JFK: Reckless Youth

"Right. Hamilton – I disagree with him much more than I agree with him. This book is very much a book about a father and a son. The father is painted as the bad guy, and the son is the good guy, struggling to break free. I don’t accept that interpretation, or that framework of analysis. Nonetheless, Hamilton writes with a verve, an electricity, a passion, that’s rare among academic historians. As a researcher, he’s extraordinary. He did everything: he read every newspaper clip and every magazine article; he interviewed everybody he could possibly find, and read the interviews that other people had done. He’s put together a remarkable portrait of young JFK, and I think that portrait will stand. You see this most unlikely of men develop, this incredible transformation take place. Nigel and I agree that Jack Kennedy always had political ambitions; if he backed off a bit, it was because his older brother was first in line. But I think he believed, and certainly his father believed, that, just like the La Follettes had been senator and governor of Wisconsin, so the Kennedy brothers could both have high positions in politics. The reason Jack was not thought of as presidential material early on was that his health was so bad; nobody in the family thought he had the endurance to run a campaign. But when you see the way this young man develops – when you see him going from being unkempt, badly dressed, undisciplined, always late, a man who would much prefer to stay at home reading a history book than go shaking hands… When you see him become the most unlikely of war heroes – a war hero who didn’t want to be known as a war hero – and then a candidate… It’s an extraordinary story, and extraordinarily well told by Hamilton. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . That’s a great question. I don’t know. Hamilton had written a book about Montgomery before this one, and I think it gave him a fresh view and a new view on Kennedy, coming from the other side of the Atlantic. He admired Jack Kennedy no end, but I think he had a certain advantage in coming at much of this in a way that was different and perhaps more fresh than his approach might have been had he grown up an American during the Kennedy presidency. I don’t think so. I think there are advantages both ways, and I would hope that my background and my understanding of U.S. history , as a historian, are going to stand me well. And also my ‘ethics’ as a historian, if I can use a horrible word. I don’t think that any historian can be objective, but I think historians have to be fair, and they have to look at all the material out there. I think that approach will stand me well, whether I’m writing about an American or a Hungarian. I think Nigel and I disagree a little bit on this. I think he regards biography as almost a separate genre. I don’t. I am a historian, and, at least with the last couple of books I’ve written, I choose to write history from the vantage point or from the perspective of an individual. As a historian, I believe that no individual is, in and of himself or herself, a fit subject. The individual is only used as a perspective, a way to illuminate a larger truth. This is true of many great biographies. Bob Caro’s biographies of Johnson are about the accumulation and use of political power; David Levering Lewis’s books about Du Bois are about race in America. I hope my biography about Carnegie is about the role of the entrepreneur in the Industrial Revolution, and my book about Hearst is about the coming to power and prominence of the mass media. So again, I regard myself as a historian who, this time around, is writing a biography. Some time ago, the American Historical Revue did a symposium on historians writing biographies. In the beginning, I refused to take part in it, because I didn’t think I needed to defend writing biography. In the end, I decided to write the introduction to the thing. In it I said that, as a historian, I’m not interested in telling a birth-to-death story – that’s not my intent. I want to use this person’s life to talk about something else. I said that, if you look at great biographies by historians, they don’t begin, ‘X was born at such-and-such a time’, and they don’t end, ‘X died at such-and-such a time’. I think that biography is a credible and an extraordinarily useful form of history writing. And I bow to no one when I write my biographies; I am as rigorous and scrupulous with my sources as when I write something else. You know, it’s not fair – there are a lot of bad biographies written. There are a lot of bad books in other forms. And you can’t use Kitty Kelley to blame or to condemn this whole form of historical writing."