Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero by Chris Matthews /Review

“What was he like?”Jack Kennedy said the reason people read biography is to answer that basic question. With the verve of a novelist, Chris Matthews gives us just that. We see this most beloved president in the company of friends. We see and feel him close-up, having fun and giving off that restlessness of his. We watch him navigate his life from privileged, rebellious youth to gutsy American president. We witness his bravery in war and selfless rescue of his PT boat crew. We watch JFK as a young politician learning to play hardball and watch him grow into the leader who averts a nuclear war.What was he like, this person whose own wife called him “that elusive, unforgettable man”? The Jack Kennedy you discover here wanted never to be alone, never to be bored. He loved courage, hated war, lived each day as if it were his last.Chris Matthews’s extraordinary biography is based on personal interviews with those closest to JFK, oral histories by top political aide Kenneth O’Donnell and others, documents from his years as a student at Choate, and notes from Jacqueline Kennedy’s first interview after Dallas. You’ll learn the origins of his inaugural call to “Ask what you can do for your country.” You’ll discover his role in the genesis of the Peace Corps, his stand on civil rights, his push to put a man on the moon, his ban on nuclear arms testing. You’ll get, more than ever before, to the root of the man, including the unsettling aspects of his personal life. As Matthews writes, “I found a fighting prince never free of pain, never far from trouble, never accepting the world he found, never wanting to be his father’s son. He was a far greater hero than he ever wished us to know.”

    History made him, this lonely, sick boy. His mother never loved him. History made Jack, this little boy reading history.  —Jacqueline Kennedy, November 29, 1963,

Hardcover: 496 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (November 1, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1451635087
ISBN-13: 978-1451635089
Biographies & Memoirs
Review

Chris Matthews has been telling his viewers how proud he is of his fraudulent book for months. But you only need look at one thing to understand the level of his plaguristic egomania. Matthews went on Jay Leno last week and talked about how he- Chris Matthrews- had discovered and dug out a previously unknown document at Choate School that proves where JFK got the "ask not what your country can do for you line." (To prove his hero thesis, he must discount the theory that Ted Sorenson wrote all the great lines). Matthews tells the story with the enthusiasm of a discover who has found the missing link, the holy grail, he has solved a presidential mystery of the ages. Of course he could have just read the New York Times from May 10, 2005, which reported the same thing, that would be five years ago. Hard to believe Matthews mysteriously found this document, that no one else had ever seen before him. That what he claims, of course. Here is what was published in the Times, five years ago: "The provenance of the speech's most famous words, the "ask not" portion, has a less inspiring history. The words hark back at least to Kennedy's years at Choate, the Connecticut prep school, where the headmaster regularly reminded his charges that what mattered most was "not what Choate does for you, but what you can do for Choate." So much for a new revelation!

JFK may have been an "elusive hero." Matthews is nothing but a self-promoting huckster and a phony, a combinaion that he endorsed in his last silly book, the one that Jon Stewart ridiculed. Afterwards Matthews said Stewart was "jealous of me." Right.