The man who would be great

As the 50th anniversary this November of the assassination of John F Kennedy looms on the horizon, the debates over his legacy and presidency continue: a procession of "what ifs" and "might have beens," accompanied by contradictory arguments, and informed and not-so-informed speculation. Would Kennedy have avoided Lyndon B Johnson's tragic escalation of the war in Vietnam? Would he have found a way to propel his stalled tax-cut Bill and civil rights legislation through Congress and start a war on poverty, or was Johnson able to achieve these historic goals only through a combination of his bare-knuckled, tactical knowledge of Congress; his personal relationships on Capitol Hill; and his ability to use the momentum of sentiment generated by Kennedy's death?

Several schools of argument have arisen. The former Kennedy speechwriter Theodore C Sorensen and the aide Arthur M Schlesinger Jr focused on Kennedy's record and the promise of his vision, creating a sort of bildungsroman portrait of the president, as learning and growing on the job.

Debunkers like Garry Wills and Seymour M Hersh, by contrast, focused on the dark side of Camelot, suggesting that what they saw as Kennedy's moral shortcomings and recklessness endangered the nation. More judicious and substantive accounts have been provided by Richard Reeves (President Kennedy: Profile of Power) and Robert Dallek (An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963).

Mr Clarke contends that during that crucial period Kennedy was "finally beginning to realise his potential as a man and a president".

In Mr Clarke's view, two speeches the president gave in June 1963 - one proposing negotiations with Moscow to draft a nuclear test ban treaty, the other declaring that "race has no place in American life or law" - represented a turning point in his life, when he went from sailing with the winds of political expediency to embracing principle, as he described some of his heroes doing in "Profiles in Courage".

The idea of transformation is deeply appealing: we live in a culture that prizes reinvention and second acts. With John F Kennedy, however, it's difficult to make a case for dramatic change or to suggest that in June 1963 "he finally began to be more Irish than Harvard, governing from the heart as well as the head."

Kennedy's opinions, too, could appear to mutate swiftly, and could be read in numerous ways. Much of the debate over what Kennedy would have eventually done about Vietnam - find a way to extricate the US or listen to the same hardliners who would help persuade Johnson to escalate American involvement - stems from wildly divergent remarks he made on the subject. Mr Clarke says that Kennedy delivered a response to the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite in early September 1963 that was calculated to "prepare Americans for the possibility that the war might be unwinnable." In the final analysis, Kennedy said of the South Vietnamese government: "It is their war. They are the ones who have to win or lose it."

A week later, during an interview with David Brinkley and Chet Huntley of NBC News, Kennedy declared that he believed in the domino theory (which held that if South Vietnam fell, the rest of Southeast Asia would go Communist, too), then concluded: "I think we should stay. We should use our influence in as effective a way as we can, but we should not withdraw." Mr Clarke contends that this statement "bore no more resemblance to his real intentions than Roosevelt's pledge not to involve America in the Second World War did to his".

His book, however, lacks the granular detail and sober, appraising eye of Mr Dallek's volume. Too often, Mr Clarke seems to be cherry-picking details and anecdotes that support his overarching thesis - that Kennedy began to hit his stride in his last 100 days, starting to emerge as "a great president" - rather than assessing the historical record.

Mr Clarke focuses, speculatively, on what Kennedy planned to do, rather than on what he achieved, writing that, among other things, the president "intended to travel to Moscow for a summit meeting with Khrushchev; launch a secret dialogue with Castro; explore the possibility of establishing a relationship with China; withdraw a thousand advisers from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and remove more during 1964; settle the cold war; end the threat of a nuclear war; launch an attack on poverty; pass his tax cut, civil rights and immigration bills; preside over the most robust, full-employment economy in American history; and continue marrying poetry to power and inspiring the young".

Mr Clarke plays down, even dismisses, Johnson's extraordinary legislative mojo in getting Kennedy's stalled initiatives passed, making the debatable assertion that Kennedy "would have succeeded in getting a civil rights Bill through Congress, but perhaps not until after the election" of 1964. He also writes that the Great Society, Johnson's domestic legislative programme, "was largely a compendium of Kennedy's bills and initiatives".

Such efforts by Mr Clarke to inflate Kennedy's achievements distract from his actual accomplishments and influence, and they also make this intermittently interesting volume feel like a sentimental work of hagiography.

©2013 The New York Times News Service

JFK'S LAST HUNDRED DAYS
Thurston Clarke
The Penguin Press; 432 pages; $29.95