Description:
John Kennedy's presidency has taken a beating in the historical literature of the past few years, in what Lawrence Freedman wryly calls "the drive to replace history as celebration by history as indictment." Kennedy's performance was, Freedman holds, mixed at best, but it reveals a complex personality and an equally complex set of viewpoints over how the United States could best maintain its role as world leader and contain communism. Drawing on a wealth of new material--including a 25-volume official documentary history of U.S. foreign relations under Kennedy and declassified transcripts of Cabinet meetings held during the Cuban missile crisis--Freedman examines the intellectual and political contexts of the Kennedy administration, giving attention to largely overlooked actors such as Dean Acheson, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Theodore Sorensen, and Walt Rostow, all of whom influenced the conduct of the administration as it confronted military and political foes around the world. Freedman scrutinizes Kennedy's efforts to stabilize fledgling democracies and thwart communist designs in Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Some of those efforts led to disaster, including Kennedy's misguided actions in Vietnam (which, the author argues, "compounded the folly of the Eisenhower administration"). Still, by the time of Kennedy's death, in November 1963, some of the administration's efforts had paid off. As Freedman notes, in October 1963, Nikita Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy to propose not only a program of arms control, but also a relaxation of tensions over the Soviet encirclement of Berlin, opening the way to the détente that would come only much later. --Gregory McNamee
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