Beginning Hour Annex: JFK Books

Before I pack many of these JFK books back in their box (for there is no room on the overflowing shelves) I thought I'd give them their close-ups. These books remind me that at least in my lifetime there has never been as broad and extensive interest in a presidency as there was of JFK in the early 1960s. Consider this as well as an appendix to previous History of My Reading posts, such as this one and this one.

These are books that JFK authored.  Why England Slept was based on his Harvard undergrad dissertation, originally published in 1940, about how and why England failed to prepare for World War II.  He authored Profiles in Courage while a US Senator while recovering from a recurrent back problem.  It profiles 8 Senators in history and their acts of political courage  It was a best-seller and won the 1957 Pulitzer for biography.  JFK acknowledged the role of special assistant and speechwriter Ted Sorensen, though perhaps not the extent of his contribution.  The role of writers such as Sorensen in books by public figures is now assumed.

  A Nation of Immigrants was JFK's statement on immigration policy published in 1958 when he was in the Senate.  The other books are principally collections of speeches: To Turn the Tide covers roughly the first year of the presidency, The Burden and the Glory covers the remainder.  The Strategy of Peace selected Senator Kennedy's statements on foreign policy issues, plus an interview with him.  Published in 1960, it was meant to articulate positions he would advocate in his presidential campaign.  I got my first copy from the Citizens for Kennedy office on Main St. in Greensburg, PA, where I did some campaign work.

Three editions of Profiles in Courage still in my possession.  My first was a paperback written by "Senator John F. Kennedy." It was reissued when he was President, without changing the photo or the cover.  That's the bottom one.  I'm not sure when I got the Inaugural Edition but I got the Memorial Edition as a gift in 1964.  It's physically a little bigger than the Inaugural Edition with a different back cover photo.  The foreword by Robert Kennedy is notable for the sentences: "President Kennedy would have been forty-seven in May of 1964.  At least one half of the days that he spent on this earth were days of intense physical pain."

Theodore White's account of the 1960 presidential campaign, from the primaries through the general election contest between JFK and Richard Nixon, was the first of a now-familiar genre.  It just hadn't been done before.  Published in 1961, The Making of the President 1960 was a sensation, at the top of the best-seller list for months.  Teddy White wrote three more in his series, and using the Making of.. title or not, taking an inside view of presidential campaigns has become a publishing tradition ever since.

John Kennedy: A Political Profile was the first JFK biography and for awhile the only one.  Researched by historian and political science professor James MacGregor Burns in 1959 and 1960, it was published in paperback in 1961.    P.T. 109 was the best-selling account of JFK's WWII exploits in the Pacific, leading 11 survivors away from their severed P.T. boat to swim for 4 hours to the nearest small island, JFK towing one injured man by a rope held in his teeth.  There were a number of articles about this incident (notably John Hershey's in Reader's Digest) but this book by a New York Herald reporter published in 1961 became the standard.  The 1963 feature film starring Cliff Robertson as JFK was based on it.

You can gauge the early 60s voracious interest in JFK--generally as well as mine--by the fact that The Kennedy Government, nothing more than bios of JFK's cabinet and White House advisers, was published in mass market paperback in 1961. America's first man in space (Alan Shepard) and first to orbit the earth (John Glenn) were major events of the JFK years, leading to his commitment to land on the moon by the end of the 1960s.  This paperback (First American Into Space) is notable for its author, prominent science fiction writer and anthologist Robert Silverberg.  It was a time for s/f authors to claim some respectability, as the future they'd written about in their fantasies was becoming reality.

In the Kennedy government were authors of books already published, such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., J.K. Galbraith and Robert Kennedy.  Others published during the JFK administration, notably these two.  Point of the Lance was a selection of Sargent Shriver's speeches plus some additions relating directly to the Peace Corps, of which he was the first director.  Many years later I had dinner with Harris Wofford, an associate of Shriver's as well as White House operative in the JFK years, and later Senator from PA.  This book came up in the conversation, and Wofford said that he'd written most of it, completely uncredited. Under his own name he authored Of Kennedys and Kings, an account of the 60s.

  The Quiet Crisis by JFK's Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall is a different matter.  It's first of all a real book, not a collection of speeches.  Published in 1963, it is an early argument for government action to save the environment, as well as a historical look at attitudes towards the natural environment in the US, beginning with "The Land Wisdom of the Indians."  Popularizing the great Aldo Leopold's concept of "the land ethic," Udall's book is a conceptual and policy breakthrough for the US and the US government.  President Kennedy wrote the introduction.

