Kennedy-A Close-up View

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30953, 8 January 1966, Page 4

Kennedy-A Close-up View

Kennedy. By Theodore C. Sorensen. Hodder and Stoughton. 764 pp. Index.

More than two years have passed since the tragic death of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas but the flood of analyses, reminiscences and accounts of his brief presidency continues undiminished. No President, even Roosevelt, was so deeply mourned, particularly outside his own land; certainly none has been so written about, in tones ranging from the wildest praise to the most scurrilous abuse. Yet the definitive biography of Kennedy, and his tremendous impact on the American nation and the world, has still to be written. Mr Sorensen’s “Kennedy” is not that biography, but it is the kind of invaluable material which future biographers must draw on when time makes a more dispassionate perspective of Kennedy possible. No man outside his immediate family knew Kennedy so intimately as Ted Sorensen. His account of their working association which ripened into the closest friendship is both a personal tribute to that friendship and a remarkable addition to the vast literature of contemporary American polities. Mr Sorensen was only 24 when the newly-elected junior Democrat senator from Massachussets took him on his staff as a legislative assistant. That was in January 1953. This book is his account of Kennedy's political rise to world leadership in the next 11 years, and particularly of the last three in which Mr Sorensen served in the White House as Special Counsel to the President. It is an exuberant book — even though the gloom of the assassination is evident from the first pages. Mr Sorensen describes it as a substitute for the account of his White House term which Kennedy planned to write on his retirement. Kennedy, as Congress-

man, Senator and President, emerges as a man who thoroughly enjoyed the tremendous complexities of his chosen political career. As Mr Sorensen portrays him he is seldom downcast or annoyed, almost never so for long, and the author himself, peeping unobtrusively from the footnotes, seems often to have found the hurly-burly sheer good fun. However, as the President and his associates move to the White House the tone changes. Suddenly the great issues of the 20th century are all around them and almost immediately the Bay of Pigs incident in Cuba brings a grave international crisis. Since its publication in the United States, “Kennedy” has been roundly attacked and solidly defended for the account it gives of the “Cuban fiasco” and the missile crisis in Cuba 18 months later. Mr Sorensen has sought, on his own admission, neither to defend the President nor to shift the blame for his mistakes to others. What he has done, probably as accurately as it will ever be done, is to set down an account of these events through the eyes of the President, relating them as they appeared then, and offering a detailed account of what happened in the circle around the President: why the chief’•executive finally made the decisions he did. For readers more concerned with America’s impact on the world than with the details of its domestic politics these are easily the best parts of a very long book. Mr Sorensen has not sought to create sensations where there were none. Nor has he used his unique position to write a series of intimate revelations about a president who was the victim of more malicious talk, with less foundation, than any other in this century. Nevertheless, the whole book is itself a refutation of the more absurd charges which have been

made against Kennedy—whether they be that the president was a tool of the Vatican (or Moscow), or that his private life would not stand inspection. The young President emerges as the great world leader he appeared to be to those distant from him. The most striking personal “secret” which Mr Sorensen makes clear is that Kennedy’s health was often not good and throughout his political life he was in continual pain from an old wound in his back. Mr Sorensen has not sought to make a martyr of his subject, but there is a deep sympathy in his account of the man who frequently had to use crutches, but only in private, and who hardly dared lift his children or swing a baseball bat.

“Kennedy” is much more than a personal memoire or a series of extended anec dotes. The author has sought to portray as accurately as possible the Kennedy “style” in politics, at home and abroad. He has quoted extensively from some of Kennedy’s greatest speeches. Mr Sorensen played a major part in writing many of these and he is at pains to explain why certain passages were included. but he admits that at his best the President would depart from his prepared text, as he did when deeply moved by his tumultuous welcome in West Berlin. President Kennedy in fact emerges as a master at the new art of diplomacy by public speeches made by heads of State. In his exchanges with Khrushchev on Cuba and the nuclear test ban treaty, as in his preelection defence of his own religion, Kennedy was a speaker whose words were never mere rhetoric for the converted. They shaped policy, won over many opponents, and, on occasion, literally made history. Of the tragic death in Dallas Mr Sorensen, who was not present, says little, true to his own limitation that he would not write about matters where he had no personal experience. He accepts the guilt of Oswald as the killer, and the Warren Commission’s finding that no deep plot was involved. “No amount of argument or investigation can alter the fact that Jack Kennedy was assassinated. . . . We will never know what he might have been.” But thanks to Mr Sorensen we have the most detailed account yet of what Kennedy was, and what he did. Whether we are familiar with the President’s record or not, this book deserves to be read as a tribute to the man who “stood for excellence in an era of indifference, for hope in an era of doubt. . . . who had confidence in man. and gave men confidence in the future.”