John F Kennedy: An Unfinished Life and JFK: Remembering Jack

Both reviewed by JULIE MIDDLETON

John F Kennedy: An Unfinished Life.

By Robert Dallek

Allen Lane (an imprint of Penguin), $49.95


JFK: Remembering Jack,

By Christophe Loviny and Vincent Touze,

Chronicle Books (distributed by Southern Publishers Group), $29.95.


Before tackling the latest Kennedy biography, published in time for tomorrow's 40th anniversary of the assassination, I conducted a highly unscientific experiment, asking under-40s what they knew about him.

Responses ran mostly like this: he was a president of the United States, married to Jackie, fantastically wealthy but tragic family, had a presidential term which included the Cuban missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Then he was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald.

The headings were all there, but not the context.

An attractive small-format hardback, JFK: Remembering Jack, allows novices to get to grips with his life through an easily-digestible once-over-lightly account, rarely-seen public and private pictures, and a CD recording of the memorable sound bites.

These include the announcement of his presidential candidacy, the oath of office, the inaugural address of course, and speeches about civil rights, the space race, and at the Berlin Wall.

His voice is strangely inflectionless as it delivers the lines so often quoted since.

The package offers a fascinating social history. Among the tracks is the 1960 campaign jingle designed to appease those who viewed the candidate, then 43, as too green for the job. Jaunty voices backed by brass sing of, " ... a man who's old enough to know and young enough to do ... "

The CD also includes a radio broadcast of the moments in Dallas, Texas, where the President lost his life. The neutral voice of the announcer becomes suddenly breathless and rises several notches: "It ... it," he gulps, "it appears as though something has happened in the motorcade route. There's numerous people running up the hill alongside Elm St ...

"Several police officers are rushing up the hill. Stand by. Something has happened."

And later, another male voice, this one sombre and funereally slow: "The President of the United States is dead. I have just talked to Father Oscar Hubert of the Holy Trinity Catholic Church. He and another priest tell me the pair of men have just administered the last rites of the Catholic Church to President Kennedy.

"Women here in shock, some have fainted. Secret service men standing by the emergency room, tears streaming down their face ... "

Even 40 years on, it brings a chill to the spine.

The image John Fitzgerald Kennedy nurtured was one of fitness, vitality and honesty with the public.

Beneath the veneer, he was racked by debilitating pain and illness, which he and aides kept concealed.

Kennedy had Addison's disease, an adrenal gland disorder which results in a deficiency of the hormones needed to regulate blood sugar, sodium and potassium, and the stress response, leading to anaemia and weakness.

For John F Kennedy: An Unfinished Life, Boston University history professor Robert Dallek convinced the Kennedy Library and other sources to release hitherto closed archives that flesh out the health story.

Dallek's fluid, 711-page account of how the illness dogged Kennedy from childhood, and how he and aides concealed its extent.

Kennedy, says Dallek, was certain that disclosure would block him from the top job.

Family wealth, status and connections gave him the tools to keep his secret and the media were complicit in the cover-ups.

The public certainly didn't know, as Kennedy campaigned his way up the political ladder, that he got into the Navy under false pretences. He was rejected as unfit for service because of his intestinal and back problems, but millionaire father Joe ensured he got in anyway.

By the time he became President, says Dallek, Kennedy's problems included intestinal and digestive disorders, Addison's disease, and prostate problems.

The drugs - among them steroids - and hormones Kennedy took to combat Addison's are thought to be linked to his osteoporosis and degeneration of the lumbar spine.

His use of prescribed amphetamines, sleeping pills, testosterone, Ritalin (for night rest) and painkillers, among other things, was frequent.

The book also covers already well-traversed events of Kennedy's political career, from the Bay of Pigs fiasco to the Cuban missile crisis.

Much ink has been spent on Kennedy's extramarital affairs which, to Dallek, say little if anything about his presidential performance.

But Dallek does reveal, thanks to the unsealing of an oral history by a former White house aide, that Kennedy, like Bill Clinton a generation later, had an ingenue intern with whom he had a lengthy affair.

The book accords just a few lines to the unnamed woman, described as a tall, slender, beautiful 19-year-old college student who worked in the presidential press office over two summers.

She often travelled with him, which was just as well. "She had no skills," says a former member of the press corps quoted by Dallek. "She couldn't type." A New York tabloid identified the woman in May.

According to Dallek, 75 historians and journalists nominated Kennedy in 1988 as the most overrated pubic figure in American history.

Dallek himself is even-handed in his assessment. He says Kennedy left no notable marks as a congressman or senator. Had he not become President, it is doubtful that biographers, historians and the mass public would have taken much interest.

Kennedy's presidency, he says, is better understood as a patchwork of stumbles and significant achievements.

As for the medical problems, Dallek decides Kennedy "courageously surmounted physical suffering" and concludes that they did not significantly undermine his performance.