The top secret of the former U.S. President's we never know

This is a very good biography of JFK, focusing principally on his presidency. The author's, Robert Dallek obviously admires Kennedy, but that does not prevent him from being critical of his subject when he believes that the criticism is warranted.

Dalleck details Kennedy's extensive womanizing, both before and after he married Jackie, and which continued unabated during his presidency. Dalleck speculates that perhaps this compulsion resulted from the example that JFK's father had set and from Kennedy's fears about his own mortality because of his medical problems. Again, Dallek concludes that his womanizing did not distract Kennedy from the larger tasks that confronted him and so did not prevent him from being an effective president. 

Though many reporters and others knew or speculated about Kennedy's philandering, as quaint as it now seems, the press still believed that a president's private life was off limits. Dallek also points out that many of the journalists and editors who covered the Kennedy administration had extra-marital affairs of their own and so did not want to cast the first stone. Dalleck again assumes though, that no candidate with Kennedy's record in this department could be elected today. 

He also concedes that Kennedy came slowly to the cause of civil rights and tempered his actions by calculating the political consequences, which is hardly surprising. He also insists, though, that Kennedy learned from his mistakes and grew to be a better president as a result. Dallek gives Kennedy very high marks for his handling of the Cuban missile crisis, and reading his account one realizes how perilously close we came to the possibility of nuclear annihilation. 

Kennedy was determined to give diplomacy every chance to work, even against the advice of military figures and others who argued for an attack on the missile sites and an invasion of the island. Considering some of the trigger-happy people who have occupied the office since 1963, one reads these chapters and becomes enormously grateful for the fact that this crisis fell to JFK and not to some of his successors. 

Probably the greatest argument left from the Kennedy administration is the question of what JFK would have done with respect to Vietnam. Dallek covers in great detail Kennedy's handling of the problem and, based in part on new evidence, concludes that, had he lived, Kennedy almost certainly would not have enlarged the war. Dallek also concludes that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of the President. 

This book's is a rich of many information we never know, compelling book and may be the best biography of Kennedy that I ever have. Reading it, one can only regret that, even for all his faults, JFK did not live long enough to serve a second term as president.