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John F. Kennedy
Contributor(s): Brinkley, Alan (Author), Schlesinger, Arthur M. (Editor), Wilentz, Sean (Editor)
ISBN: 0805083499     ISBN-13: 9780805083491
Publisher: Times Books
OUR PRICE:   $30.60  
Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats
Published: May 2012
Qty:
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Presidents & Heads Of State
- History | United States - 20th Century
Dewey: B
LCCN: 2011043747
Series: American Presidents (Times)
Physical Information: 1.1" H x 5.8" W x 8.6" (0.90 lbs) 224 pages
Themes:
- Chronological Period - 20th Century
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:

The young president who brought vigor and glamour to the White House while he confronted cold war crises abroad and calls for social change at home

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a new kind of president. He redefined how Americans came to see the nation's chief executive. He was forty-three when he was inaugurated in 1961--the youngest man ever elected to the office--and he personified what he called the New Frontier as the United States entered the 1960s.

But as Alan Brinkley shows in this incisive and lively assessment, the reality of Kennedy's achievements was much more complex than the legend. His brief presidency encountered significant failures--among them the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which cast its shadow on nearly every national-security decision that followed. But Kennedy also had successes, among them the Cuban Missile Crisis and his belated but powerful stand against segregation.

Kennedy seemed to live on a knife's edge, moving from one crisis to another--Cuba, Laos, Berlin, Vietnam, Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. His controversial public life mirrored his hidden private life. He took risks that would seem reckless and even foolhardy when they emerged from secrecy years later.

Kennedy's life, and his violent and sudden death, reshaped our view of the presidency. Brinkley gives us a full picture of the man, his times, and his enduring legacy.


Contributor Bio(s): Wilentz, Sean: - Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton University, is the author or editor of several books, including Chants Democratic and The Rise of American Democracy. He has also written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and other publications. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.Brinkley, Alan: - Alan Brinkley (1949-2019) is the author of The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is also the author of Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression, which won the National Book Award, and The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. He was the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University and also taught at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge. He lived in New York City.Schlesinger, Arthur M.: - Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., (1917-2007) was the preeminent political historian of our time. For more than half a century, he was a cornerstone figure in the intellectual life of the nation and a fixture on the political scene. He won two Pulitzer prizes for The Age of Jackson (1946) and A Thousand Days (1966), and in 1988 received the National Humanities Medal. He published the first volume of his autobiography, A Life in the Twentieth Century, in 2000.