Reviews of JFK: Reckless Youth

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More Than A Rake's Progress
The New York Times, November 22, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition
Section 7; Page 1; Column 1; Book Review Desk
By Roger Morris;

Roger Morris, who served on the White House National Security Council staff under both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, is the author of "Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician."

JFK Reckless Youth. By Nigel Hamilton Illustrated. 898 pp. New York: Random House. $30.

THERE has never been a political love affair quite like it -- the brief, intense romance of a generation with a stylish, handsome young President named John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Promising to be epic in life, the passion would only grow with the classic tragedy of assassination and martyrdom in November 1963, leaving the survivors prone to both public myth and private wistfulness about what was and what might have been.

For more than a decade historians and popularizers alike have been slowly peeling away, layer by layer, the long encrusted, often deliberately created iconography surrounding that extraordinary love and loss. It seemed inevitable, therefore, that we would eventually have Nigel Hamilton's "JFK: Reckless Youth," the gripping first volume of an ambitious full-scale life of John F. Kennedy.

Mr. Hamilton, the British scholar who is the official chronicler of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, has been undaunted, almost jaunty, in entering the relatively unfamiliar American terrain for an unauthorized Kennedy biography, even if important elements of this volume, covering only the years 1917-46, involve British policy on the eve of World War II. There will be quibbling about Mr. Hamilton's handling of Boston politics, and about his use of a style often less dignified than the subject -- "all was not well in the state of Denmark," "it opened another can of worms." This sometimes repetitive, simplistic, breathless narrative could have benefited from additional editing, while excursions into psychology seem to call for more of the historian's detachment. And though claiming more than 2,000 interviews, Mr. Hamilton can be dependent on surprisingly few sources and perspectives for significant events and periods.

Yet none of this should obscure the fundamental importance or fascination of this book.
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An intruder scales the walls of Camelot
The Boston Globe, January 27, 1993, Wednesday, City Edition
OP-ED; Pg. 11
By Alex Beam, Globe Staff

For zeitgeist grazers and flapophiles suffering temporary withdrawal symptoms from the abrupt cancellation of the Zoe Baird hearings, I have some alternative programming in mind: the overheated slanging match between British historian Nigel Hamilton and the Kennedy family.

The publication of Hamilton's unbuttoned chronicle of JFK's early years, "Reckless Youth" has prompted the late president's siblings to complain, dolefully: Stop lying about our family!

Now Hamilton has returned fire, accusing the K-people of indulging a "contempt for history" at their personal archive, the John F. Kennedy Library: "Thousands of documents have been removed or sanitized over the years to avoid the wrath of the Kennedys."

Hamilton is not the first researcher to complain about the Kennedy Library, and he will not be the last. John Davis, a relative of Jackie and author of "The Kennedys; Dynasty and Disaster," wrote that the library has a "policy of keeping much of its most important resources closed to the public." Indeed, many archives in the library are conspicuous by their absence or their inaccessibility to outsiders.

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No Quarter for the Kennedys;
JFK: Reckless Youth, by Niglel Hamilton
Los Angeles Times November 22, 1992, Sunday, Home Edition
Book Review; Page 1; Book Review Desk
By Martin F. Nolan,

An associate editor of the Boston Globe, Nolan began reporting on the Kennedys in 1961.

He has had hagiographers aplenty, pals and sycophants. Revisionists, debunkers and cynics have also sat in judgment. Finally, after 29 years of fevered and fruitless speculation about his death, John F. Kennedy has a biographer.

Nigel Hamilton, as ambitious as any Kennedy, decided that "no one had ever written a complete life, in the English tradition." That tradition includes Hamilton's three-volume biography of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Monty's life was compelling, but tame compared to the Kennedy melodrama, an endless miniseries that has kept casting agents working double shifts.

"The English tradition" is a literary metaphor for a Woodward-Bernstein investigative sweep of letters, school transcripts, books, newspapers and magazines, archives and oral history projects, all funneled into a narrative that neither demonizes nor sanctifies its subject.

To assess the first 29 years of Kennedy's life, Hamilton had to confront a major myth. For 50 years, as societal tensions defined other American families as dysfunctional, the Kennedy legend was marketed as the embodiment of family. Large and loyal, loving and laughing, this gang of handsome siblings seemed secure, united by a deep religious faith and strong parental devotion, plus millions of dollars. Kennedyland, a theme park of family values, has flourished in the American imagination; Hamilton has dismantled it.
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