Camelot never looked so good

A far deeper, worthier and more interesting JFK emerges in detailed new biography

JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 Fredrik Logevall Random House

In December 1941, Jack Kennedy was having an affair with a married Danish former beauty queen who was being investigated by the FBI as a German spy. Her name was Inga Arvad; he called her “Inga Binga.” (She had been seen sitting in Adolf Hitler's box at the 1936 Olympics.) Kennedy was an officer in Naval Intelligence, a job arranged by his father, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. He was pulling strings to get into a more glamorous posting — PT boats — despite a history of poor health. Young Kennedy was not exactly spit polished or squared away.

Those are all facts, but not the whole truth. Arvad was clever and perceptive, and she saw in Kennedy his abiding desire to serve and to do good. JFK was tender and adoring toward Arvad. (And she was no German spy, as the FBI wiretaps eventually showed.) JFK did use political favours to get a better post in the Navy, but, as one of his commanders noted, “there are a lot of people in America who use political influence to keep out of combat, but Jack Kennedy used it to get into combat.”

An entitled sometimes reckless Harvard boy, his men worshipped him, especially when, after his PT boat was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer, he repeatedly risked his life to save them.

Jack Kennedy was a spoiled young man, and he had a habit of treating women — and, sometimes, his male friends — badly. But as Fredrik Logevall shows in his superb JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 19171956, Kennedy was a far deeper, worthier, more interesting character than the familiar revisionist cliché. He had a premature sense of his own doom, which he faced with bravery and good cheer, albeit cloaked at times in prep school cynicism.

“Detachment” might be a better word. Kennedy's cool bordered on coldness. Jack's seemingly effortless grace, so seductive to women and men alike, was a kind of armour.

He was passionate about politics — an honourable profession, he believed — but he was never polemical or even partisan. He knew it could take courage to be a moderate. His heroes were politicians who compromised on policy but not principle.

It's hard, in the Age of Trump, not to feel nostalgic about the Age of Kennedy — to remember once there was a leader who read avidly, who believed in the power of words not to divide and inflame but to call on our better angels. Kennedy mocked pieties, but he was a deep romantic, in a dangerous sort of way.

When he met Jacqueline Bouvier, she sensed he “would have a profound, perhaps disturbing” influence on her life.

“Jackie told a friend she was frightened, envisioning heartbreak for herself, but swiftly determined such heartbreak would be worth it,” he writes.

(“Kennedy's recollection was plainer: `I leaned across the asparagus and asked for a date.'”)