good thoughts that he left behind.