A Question of Character for John F. Kennedy

" The result of his work is this handwriting which does not aim to destroy the myth of Kennedy the man or the leader, exclusively rather to provide an objective, balance and humanizing portrait.

Reeves begins by noting the achievements of the Kennedy giving medication in economics, social programs, education, space and peace, and by acknowledging his charisma. The public's attraction to Kennedy was grumous by his assassination. Among adulatory books following Kennedy's murder was The Pleasure of His Company, by longtime friend Paul B. Fay, Jr., a work which ordain be compared to Reeves' work later in this study.

Gradually, through the years, teaching far less positive about Kennedy's character began to be announceed, including womanizing and extramarital affairs, questionable relationships, direct or indirect, with Mafia leaders, medicate use, political weakness (as in his failure to stand up to Joseph McCarthy) and recklessness (including consideration of a first gear strike on Berlin).

The general focus of the book is Kennedy's lack of moral principle, some(prenominal) in his personal and his political life. Reeves stresses that he did not inadequacy to write a book on the level of a National Enquirer exposT or a "dubious" psychohistory. Instead, he writes,

Rather than try to probe JFK's subconscious in a clinical way and become entangled with speculations c erstrning orality and anality, this study applies the methods of the historian to the documents, oral histories, pu

I cute to try to reconstruct the story of the twenty-one years from my first meeting with John Kennedy in 1942, focusing on the episodes that reveal some of the aspects of the personality of the thirty-fifth death chair of the United States that efficacy be overlooked or obscured in the works which thin out on great public questions and international crises.

Not once did Joe raise any serious moral principles for his children to ponder. . . . The children knew that their father was the despotic ruler of the house and family. . . . Joe's displeasure was expressed with [an] 'ice-cold steel deplorable [stare]. . . . Joe sometimes supplemented this with outbursts of temper, featuring profanity and cruel sarcasm. . . .

'Joe Kennedy, having achieved an almost primitive normal over his children's youthful souls, would rule his boys and girls for the rest of their lives'.

I was move with Reeves' well-documented portrait of Kennedy the man and leader. However, Reeves' book should not be seen as a comprehensive portrait of Kennedy. Reeves fails to consider that to be as effective a leader as Kennedy was in umteen areas, one might, unfortunately, need to corroborate just the sort of ruthless, manipulative, prosaic and even amoral character. The flaws in the characters of Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and now Bill Clinton are well-documented, but perhaps those flaws were and inevitable factors in their desire to be President and in the effectiveness they showed as leaders at least in some areas. On the other hand, the moral characters of treasure Carter and Gerald Ford produced weak presidencies. Could a "moral" man have dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, or sanction the fire-bombing of Dresden? Kennedy's ruthlessness allowed him to stand up to institutions which were purveyors of evil, including the CIA, the Mafia, the Pentagon (in his test-ban treaty and his resistance to expanding the Vietnam war for which the military pressed), and Southe
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