The early 1960s were rife with satire and political humor.  The Kennedys were gently spoofed in enormously popular recordings, beginning with The First Family in which comedian Vaughn Meader imitated the unique characteristics of JFK's speech and voice.  There were books of political humor as well, such as the Gerald Gardner series of photos with cartoon dialogue balloons, beginning with Who's in charge here?

Meader and Gardner were witty about JFK, but JFK surprised the country with his dry sense of humor and deadpan delivery.  He was particularly adept at demonstrating it in his press conferences, which were carried live on national television.  Bill Adler selected zingers for his very popular paperbacks such as these two, The Kennedy Wit and More Kennedy Wit.  For example, from a press conference: QUESTION: The Republican National Committee recently adopted a resolution saying you were pretty much of a failure.  How do you feel about that? PRESIDENT KENNEDY: I assume it passed unanimously.

Before digital, there was usually about a year between an author finishing a book and its publication.  So many books that were prepared during the JFK administration only came out when it was abruptly and unexpectedly over. Jim Bishop had done a series of "A Day in the Life" books.  He followed the Kennedys for four days in what turned out to be during the final weeks of JFK's life.  It is written in October and November 1963, and JFK press secretary Pierre Salinger was reading it in typescript when he learn of the murder in Dallas. Written in the present tense, and published in 1964 exactly as written (according to Bishop),  there are the inevitable eerie presentiments, especially as JFK spoke fairly often about the possibility of assassination.

Hugh Sidey was the White House correspondent for TIME Magazine, and was granted a lot of access and time with JFK.  His book, he says in the preface, was supposed to be "the beginning of the story."  Instead when it was published, also in 1964, it became the first book about the entire Kennedy presidency.

President Kennedy was killed by an assassin's bullet on November 22, 1963.

 There were many memorial issues of newspapers and magazines (I still have several) and there were books that were quickly published like this one, compiled by UPI and American Heritage Magazine.  It is mostly photographs covering that indelible weekend from the murder in Dallas on Friday to the funeral and burial at Arlington on Monday.

The official investigation into the Kennedy assassination was headed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren.  The Warren Report, widely criticized over the years, was published in 1964.  My copy was a Christmas gift from my mother, which seems weirder now than it was then.

  Death of a President is a long and thorough historical account--more than 700 pages--published in 1967.  It is by historian William Manchester (his two volume set, The Glory and the Dream, has been my Bible on the Roosevelt 30s to 1972.)   Manchester had the cooperation of the Kennedys but Jacqueline Kennedy had strong second thoughts and tried to stop publication.  Deletion of a few paragraphs concerning the assassination was negotiated.  The book was an immediate best-seller but went out of print until 2013, which perhaps makes my crumpled second-hand paperback a rare book.  

These are the first definitive accounts of the Kennedy presidency by insiders who also were adept at objective research and were exceptional writers.   Kennedy by Ted Sorensen was published in 1965.  I wrote a long review of it published in the April 1966 issue of Dialogue, the Knox College magazine.  Arthur Schlesinger's A Thousand Days was published later in 1965, and won both a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize.  These are my well-worn, much-used paperbacks.

Then there were the personal memoirs, such as these two, written by Kennedy's secretary Evelyn Lincoln (published in 1965; paperback a year later) and another by Kenneth O'Donnell and Dave Powers, who had known and worked for JFK since he first ran for Congress.  To suggest the continuing fascination with JFK, this one wasn't published until 1972.

The 50th anniversary of the Kennedy administration was the occasion of another flood of books, including two unique volumes, both essentially transcripts of enclosed audio recordings.

 Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy (Hyperion 2012) presents mostly recordings from 1962 and 1963, after JFK installed a hidden taping system in the Oval Office, and took to recording phone conversations.  The technology was comparatively primitive, so transcripts are essential.  (The recordings themselves can also be heard over the Internet from the JFK Library.)

 There are also JFK's private dictations, all meant to create an historical record and probably to aid him in writing his memoirs.  Some of the recordings are stunning--as we hear General Curtis LeMay sounding like Gen. Buck Turgenson in Dr. Strangelove--as well as mundane and vaguely interesting, as in a brief presidential conversation with the teenage Jerry Brown at the end of a call with his father, California Governor Pat Brown.

 More impressive is the 2011 Hyperion volume of Jacqueline Kennedy's reminiscences with Arthur Schlesinger in 1964.  She speaks with clarity and insight about specific events and policies in their historical contexts as well as observations on family, personalities and her own role in the White House.

 Because she never spoke on the record about the White House years, which (her daughter Caroline recalls) she later called the happiest years of her life, her voice and to a great extent her role in that history has been overlooked.  Now it can be heard, in 7 CDs. Again, the recordings are online, as are many others in the Kennedy Library oral history project. Both volumes include forewords by Caroline Kennedy, who was instrumental in releasing these sound recordings and creating these volumes.

