John F. Kennedy
Dallek redacts his massive An Unfinished Life (2003) for this entry in Oxford’s brief-life series on U.S. presidents, a just-the-facts-ma’am offering that doesn’t mention such disputed matters as the career of PT-109 and barely notes JFK’s now notorious womanizing. It does unfold a bit about Kennedy’s chronic ill health, but not so much as to upset its stated aim of answering the question of why a president who served less than three years is perennially highly ranked by the U.S. citizenry. And that answer is that Kennedy, despite blundering with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and temporizing about using federal force to protect African Americans’ civil rights, handled the 1962 Cuban missile crisis with aplomb, initiated nuclear-arms-control negotiations, and compiled the reform agenda of civil rights measures, Medicare, federal aid to education, tax cuts, and antipoverty programs that Lyndon Johnson subsequently pushed through Congress—and don’t forget who started the Peace Corps. In short, Kennedy “spoke to the country’s better angels.” --Ray Olson