PRESIDENTIAL STUMBLES AND SUCCESSES

An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek.

According to pollsters, the public rates John Fitzgerald Kennedy among the top three American presidents. Few historians would agree, and debunking biographies regularly appear. The latest biography, Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life, offers a sympathetic, though not uncritical, account of its subject. An excellent historian and a renowned biographer of Lyndon Johnson, Dallek tells a familiar story that lacks grand themes or much in the way of new interpretation. But he knows how to write a compelling narrative, and the fresh detail he has mined from recently available sources more than justifies this project.

Kennedy, it turns out, was very sick most of his life, a fact that he and his family carefully concealed. In 1937, after his junior year at Choate, he spent a month at the Mayo Clinic, suffering medical tortures that eventually revealed life-threatening colitis. Dallek suggests that Kennedy’s doctors may have prescribed steroids to relieve the colitis ‘but at the possible price of stomach, back, and adrenal problems.” In 1944 Kennedy had his first back surgery. In 1947 he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, a condition of the adrenal glands. He also suffered from chronic and painful prostatitis, which may have resulted from “a possible sexual encounter in college,” Dallek’s rather oblique reference to the gonorrhea-like venereal disease that plagued Kennedy till his death. By the 1950s he was taking cortisone, antibiotics, procaine to relieve back pain, antispasmotics, testosterone for his weight and Nembutal to help him sleep. When Kennedy’s bag of medicines temporarily got lost in Connecticut during the 1960 presidential campaign, the candidate feared that if it fell into the wrong hands the cover-up of his bad health would unravel, along with his election chances.

On the obligatory subject of Kennedy’s ‘compulsive womanizing” Dallek’s none too successfully to find reasons. He offers the example of Kennedy’s father, his satisfaction in outdoing his brother Joe, his sense of entitlement ‘as a member of possible nuclear doom as rationales for his self-indulgence in the White House. And, of course, there was his health. Forced to withdraw from college because his white blood count was sinking, Jack wrote his friend Lem Billings, “Took a peak (sic) at my chart yesterday and could see they were mentally measuring me for a coffin. Eat, drink & make Olive (his current girlfriend), as tomorrow or next week we attend my funeral’. Dallek quotes another historian who claimed that playing tennis took more of Kennedy’s time than sex.

In the chapters on Kennedy’s presidency, Dallek is less Concorde which personality and character than with policy, especially foreign policy. “I mean, who gives a (expletive) if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25…?” Kennedy once asked. Dallek praises the Kennedy who resisted the hawks and reproves the Kennedy who was a hawk himself. There was, for example, the matter of Vietnam. Dallek believes that American involvement in the war was a mistake. Kennedy had his doubts, too. In 1961 the president resisted advice that he commit combat troops to the struggle against the Viet Cong, but believing that the stakes were real, he sent military advisers instead. As a result, he found himself in a war he would not admit and couldn’t win. In early 1963 the CIA reported that “the war remains a slowly escalating stalemate.” By then Kennedy was groping for ways to disengage but dared not risk the domestic political consequences.

In May 1963 South Vietnamese president Ngo Diem initiated a confrontation with Buddhist monks that raised serious questions about the viability of his regime. A bitter debate ensured between those of the president’s advisers who wanted to encourage a coup by dissident generals in Saigon and those who did not. Vacillating, Kennedy signaled the plotters in August to proceed but tried to slow them down in late October. He was too late. When he received word on November 2 that Diem and his brother had been murdered, “he leaped to his feet and rushed from the room,” recalled Gen. Maxwell Taylor, “with a look of shock and dismay on his face”.

On civil rights, the preeminent domestic issue of his presidency, Kennedy, says Dallek, was a “temporizer”. Through 1961 and 1962, he refused to risk his political capital or provide moral leadership to meet rising demands for racial justice, preferring cautious executive action. Fear of violence changed his mind. During the spring of 1963 bombs and a ghetto riot attended Martin Luther King’s campaign in Birmingham, and a survey of other Southern cities suggested imminent race war. On June 13, the day his government forced Alabama Gov. George Wallace to admit two black students to the state university, Kennedy finally made the moral case for civil rights bill. “There comes a time when a man must make a stand,” he privately remarked.

But Kennedy continued to temporize. Fearful of white resistance, congressional reluctance and Southern white defections in the 1964 elections, he was prepared to compromise away much of his own bill. Dallek believes that if Kennedy had proposed a civil rights bill in 1961 and made passage of the whole bill a moral imperative in 1963, he might very well have prevailed. As it happened, Lyndon Johnson was the president who refused to temporize and saved the bill.

Dallek concludes that Kennedy’s performance was “a patchwork of stumbles and significant achievements.” The Kennedy presidency, he says, “spoke to the country’s better angels, inspired visions of a less nation and world, and demonstrated that America was still the last best hope of mankind.”