These are two of the many new histories published during the 50th anniversary. (I wrote about them in more detail here.)  Though Clarke's book is a straightforward history (making much use of information that has come to light in the past 50 years) and Jeff Greenfield's speculates on what JFK's second term might have been like, based on the same sort of information, they come to remarkably similar conclusions, especially about American participation in the Vietnam War, which both agree JFK would have ended by 1965.

History of My Reading: The Beginning Hour

Doug Wilson, 1969 Knox Yearbook

Freshman orientation at Knox College transitioned into the school year that late September of 1964 with choosing and registering first semester classes.  My academic advisor officially was Howard Wilson, head of the English department, but actually it was his younger colleague Douglas Wilson (no familial relation.)  I don't remember that first meeting, but I would soon get to know Mr. Wilson, take classes from him, babysit for him and socialize with him, plus drop in for many informal conversations in his Alumni Hall office.  We've kept up a scattered but longstanding correspondence over the years, the only such relationship that remains.

Sam Moon 1969 Yearbook

I recall registration as a noisy process of finding the correct folding tables where the appropriate class lists were, and filling out forms under bright lights, probably in the huge Knox gym.  I was registering for my English class when the student seated at the table recognized my name and told me to wait, Mr. Moon wanted to talk to me.

 At that point a thin man in a suit jacket, maybe tweed or corduroy, turned around and took me over to an empty table.  He sat across from me.  Sam Moon wore glasses that themselves might be described as "owlish."  But in fact I'd never met anyone who in all respects reminded me so much of an owl--a very kind owl.  I remember this moment and his face across the table as clearly as 54 years allow.

Sam Moon, probably in the 1950s

He wanted to talk to me because I was at Knox on the Scholastic Magazines Writing Awards Scholarship, and he was the de facto head of the writing program.  He wanted to assure me that even though I was there on a writing scholarship, I was under no obligation to take creative writing courses.  I said immediately that I wanted to, and he seemed delighted, but quietly.  I couldn't do so until sophomore year but he said if I wanted to show him anything I was writing this year, he'd be glad to talk to me about it.  It wasn't long before I took him up on his offer.

 But before going creative I was registered to explore academic writing.  One or another of the tests I took meant I skipped freshman English.  Instead I had what amounted to an independent studies course in which I was to research and write a long paper.  I had mixed feelings about this.  My classmates all seemed to be reading The Education of Henry Adams, which sounded interesting, but I was left out of their discussions.  Still, I had plenty to read, if nobody to talk to about it.  Prof. Davenport supervised me, but as I recall I met with him only a few times over the semester.

This was probably the third long or longish paper I'd ever written for which I'd chosen the topic.

The first was for a college prep course I'd taken the summer between my third and fourth years at the nearest public high school.  Hempfield High was just a few miles down West Newton Road. One of the attractions of taking the course was that I got to drive myself to it, in our very cool 1957 Chevy convertible.  Cool to look at but nerve-wracking to drive on narrow streets because it was so huge--the distance between the windshield and the headlights had to be five feet.

 I must have taken two courses that summer, though from the same teacher, because I recall one of them involved some acting improvs--it was probably a speech course.  The paper however was for Advanced Composition and involved research and reading.  It had the grandiose title of "Victorian England and the Organization Man," which was more of a journalistic-style teaser than an academic description.  All of Victorian England was represented by one author: John Stuart Mill.  The Organization Man represented contemporary America.

 I isolated one Mill idea--that the natural state of society is when "worldly power and moral influence are...exercised by the fittest persons whom the existing state of society affords."  (Darwin already!)  Mill didn't think Victorian England was in a natural state.  And I found plenty of writers who didn't think contemporary American society was either.  I quoted Mill that "the betters" in our society are " not their wisers, or their honesters, but their richers."

Why Mill? It's possible that I found a collection of Mill's work called Essays on Politics and Culture in the new nonfiction arrivals shelves I eagerly scanned on each visit to the Greensburg Public Library, since this edition, edited by Gertrude Himmelfarb, was no more than a year old.

  But it's also possible that Mill got favorable mention in Arthur Schlesinger's Politics of Hope, published the same year as my essay (1963.)  I know I found that volume among the new arrivals, and pounced on it because I knew of Schlesinger's role in the JFK White House.

  As for Mill, I quickly found his classic work, On Liberty. Including those three, there are 12 books in my bibliography, and they mirror the places I found books before college as I wrote about them in previous posts: six I found in the public library, three or four were on the shelves at home (including in Readers Digest condensed form), and a couple were paperbacks I found on the supermarket or tobacco store/news stand racks.

