COMING TO TERMS WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY

The author, a professor of national security affairs at the United States Naval War College, grew up revering Kennedy under the influence of his Irish-Catholic mother, but after working at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston for almost six years beginning in 1979, his “faith-based, ethnic allegiance” was replaced by a more intellectually scrupulous appraisal of the president, one unburdened by the fantasy of Camelot. Knott focuses his interpretation of Kennedy’s legacy on five key issues: his expansion of executive power, his support of the civil rights movement, and his foreign policy record with respect to Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam. In each case Knott argues that, despite Kennedy’s missteps and imperfections, he conducted himself with impressive intelligence, guided by moral precepts consistent with the nation’s founding principles. While one can criticize Kennedy for insufficiently backing the fledgling civil rights movement, partly out of fear of political backlash in the South, it is also true that he loathed segregation and ultimately submitted the “most comprehensive civil rights legislation [the Civil Rights Act of 1963] ever proposed by an American president.” Similarly, while the Bay of Pigs debacle was the “low point of his presidency,” the author asserts that his approach to Cuba was neither reckless nor timid, as detractors from either side of the political aisle have charged. Ultimately, Knott contends that, while Kennedy was not a president of the order of Abraham Lincoln, he was still a “near-great” one.

Knott’s accounting of Kennedy’s accomplishments includes a thoughtful discussion of the way in which he expanded executive power, contributing to the idea of an “imperial presidency” that elevates the office holder’s cult of personality. The author displays admirable skepticism regarding the conclusions he can draw regarding what Kennedy might have accomplished had he not been assassinated. On the president’s theoretical handling of the Vietnam War (had he lived longer), Knott concludes, “Kennedy’s public words, even the ones that support the thesis that he would have prevented Vietnam from becoming an American quagmire, which I now believe to be the case, must be read with caution.” While the author clearly holds Kennedy in high regard, he avoids the “myths of the idolaters,” as is evident when he takes him to task for the philandering Knott calls “reprehensible.” Knott’s treatment of the “assassination conspiracy complex” is less rigorous—while he debunks theories about a second shooter, he seems dismissive about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s “association with anti-Castro activists” and the possibility of his state sponsorship. Oswald defected to the Soviet Union and maintained deep ties to the regime, a fact that the author never mentions. While Knott’s analysis of Kennedy’s tenure as president is a welcome corrective to the more extreme partisan accounts available, he doesn’t break any new ground—although to be fair, originality is a high bar to clear given the exhaustive literature on the subject. Still, this is a sober and searching account of a complex president, and it’s manageably concise.