JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President
Do President Kennedy’s final 100 days offer hints about what sort of leader (and man) he might have become? Author-historian Clarke thinks they do. The period began in tragedy: the death of the Kennedys’ two-day-old son, Patrick. Both parents were devastated; Jack’s concern for Jackie, who had suffered postpartum depression after John’s birth, seems to have led him to a serious effort to be a better husband and father. Certainly, Jackie seems to have discerned a genuine improvement that autumn. Clarke vividly portrays the welter of issues a U.S. president juggles. In foreign policy, the test-ban treaty, Vietnam, and Cuba were central, but Kennedy also aimed to reframe long-term relationships with the USSR, China, Europe, and Latin America. On the home front, civil rights was clearly dominant, but, during these days, Kennedy was pressing Congress to pass the “stimulus tax cut” and immigration reform as well as the civil rights bill and working with advisors and cabinet members on what would become Medicare and the War on Poverty. A fascinating analysis of what was . . . and what might have been. --Mary Carroll