 The second paper earned me a brief moment of fame in my senior year of high school, the spring of 1964.  It was my final paper for Problems in Democracy class: a history of the first 100 days of the Kennedy administration.  It was 50 pages long. That's what made it famous--no one in my high school could even imagine a 50 page paper.  It was an instant if short-lived legend. ( Of course no one actually read it.  The teacher involved who spread the news of its length also complained about needing to read all those pages.  But she did bump my final grade up from a B to an A.)

The title of the paper was "The Beginning Hour," taken from the poem Robert Frost wrote for JFK's Inauguration but didn't deliver because his eyes were bedazzled by the sun and he couldn't read the pages. The lines extol "A golden age of poetry and power/Of which this noonday's the beginning hour." 

 The paper itself has disappeared but I do have some pages of draft plus a couple of handwritten page of footnotes, numbered 23 through 161.  It begins: "Inaugural morning in Washington was frigid."  This was one of the few sentences that didn't need a footnote: I'd been there.

 There were few books available (professional historians had not yet written on the subject) so most of my sources cited in this paper were periodicals, principally Time and Newsweek.  Once again, I owe this resource to speech club and debate.  That's why I had subscriptions to these and other magazines, why I knew about the periodical Vital Speeches, and had developed habits of capturing information on index cards, as well as hoarding the actual magazines.  I also quoted television documentaries and interviews, partly because I sent away for transcripts.  I used government documents, mostly from the library (including the Congressional Record) but again some I requested by mail.

I did have one book specifically on the subject.  Let Us Begin: The First 100 Days of the Kennedy Administration was not a narrative, however.  It was mostly photographs, with a half dozen essays by different authors.  Only two were directly about the actual happenings, and I mined these for facts.  (One essay--by Sidney Hyman and Martin Agronsky--is so interesting to re-read in light of subsequent events that it will be the subject of a separate post.)

 Other books cited tended to be about the presidency itself.  JFK had made the presidency a topic of popular interest, and so I could find paperbacks including Ordeal of Power, Emmet John Hughes' book on the Eisenhower presidency, Decision-Making in the White House by JFK's aide and speechwriter Ted Sorenson,  and especially Presidential Power by political scientist Richard Neustadt, a book that President Kennedy praised and used, as obviously Sorenson did.  Neustadt himself took time off from Columbia to be a Kennedy advisor during the transition from the Eisenhower administration.

My 1964 paperback

Even all these years later Neustadt's Presidential Power (in updated editions) remains a classic work on the presidency and is still taught in political science courses.  It explains both the sources of presidential power and its limitations.  It remains a key work to understanding the office, and therefore national politics in America.  Reading the surviving pages of my paper now I find the writing surprisingly good--better than most of the other high school and early college work that survives.  It's a well-organized historical narrative.

  Which brings me to my first semester freshman year paper for English 103 at Knox.  I submitted a first draft and a final draft. The only comment or critique I remember Prof. Davenport making on the first draft was that the paragraphs were too short.  I attempted to fatten them up, but the only comment I remember about the final draft was that the paragraphs were still too short.  I got an A-.

In any case, sometime that year I saw a notice in the Knox Student that a new faculty-student magazine called Dialogue was soliciting non-fiction manuscripts.  So I slipped my paper into the appropriate mailbox outside the bookstore at Alumni Hall.

 It appeared in the first issue of Dialogue, as "Affluence and Adolescents: The Emergence of the New Breed," in between reviews of Norbert Weiner's God and Golem, Inc. by my math prof Ron Hourston and a brilliant senior named Stephen Baylor, and Rowland K. Chase's Last Lecture on his production of Hamlet, which opened the new Center for the Fine Arts that first semester of 1964-5. That's why I still have a copy.

 (I'm not saying it was the only one, but the only discussion I recall having with classmates about my paper while I was working on it happened in one of the college dining rooms.  I was at a table shared by Barbara Cottral and a companion I judged to be her boyfriend.  I believe she and I shared the same academic advisor, which may be why we got talking.  Anyway when she asked me the subject of my paper and I said "affluence and adolescence" she and her friend looked at me with slightly startled expressions.  I had pronounced "AFF-luence" with emphasis on the first syllable.  Apparently the Iowa--or more broadly the Midwestern--pronunciation was "affLUence." I'm not sure if they were impressed or put off, but I felt it was both.  Which is probably why I remember it.)

In many ways, including the books cited (only 42 footnotes this time), my first college paper was a combination and extension of those previous two high school papers. There were important additions, however.

