“What was he like?” John F. Kennedy once said that was the reason for reading a biography, and it is the question Hardball host Chris Matthews tried to answer in his biography of our 35th president, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero.
To answer that big question, Matthews relies on accounts from Kennedy’s confidants, the so-called “Irish Mafia” of campaign staffers and, later, presidential advisors. They provide a new perspective that documents and speeches cannot.
Matthews is a huge Kennedy fan; he told Stephen Colbert that he wanted to show a new generation that “we once had a hero for a president.” Indeed, Matthews recounts Kennedy’s many heroic moments, such as the PT-109 rescue and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In addition, he adds to the traditional narrative by describing some of Kennedy’s behind-the-scenes trials, such as his struggle with Addison’s Disease.
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However, a good biography can’t be all hero worship; it’s hard to know what a person was really like without knowing their faults. Some of the book is a little mawkish; the passages describing JFK’s youthful misadventures at Choate Rosemary Hall sound like they were written by his mother.
Matthews ultimately avoids the trap of hero-worship, however. He claims that Kennedy viewed many members of his staff as disposable, and was often distant from Jackie, showing that the man was not perfect.
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In fact, Matthews may have gone into too much detail. He spends a lot of time explaining Kennedy’s rise to political prominence, how he went door-to-door campaigning for the House of Representatives in 1946, or how he called on influential Democrats to collect delegates in the 1960 presidential primary.
That’s all very interesting, but it would have been nice to see that amount of detail applied to Kennedy’s presidency. Matthews’ narrative seems to unfold in real time, with longer events getting more paragraphs, but that might not have been the best approach. The bulk of the book is about elections; in comparison, the section on the Cuban Missile Crisis seems too brief.
This is very much a personal biography, instead of a historian’s attempt to explain JFK’s actions. This biography is not a judgment of JFK, just an attempt to get to know him. Kennedy’s actions in public take a backseat to his behavior away from the spotlight. Consequently, some of Kennedy’s biggest public moments are more like summaries than explanations. Matthews’ biography does not answer every question about JFK, but it does tell us what he was like.
