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Reviews
of JFK: Reckless Youth
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'J.F.K.' BIOGRAPHER HAS TENACITY OF RETRIEVER;
BOOKS: THE BRITISH WRITER TACKLES AN
AMERICAN LEGEND THAT WILL TAKE MORE THAN ONE VOLUME
Los Angeles Times December 20, 1992,
Sunday, Bulldog Edition
Part A; Page 15; Column 1; Advance Desk
By SID MOODY, ASSOCIATED PRESS, WASHINGTON
For four years Nigel Hamilton has inhabited
the skin of a young Jack Kennedy.
Before that it was a decade inside the prickly
hide of Britain's Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. And before
that the yin and yang pelt of the disparate novelist brothers
Mann, Heinrich and Thomas.
Nigel Hamilton is a professional biographer.
Just out is his latest effort "J.F.K.: Reckless
Youth." Four years of research and writing scarcely get Kennedy
beyond World War II. Looming ahead are two more volumes and
X more years. Morning, noon and night with the shade of the
late President.
The one-volume-isn't-enough biographer is
a retriever, patted for fetching one stick, only to take off
after another. He may clandestinely admire Leon Edel's near
lifetime extrapolating Henry James, but that's not for Hamilton.
"After 10 years, I will have had it," says Hamilton, who's
been there.
Biography is an uneasy calling, putting one's
own mind inside and outside the mind of another, usually dead.
It is historical ventriloquism.
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Battling over JFK's hidden past;
Biographer Nigel Hamilton's dogged pursuit
of personal material sparks a dispute with archivists at the
Kennedy Library
The Boston Globe October
7, 1992, Wednesday, City Edition
LIVING; Pg. 73
By M. R. Montgomery, Globe Staff
Tomorrow, in Florence, Italy, a conference
on "John F. Kennedy in Europe" will open with a speech by
Nigel Hamilton, the British biographer whose "JFK: Reckless
Youth" will be published later this month by Random House.
It is Hamilton's dogged search for the more lurid details
about the young Kennedy's apparently insatiable appetite for
sexual gratification that almost got him disinvited from the
stodgy historical conference - and has contributed to an increasingly
disagreeable relationship between Hamilton and the JFK Library
in Dorchester-by-the-Bay.
If the intensity of the dispute at the JFK
library is unusual, the issues are no different than at any
other archive filled with biographical material. There is
an inevitable tension between researchers who want everything
opened yesterday, and cautious archivists who are duty-bound
to follow the myriad restrictions and rules imposed by donors
at each and every turn. It is even more complicated at presidential
libraries, where the good reputation of the president is at
stake.
The low point in Hamilton's relationship with
the JFK library began when Charles U. Daly - director of both
the library and the associated JFK Library Foundation - argued,
in a private conversation, that Hamilton should not have been
invited to be the opening speaker at the Florence conference.
Daly had been approached, as the JFK Foundation director,
to contribute to the costs of the conference and, when he
heard who was speaking, declined. Hamilton was, in fact, temporarily
disinvited, and found out why. He yelled bloody murder, and
will now, just prior to the publication of "Reckless Youth,"
be the keynote, or perhaps footnote, speaker.
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Reckless, young or old; British biographer
deconstructs JFK myth
The Gazette (Montreal), December 26,
1992, Saturday, FINAL EDITION
BOOKS; Pg. G4
ALAN HUSTAK; GAZETTE
JFK Reckless Youth By Nigel Hamilton Random
House, 898 pp, $ 37.50
After President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was
murdered in 1963, Malcolm Muggeridge refused to follow the
crowd and become a "slobbering apologist" for the martyred
president.
"If the late president was really - as his
posthumous adulators would have us believe - so dedicated
a public servant, so faithful a husband and devoted a father,
so witty, learned and profound an orator, writer and thinker,
so genial a friend, prayerful a Christian and enlightened
a statesman, he is better off in heaven, where we can safely
presume him to be," Muggeridge wrote in 1965. "Sometime this
miasma will lift, and some young, uncontaminated biographer
will get to work, extricating a man from his legend, and subjecting
his tragically abbreviated presidency to a proper historical
and sociological analysis."
It has taken almost 30 years, but at last
that biographer has arrived in the person of Nigel Hamilton,
who has produced a portrait of the president that goes beyond
any other to date in terms of balance and comprehensiveness.
Hamilton, 48, is the son of former London
Sunday Times editor, Sir Denis Hamilton, and he is Field Marshall
Bernard Montgomery's official biographer. A foreign observer
in Washington, he has no axes to grind: Reckless Youth,
which covers the years 1917-1946, is remarkable precisely
because it is so imperturbable, lucid and harrowing.
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AT LUNCH WITH: Nigel Hamilton;
A Target for the Longbows of Camelot
The New York Times January 27, 1993, Wednesday,
Late Edition - Final
Section C; Page 1; Column 1; Living Desk
By FRANK J. PRIAL
THE lunchtime crowd at the "21" Club was typical: mostly male,
soberly suited, well padded for the most part and, given the
prices, certainly well heeled.
Joe Kennedy would have been at home there.
Indeed, for many years, he was. Jack Kennedy, less so, perhaps,
and Nigel Hamilton not at all. Even so, there Mr. Hamilton
was. British, bearded and tweedy, a book and a sheaf of papers
at his side, looking like a fugitive from the Lotos Club,
or the Strand Book Store.
The book, of course, was his highly successful
new biography of the young Jack Kennedy, "J.F.K.: Reckless
Youth," which has been on the New York Times best-seller list
for seven weeks. The papers were whatever it is that authors
always seem to carry around with them. The venue was a sentimental
touch: it provided an opportunity to talk about the Kennedys
in a place they knew well, a place that outwardly has changed
little since they were part of the "21" crowd. The Kennedys
-- the living Kennedys -- were much on Mr. Hamilton's mind.
The President's brother, Teddy, and three
of his sisters -- Jean Smith, Eunice Shriver and Patricia
Lawford -- had recently issued, on the Op-Ed page of The Times,
a scathing rebuttal of the way Mr. Hamilton portrayed their
parents in the book. On Friday, in his own article on the
Op-Ed page, Mr. Hamilton counterattacked, asserting that the
Kennedy family had tried to obstruct his research, doing things
like suppressing documents that had previously been available
to the public. Other materials were tampered with, he charged.
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full article
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