  On adolescents, the major sources were The Vanishing Adolescent by Edgar Z. Friedenberg, and  Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd (with its immortal sentence about how young people saw their future: "During my productive years I will spend eight hours a day doing what is no good." )

  Goodman's book was a best seller so I probably got it as a paperback, but I know for sure that's how I found The Vanishing Adolescent.  Though not as well remembered, it was a popular book at the time. I was more impressed by Friedenberg, and a few years later I heard him speak in what I recall as a large classroom at UC Berkeley, where I also saw and heard Tom Hayden.

first edition without dustcover, as it
would have been in the library, and
as I now own it

On the affluence theme, there was of course The Affluent Society by economist John Kenneth Galbraith. It was famous on its own, but I could also have come to it because of Galbraith's association with the Kennedy administration (he was JFK's ambassador to India.)

 The title entered the language, to be used in ways that had little to do with the book's thesis. It isn't about the evils of affluence, but about the inadequacy of economic theories and policies that don't recognize the marked differences between a society of scarcity and a society of abundance.

  Reading it today precisely 60 years after its first publication, its main point rings true, particularly in view of the same obsolete economics still favored by the Republican party, as well as related points on income inequality and the unmet needs in the public sector.  This book also gave us the perennially useful concept of "the conventional wisdom."

Another title that entered the language is The Organization Man by William H. Whyte, Jr.  It also is used to represent the era (as I did it in my Mill paper.) The book itself is a penetrating, carefully researched and well-written study of early suburbia and the large postwar organizations for which suburbia furnished the family homes.

 As such, when I reread it carefully years later, it became a key background text for me in my own researches and writings, particular for a 1980 article on suburbia that was a cover story in the New York Times Magazine, and more generally for my book The Malling of America.  When I met the author around that time, he was a kind and still curious and enthusiastic scholar who had mostly turned his attention to urban spaces, and was said to have been a mentor to Jane Jacobs and others.

But at the time of my freshman paper, the Organization Man was mostly another symbol of suburban conformity.  Providing something of a psychological counterpart to Whyte's more sociological view was David Riesman.  I got his paperback, Selected Essays from Individualism Reconsidered off the racks, which led me to his classic work (which I'd probably read about in the magazines), The Lonely Crowd.  The popular press particularly noted his concepts of "inner-directed" and "outer-directed" people in terms of where they got their values. Though neither book is cited in any of my papers, my reading and scattered understanding of them contributed to my impression of contemporary society.

Many of these books, as well as magazine articles, portrayed conformity and the repression of difference as endemic to the middle-class ethic.  Clearly my interest was in individual development and self-expression, especially my own. That's a thread that runs through all three papers, beginning with John Stuart Mill's championing of eccentricity.  ("Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded.")

 In that Mill paper I also quoted Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. from Politics of Hope noting that "contemporary society... has little use for the individualist" and asserting "Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself."

When Schlesinger became a JFK aide, his point of view became identified with the Kennedy era. Eric Goldman, in the opening essay of Let Us Begin, notes Schlesinger's view that with quantitative improvements largely achieved in the affluent society, attention "should turn to the 'qualitative' development of the individual."

 And of western "man," Barbara Ward concluded in her essay in this volume, "The fateful question remains whether, while gaining affluence, he may not have lost his vision and his soul."  (Barbara Ward, a distinguished scholar and editor, would in a few years take Buckminister Fuller's term "spaceship earth" as the title of her new book, and thereby help popularize the concept.)

 Looking back, I can see that the repression I recognized and was specifically rebelling against was not so much that of the upwardly mobile middle class organization man (I didn't actually know any.) Its source in my life was primarily the Catholic church and Catholic education at that time.  Still, I was accurately picking up this theme in my reading, and from my limited observations it rang true.

 I also absorbed some ill-informed and readymade judgments of, for example, "the beats" and rejected their "nihilistic" alternative to the Organization Man.  I latched instead on the concept of the New Breed (which I recognized as a "dubious" term) as developed by Andrew Greeley in the pages of America magazine.  It's worth noting that Greeley was a Jesuit, and this was a Jesuit magazine.  It still felt more secure to have some Catholic connection, if not imprimatur.

 Greeley's (and Friedenberg's) new breed of young people were both idealistic and pragmatic, valuing honesty and integrity, but also skill and effectiveness.  It was a reminiscent in some ways of younger versions of JFK, the "idealist without illusions." But more specifically it was based on the young Civil Rights activists, both black and white.  I would come to see these characteristics in some of the older students at Knox.  The New Breed, such as it was, now seems a distinctly early 60s model.

It was that first year at Knox that my connection with the Church became more tenuous.

