JFK

many of the biggest names in Boston society had kept summer homes in Brookline. Over time, some opted to make the quiet summer town their year-round residence, adopting the English model of an aristocratic elite rooted in the country, the better to separate themselves from the seamy underside of industrialization and the influx of immigrants. The Lowells, Cabots, Sargents, Amorys, Codmans, and other prominent families all came, creating a larger concentration of Brahmins than in perhaps any other town in the region. As the money flowed in, Brookline acquired more urban services than most surrounding towns; by the 1850s, it had one of the best school systems in New England, as well as an excellent public library; by the turn of the century, there were sewers and telephone lines. Although the town housed a sizable working-class population to serve the needs of the wealthy and had a growing middle class, 36 percent of the town s residents were wealthy enough to employ live-in domestic servants.

History does not record whether Joe and Rose, on their first evening in that new home, reflected on how far their respective families had come since their grandparents arrived from Ireland six decades before. Joe in particular was not the introspective sort. But they needed no one to tell them that they were benefiting from improvements in the lot of Irish Americans scarcely imaginable to that earlier generation.

II

Patrick Kennedy wasn t thinking that far ahead in October 1848 when he made his way on foot so it is said from Dunganstown, a town in southwest County Wexford, along the River Barrow, down to New Ross, six miles away, to board a ship to Liverpool and from there, he hoped, to the New World. He was just trying to escape an Ireland that was three years into a catastrophic famine.

In 1845, following an unusually wet summer, a mysterious blight caused the potato crop to fail. The disease h

of the twentieth century and made it feel fresh. Harvard historian Fredrik Logevall scrapes away the encrusted layers of myth, rumour and cliché; the result is a generous portrait of the young Kennedy, one that is attentive to his contradictions and weaknesses even as it seeks to understand what it was that made him so extraordinary. The Telegraph
 
With a novelist s eye for the telling detail and vignette, [Logevall] strips away the layers of myth and sensationalism that obscure the real, live human being that was JFK . . . . One of the many pleasures of reading this keenly perceptive page-turner of a biography is that it also illuminates the story of America s ascent to great power and then superpower status in [a] fresh and compelling way. The Daily Beast

Such are Logevall s eloquence and storytelling powers that, even though we all know the story s tragic ending, he provides often overlooked detail about how it all started. He reveals the future president to be less skittish and far more savvy and independently minded than we have been led to believe. He also renders him less mythological and more accessible and familiar. Irish Examiner

A magnificent portrayal. Detroit Free Press
 
An excellent book . . . Logevall has taken a familiar story and retold it in a way that is captivating and persuasive, as the tale of triumphant emergence from war and the tragedy of an immigrant family. The Times (London)

With impressive vision and flawless execution, Logevall bores down to a molecular level to put JFK s life and achievements within the context of the history of the times, while simultaneously exposing the truths obscured by the most popular JFK misconceptions. Booklist (starred review)

Our best historian of the Vietnam War now turns to another subject you thought you already knew, and he makes John F. Kennedy as alive and compelling as if you were reading about him for the first time. Fredrik Logevall portrays the young JFK with the masterful intimacy and sympathy that only a great scholar and writer could achieve. George Packer, author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America and Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century

John F. Kennedy was a man before he was a monument, and among the great achievements of this wonderful book is how brilliantly Fredrik Logevall conveys both JFK s humanity and the history of the age. With precision and with grace, Logevall has given us a memorable portrait of a man and of the world that, before he shaped it, shaped him. It s a powerful, provocative, and above all compelling book. Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Soul of America

In this magisterial biography, Fredrik Logevall has deftly peeled away the many layers of myth surrounding John F. Kennedy to reveal a complex and surprisingly vulnerable human being. This first installment of his Kennedy biography is also the story of the rise of the United States to world power in a turbulent age. An essential read for anyone interested in the life and the times. Margaret MacMillan, author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us

Fredrik Logevall s brilliant biography rescues JFK from the myths that have long surrounded his early life without in any way obscuring the complexities of his character. There could be no more poignant reminder of what we were far too soon to lose. John Lewis Gaddis, Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University