Volume 5, Number 11 · January 6, 1966
Monuments to Kennedy
By Hans J. Morgenthau
A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Houghton Mifflin, 1097 pp., $9.00
Kennedy
by Theodore C. Sorensen
Harper & Row, 783 pp., $10.00
When I met John F. Kennedy in 1956, at a symposium sponsored by the American Friends of Vietnam, I tried to size up the man and was baffled. What, if anything, I wondered, was behind that bland, slick, polished façade, with words and gestures moving with almost mechanical precision? Fate has allowed history to answer that question only in part. There was indeed something of substance behind the façade. But what was it? Messrs. Schlesinger and Sorensen say it was greatness, and their books are monuments to it. However, it is a greatness assumed but not proven. I am not saying that Kennedy could not have become a great President if fate had allowed him to test his inner resources against a series of momentous challenges. I am saying only that the record is inconclusive. The record was not without promise. That promise rested on three qualities of which these books provide abundant evidence.
Review, 2542 words
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