I recall showing up for the Newman Club (an organization for Catholics) as one of my stops on the orientation tour of clubs and organizations, but I didn't join.  I continued to attend Sunday Mass in Galesburg, however. Until one winter Sunday the thread just broke.

 For some reason I saw a familiar sight with new eyes during that morning's Mass: that all the attendees kept their coats on during the service, as if their presence was partial, and they couldn't wait to leave.

 That evening I went to dinner in the Knox student union, where dozens of students had piled their coats on top of each other on the floor in the hall outside the dining rooms. That sight decided me. That's where I was going to find warmth and involvement, maybe even trust and intimacy, and along with books and studies and curiosity, where I might find meaning.

 For in addition to my solitary work on my English 103 paper, I had other classes with students and teachers that first semester, and a growing life outside classrooms, including for pretty much the first time, something like an actual social life.  I had this new world to explore, and I did. And along the way, I had new books to read.

Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program
 By David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek
MIT Press

 Forty-five years ago today, a human being first set foot on another world. Some 600 million people on Earth were watching and listening as Neil Armstrong descended to the surface of the Moon from the Apollo 11 lunar lander, saying (in words slightly obscured by static) "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

 Earlier in this 45th anniversary year, MIT Press published Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program by David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek. I liked everything about this book except the title, which suggests a conscious and coordinated campaign of hype and spin. The book's contents tell a different story. Though NASA and the major corporations involved in this titanic effort all had public relations and marketing people, NASA set the standard by insisting that the media be given full factual information. There was plenty of hoopla surrounding the astronauts in particular, but a lot of that was generated by media responding to the burst of public interest that caught everyone by surprise.

 As this book says (and other sources affirm), well into the 1950s the idea of rocketing humans into space was considered to be science fiction fantasy, believed only by children. The Eisenhower administration itself was skeptical, though the U.S. government was confident that its plans to send a satellite into orbit as part of the 1957-8 International Geophysical Year would be the first such endeavor.

 But early in the 50s, some magazine articles accompanied by dramatic cover art in Colliers plus the 3 Walt Disney programs beginning with "Man in Space" stirred some public interest. Then came the shock of Soviet space firsts--the first satellite (Sputnik), the first live animal, the first man and the first woman in Earth orbit. Humans in space was no longer a fantasy.

 After a few disasters (including at least one on live TV), the U.S. Army and Navy succeeded in getting satellites up. The civilian agency NASA was created, and suddenly the astronauts became heroic celebrities. After two sub-orbital flights, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. Shortly afterwards, President John F. Kennedy issued his famous challenge: to land a man on the Moon and return him safely before the end of the 1960s.

 After a string of successful one-person flights (the Mercury program) and two-person orbits mostly testing procedures and equipment for the moon shot (Gemini), the Apollo program began with an horrific tragedy: during a ground test, a fire aboard the crew capsule killed three astronauts, including the second American in space, Virgil Grissom. After months of reappraisal and redesign, Apollo flights began, and continued at a pretty rapid clip that kept the astronauts in the news and built to the moment of Apollo 11.

 But for the next 6 Apollo flights, public interest dropped gradually and then precipitously. "Few people alive on December 14, 1972, can tell you where they were on that day," this book notes. But it was the day that the last humans to ever go there left the moon. No one has been back since.

 This book continues examining the coverage and marketing efforts after Apollo 11 and speculates on why interest dropped so far so fast. Television coverage of the space program increased network news prestige--particularly CBS--but lost money, so after Armstrong it was cut back severely. Other factors are suggested, notably that the goal of landing an American on the moon was basically Cold War competition with the Soviets, and after Apollo 11, it was game over, the home team won.

 The authors also note how much else was going on to absorb public attention, and having lived through those years, that's certainly pertinent: the Vietnam war and associated actions in Southeast Asia, antiwar demonstrations, racial unrest, Kent State, the 1972 presidential campaign and the first Watergate stories were all happening between Apollo 11 and 17.

The book repeats the assertion that the rise of the environmental movement in those years--partly inspired not at all ironically by the now iconic views of Earth in space, and the "earthrise" photos from the moon taken by Apollo astronauts--diverted attention from out there.

All of that I recall as at least partially true.  But there was also the relentless pace of U.S. space flights. I saw them all on TV, from Explorer and Vanguard in 1958 through the Apollo shots more than a decade later. I don't think people were totally fixated on the winning the space race aspect, but nobody could sustain excitement and the same keen interest for all those events. Rockets to space were getting to be a regular thing.

 Also, NASA had apparently concentrated so hard on getting humans to the Moon that they didn't come up with much for them to do there that was interesting, such as scientific exploration and experiments that could be communicated in an involving and exciting way.