Though much in his book undermines this cheerful conclusion, scholars and the wider public alike will appreciate Dallek’s vivid portrait.

THE NEW EUROPE

SOME WOULD SAY that the "new" Europe the one coalescing in the aftermath of the Cold War - is really an old Europe reborn. It fulfills the geographer's definition of the continent as the landmass between the Atlantic Ocean and the Ural Mountains in Russia; it includes nations that last appeared on maps more than a generation ago; it recognizes ethnic nationalities with roots planted deep in the past. It also incorporates the dream of a Europe united that has tantalized rulers from Charlemagne to the leaders of today.

Anchoring the continent is a core of 12 nations - the European Community (EC), whose members have been moving toward integration since World War II. Today, despite misgivings over a comprehensive union proposed by EC leaders, these countries are poised to join in a single market with free movement of goods, services, and people. Orbiting the EC are seven nations of the European Free Trade Association. They enjoy trading privileges denied so far to the impoverished countries of Eastern Europe, which have emerged from the long shadow of the Soviet Union but find themselves stalled at the fringes of the European economy. In between are Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland, former communist states that are reshaping their economies in anticipation of gaining EC associate status. As this new Europe strives toward a historic unity, it reverberates, with echoes from centuries past.

POPULATION

UROPE CONTAINS 684 million people-an average of nearly 170 people per square mile, more than twice the population density of the United States. Accordingly, the continent has become mostly urbanized: Three out of four Europeans live in cities or towns, and nearly every acre of land has been parceled out for human use or habitation. There is, however, wide fluctuation: in Belgium, the most urban nation in Europe, 95 percent of people live in cities, compared with only 33 percent in Portugal.

Concentrations are heaviest in the prosperous nations of Western Europe, where better health care has lowered infant mortality and pushed life expectancy toward 80 years.

Yet population growth has tapered off since the postwar baby boom and is expected to average about one percent a year till the end of the century. The highest growth rates are now found along the periphery of the continent, in such disparate countries as Albania and Ireland.

IMMIGRATION

HE TRICKLE of newcomers to Europe that began after World War II has become one of history's great floods - Algerians moving to France; Turks to Germany; Iranians to Sweden; Pakistanis, Nigerians, and Jamaicans to the United Kingdom; Indonesians to the Netherlands; Moroccans to Belgium. Most came to find work, while others were part of the so-called "silent invasion" of refugees seeking political asylum, mainly from conflict-ridden developing nations.

Today Europe is home to millions of non-Europeans who are classified as immigrants, guest workers, or asylum seekers. Germany, with almost six million foreigners on its books, is Europe's leading host, followed by France (nearly four million), Italy, and Switzerland (each with one million).

In most nations of Western Europe, where the labor pool is shrinking, these people fill an important niche, providing unskilled labour at low wages and boosting productivity. Yet the immigrants, many of them Muslims, often live as strangers in their adopted land and are easy scapegoats for critics who protest the cost of social services, crime, loss of jobs to immigrants, or the impact of things foreign on the fabric of their country.

All this tests Europe's traditional openness to newcomers. It also has led to much soul-searching within the European Community, which intends to eliminate border controls among its member nations on January 1, 1993 -meaning that immigrants, theoretically, could move unfettered from one EC country to another.

POPULATION SHIFTS

ORE THAN 12 million displaced persons were scattered across the face of the continent at the end of World War II. With the cold war division of Europe another 16 million of people - ethnic Germans called Volksdeutsche - were expelled from the Soviet bloc to the West. The rebuilding of postwar Europe began a trend that continues today as laborers from poorer regions - primarily around the Mediterranean Sea -seek work in the more industrialized north.

In recent months 2.5 m refugees have fled their homes in the war-torn republics of the former Yugoslavia.

LANGUAGES

PREAD BY conquest and trade, the most widely spoken languages of Europe are thought to derive from a single parent tongue, proto-Indo-European, which probably originated in what is now southern Ukraine. Among its offspring are the Latin-derived Romance languages spoken by 185 million Europeans, including the French, Spaniards, and Italians; the Germanic languages (German, English, Dutch, Swedish, Yiddish, and others) spoken by nearly 200 million; and the Slavic languages spoken by some 227 million, including Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks. Unrelated languages are spoken by a small number of Europeans, including the Estonians, Finns, Hungarians, and Lapps.

With such diversity, it is now surprising that European languages have fostered national consciousness and worked against European unity - the EC itself has nine official languages. English is more frequently spoken by West Europeans (many of whom speak two or more languages) than in German, a tongue that travels widely throughout Eastern Europe.

From National Geographic

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 728