John F. Kennedy, World Leader.

Hoffman, Elizabeth Cobbs

John F. Kennedy, World Leader. By Stephen G. Rabe. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2010. 249 pp.

Clara Bow rose to fame in the Roaring Twenties as the "It Girl." It, explains the novel on which Bow's famous character was based, is "that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes ... [e]ntirely unself-conscious ... full of self-confidence."

President John E Kennedy remains the "it" president of the twentieth century. In this rigorously fair-minded book, Stephen G. Rabe recounts the momentous events of the early 1960s in order to adjudicate the reasonableness of the nation's continued fascination with the Massachusetts-born political star. Rabe follows the trajectory of American policy from Berlin to Cuba to South Africa--and beyond--seeking to identify "whether John Kennedy deserves the solid reputation he continues to enjoy with the U.S. public and many scholars" (p. 11). Although Rabe stops somewhat short of answering the question, much in the book suggests that, if pressed, he would conclude that admiration for Kennedy--like attraction to flapper Clara Bow--is best classed as a guilty pleasure.

Rabe begins by examining Kennedy's personal beliefs, and he takes the unusual approach of granting right off that the Irish American president "was a racial egalitarian who had a genuine concern for poor, oppressed people" (p. 17). Raised in a wealthy family that never forgot where they came from, Kennedy perceived and communicated that nationalism was the defining issue of the twentieth century and that freedom for the oppressed was a demand whose time had come. Rabe thereby avoids the trap into which many critics have fallen, which is to obsess (as so many did with regard to themselves and others in the 1960s) about Kennedy's "authenticity." Instead, the author convincingly argues that Kennedy merely had an unpublicized list of priorities in which "[a]nticommunism outranked equality and justice in his hierarchy of values" (p. 18).

Based on Rabe's documentation, this is a fair statement. When given "unhappy choices" between honoring nationalism and fighting communism, Kennedy invariably chose the latter if the two seemed mutually exclusive. Where Rabe faults JFK is in overinterpreting the evidence for communist infiltration of nationalist movements. In Latin America, particularly, many government leaders consistently disagreed with Kennedy about the extent to which communism was a threat, compared with anger arising from the legitimate frustrations of the poor. Even Lyndon B. Johnson acted more sensibly, Rabe asserts, ratcheting down presidential orders to undermine Cuba, given Fidel Castro's apparent popularity with his own people.

Kennedy's Cold War myopia often comes across as immaturity or pig-headedness in Rabe's account, although nonhistorian pundits such as Noam Chomsky would characterize it as worse: a nefarious attempt to colonize the rest of the world under the Mafia-like ruse of "protection." However, Rabe sometimes misses a chance to go deeper. As his deft, compassionate view of U.S.-Soviet relations suggests, the leaders of both nations suffered from the post-traumatic stresses of World War II. Nikita Khrushchev had lost a son. Kennedy had lost a brother and a sister, and nearly his own life. Neither man was ready to underestimate the dangers ahead, and dangers there were aplenty in a nuclear era when Africa and Asia decolonized in little more than a decade. It may be that a more precise articulation of Kennedy's (and Khrushchev's) priorities would be that survival outranked equality and justice in the hierarchy of values.

Should Kennedy have thought that survival was at stake? Rabe argues that Dwight D. Eisenhower had a less apocalyptic outlook, and was more cognizant of how easy (and dangerous) it was to get too close to the edge of Armageddon. Yet the evidence is murky, as the crises themselves were. Eisenhower, after all, strongly advised Kennedy to proceed with the Bay of Pigs invasion, which helped push the younger man onto the slippery slope that led to the Cuban missile crisis. JFK, in turn, deepened the American commitment to South Vietnam, setting up Lyndon Johnson. The deep fears engendered by the Cold War influenced the policy of each occupant of the White House. Indeed, Rabe's central point is that Kennedy was a Cold Warrior like any other, who not only shaped, but was shaped by, that context. As Rabe concludes, "continuity rather than change characterized the Kennedy administration's foreign policies" (p. 188). That administration, like others, had its dark as well as its shining moments.

So, granting this fact begs the question: what made Kennedy different? What "strange magnetism" still draws such a wide variety of people around the world to this particular president? Rabe has written a balanced, insightful, valuable assessment of the man and the period. But the answer to "it" is still out there.

--Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman

Hoover Institution