 This book does an admirable job of chronicling how NASA and the institutions involved got the information out, and how the media went about covering the stories. There was a marketing concern, since it was felt that public interest would encourage Congress to keep funding the space program, but there were also concerns to keep commercialism from tainting the patriotic effort, leading to a shifting dance on what corporations could and couldn't do to publicize their part of the space program. (Apart from major contractors, the winner on becoming identified with the astronauts was clearly Tang. If you were there, you know what I'm talking about.)

 This is a large format "coffee-table" book with lots of photos and sidebars. Written by two public relations professionals, it not only tells the public information story but features enough documentary information (including transcripts of key Apollo moments) to be a good resource on the space program itself. It seems to fulfill the NASA ideal of being as objective and complete as possible. Though this was supposedly the Mad Men era, and there was a circus aspect to events like the parades and tours, this book affirms that there really was a feeling of common purpose that permeated the space program and extended to the media. The story of humans in space, of humanity on the Moon, was so powerful and inspiring that it often overrode selfishness and spin.

 Today we know how many things went wrong as the Eagle was trying to land on July 20, 1969. But somehow it did land, and that moment inspires awe even today. Perhaps even more so, since such a voyage has returned to the realm of fantasy, only with better visual effects.

JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President
 by Thurston Clarke
 Penguin Press

If Kennedy Lived
by Jeff Greenfield
Putnam

There have been thousands of books published about the Kennedys over the years, and probably hundreds in this 50th anniversary year of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  Many of this year's focus on the assassination itself, with degrees of exploitation varying from a lot to obscene.  I didn't have much respect for Larry Sabato before he touted his book by claiming JFK's assassination was "inevitable," but I have less than none now.

Then again I've avoided reading books about JFK since the first biographies (with the recent exception of Alan Brinkley's short history.)  One of the benefits of reading Thurston Clarke's book now is that I have learned probably everything worth learning from previous reporting, especially as new documents, tapes and testimony surfaced or were released.

 Clarke makes good and careful use of what's been published over the years, by historians, journalists and a lot of participants in the Kennedy administration. He's used the archival material that's been gradually released by the Kennedy Library and other sources. He integrates the most credible of the revelations about JFK's dalliances and his medical history. So for someone who hasn't trusted much or read much about JFK in recent decades, this turned out to be the right book to read.

The book is structured as a day by day account of those last hundred days in 1963. Clarke's premises is that, even though JFK's own excesses always threatened to catch up with him, 1963 was the height of Kennedy's presidency, and probably the best year of his marriage and fatherhood. He was looked forward to running for his second term, and had found his main themes. On a speaking tour in the west ostensibly about conservation, he found that whenever he mentioned the nuclear test ban treaty and the need to end the arms race, he got a huge response. The pursuit of peace was going to be one major theme. The second was a national effort to address the problem of poverty. He'd proposed a tax cut and other measures to help the middle class and the economy in general, he was committed to civil rights (especially the voting rights act) but poverty was going to be a new focus.

 Clarke chronicles the painful dance that Vietnam policy had become, but he is certain--as most in the position to know were certain--that in his second term Kennedy intended to end American military involvement in Vietnam.

Frankly, none of this surprises me. There is much fascinating detail new to me in this book, but these particular points confirm what I've always believed, and so more than ever reinforce my feeling that America was and is a much different country because JFK was killed in 1963.  I was very young then but I was a close student of the Kennedy administration, and Clarke's case comports with what I knew and felt.  I'm glad this is one of the two books I decided to read as the 50th anniversary approached.  It is well written and reported, with passages of eloquence.

It is perhaps inevitable that in a story about someone who dies violently at a young age, the theme of anticipating early death and in this case assassination is pretty strong throughout the book.  I knew that JFK talked about how possible assassination was, but it was unsettling to read about an evening of charades when he pretended to be shot, and friends doused his head with ketchup.

The premise of  the second book --an alternative history titled  If Kennedy Lived by Jeff Greenfield-- is that Kennedy doesn't die in Dallas.  The difference between life and death is simple: the weather. On the morning of November 22, 1963 in Dallas, it rained. But by the time President Kennedy got in his car for his motorcade, the sun was shining. Greenfield's story begins with one small change: the rain continues. Because of the rain, the plexiglass bubble top is attached to the presidential limo, so it is no longer an open car. So when the motorcade slows down to make a turn off Dealy Plaza, a gunshot shatters the plexiglass and wounds the President. But he survives.

 In this story, President Kennedy is re-elected (beating Goldwater but by not as great a margin as LBJ did, which is what JFK expected.) Historically the assassination stopped a congressional investigation in its tracks that might have led to serious allegations against LBJ.  But when JFK lives in this telling, the investigation proceeds and LBJ is forced to resign.  JFK runs in 1964 with Missouri Senator Stuart Symington as his running mate.

Though both of these books record JFK's belief that LBJ would be a disaster as President, they disagree on who LBJ's replacement on the 1964 ticket might be.  Clarke notes a conversation JFK had with his secretary and confidant, Evelyn Lincoln, in which JFK said he was thinking about North Carolina governor Terry Sanford.

Though Greenfield make imaginative choices, his alternate history is based on real history.  Especially on the pre-11/22/63, it often match Clarke's book as well.  There are even a few pages based on recorded conversations that are virtually identical.  There are some sly passages in which familiar things are said but by a different person, or in a different context--a source of amusement for the politically attuned.  The writing is spotty, and there are too many awkward repetitions for so short a book.  But the alternate history is plausible.

 In Greenfield's telling, much of what Clarke's book suggests would have happened does happen. The voting rights act, medical care for the aged (Medicare) pass. JFK makes further agreements on nuclear arms with the Soviets as well as selling grain to them (and in the process keeps Khrushchev in power). He begins the process of resuming relations with Cuba, and relations with (Red) China.  And above all, he does not commit ground troops to Vietnam. There is no Vietnam war.

Clarke tells this story convincingly and cites the most recent scholarly opinion that JFK was preparing to end U.S. involvement in Vietnam after his reelection.  But where Greenfield's book is best is in suggesting the ramifications of the changes in policy.  No Vietnam war is the prime example.  Though much of what we call the 60s would still have happened, it would not have been so toxic and desperate.  There would still be student protest on other issues, and Students for a Democratic Society, but they would not be borne of such despair and desperation. Young people would join SDS and go South for Freedom Summer. But they would also join JFK's domestic Peace Corps, in droves.

Cultural changes--from the Beatles to Gloria Steinem, etc.--would still happen but would be understood in an unthreatened Kennedy White House.  The racial and income rifts that energized the extreme right, from inner cities to the new suburbs, were already happening, but Kennedy was starting to understood them.

Greenfield doesn't deal much with the ramifications of the draft calls that would not happen in the late sixties, but they are also a very important factor to those of us who were young men then.  Both of these books describe what I have felt since that day, and now can see in looking back: America changed, and my life certainly changed its course, fifty years ago on November 22, with ramifications from that day to this.  At least for the country and the world, the change was very much for the worse.

John F. Kennedy
By Alan Brinkley
Times Books

I turned 14 the summer Senator John F. Kennedy was nominated for President and I participated in my first political campaign. I had relatives I could visit in Washington to see the Inaugural parade in January, and by luck and pluck that weekend I was one of the first non-dignitaries to shake hands with the new President. So it isn’t surprising that I read the major books (and some minor ones) on JFK through the 1960s.  Then came the revisionists, the debunkers, the gossip-mongers, and I mostly passed on those, while being aware of their main points.

So I came to this relatively slim volume for a balanced view by a distinguished historian and biographer. It’s part of The American Presidents Series, co-edited by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the historian who was a White House aide to JFK and wrote his own long book on this presidency.  I assume he wouldn’t let serious errors pass.

Yes, Brinkley writes, JFK’s health was more precarious, and he was more of a womanizer than was known at the time. Brinkley handles such revisions fairly, though overall he seems so impatiently determined to demythologize JFK that it becomes harder to understand how Kennedy had such an impact on his times, or why he was so popular as President (and remains so.)  But mostly Brinkley’s narrative is factual. It lacks the detail to bring events to life, but most of the time it generalizes judiciously with the perspective of time and newer evidence.

It will probably amaze younger readers that so much of such importance and drama happened in such a brief presidency, including several foreign crises culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as economic, political and civil rights struggles at home. I caught only one implied factual error, but otherwise Brinkley’s interpretations of events may not be mine but they are at least plausible. (I’d certainly place more emphasis on JFK’s American University speech and subsequent championing of the limited nuclear test ban treaty.)

  On the question of whether JFK would have extracted the modest U.S. presence from Vietnam had he lived to be reelected, Brinkley is doubtful. But he doesn’t explain why he disagrees with the evidence to the contrary collected by government scholar James K. Galbraith, or the statements by Kennedy aides, including Schlesinger, that JFK was indeed planning to withdraw. Brinkley dismisses those who see JFK idealistically, oddly lumping them together with conspiracy theorists.

 Still, as a brief primer on the Kennedy presidency this book succeeds pretty well. I wouldn’t stop here, though. For all their omissions, longer and earlier books by the likes of Schlesinger and Ted Sorensen still give a fuller picture of JFK and his times.