JFK : The Life and Death of a President E-Book

William H. A. Carr

• Herausgeber: Edizioni Savine
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

ORIGINAL DESCRIPTION (1963): What is it that sets apart one man from all others and destines him to be the leader of a great nation?Are there any qualities that mark off a youth in his college days, or even earlier, as a potential great man ?In this revealing and vivid story of the boyhood and maturing years of one of the great men of our age, the author explores these and many other provocative questions.This is the first biography of President Kennedy which tells the whole story — from his immigrant Boston ancestors through his three years in the world’s most demanding political office — to his tragic death and its dramatic consequences.

Leseprobe

JFK: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A PRESIDENT

A Complete Biography 1917-1963

by WILLIAM H. A. CARR

New digital edition of:

JFK: The Life and Death of a President

by William H. A. Carr

© 1963 by William H. A. Carr

Copyright © 2016 - Edizioni Savine

email: [email protected]

ISBN 978-88-96365-96-0

CONTENTS

JFK: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A PRESIDENT

A life had ended ... here is the complete story

The Young, the Gay, the Brave

A Political Heritage

The Money Maker

Bringing Up a President

A President Goes to School

Unmoved by the Ferment

Why England Slept’

Appointment in the Solomons

A Successor to Curley

The Gentleman from Massachusetts

The Senator Takes a Wife

The Terrible Time

The Road Back

Youth Versus Youth

‘Let Us Begin’

Martyrdom

Nov. 22, 1963

A life had ended ... here is the complete story

John F. Kennedy was not only a President of the United States; he was a new kind of President.

This is the complete story of his life: his background, his early years, how he became the kind of man he was, the growth of his ideas— and why his influence will live on after him.

For a perceptive picture of the man himself, and an important view of history in the making, this is a book you will not want to put down.

The Young, the Gay, the Brave

For thirty-four months and two days, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, as the thirty-fifth President of the United States, blazed brightly over the world like a flare in the night sky, lighting the dark way with the brilliance of his smile, his wit, his grace, his intellect, a “young, gay, and brave statesman” —as the British prime minister said after he was gone—“in the full vigor of his manhood,” a man who “bore on his shoulders all the cares and hopes of the world.”

A man unlike other men: a breaker of precedents. He was the first Roman Catholic to be chosen Chief Executive. At forty-three, he was the youngest man ever elected to the highest office in the land, and he brought to the White House with him one of the youngest First Ladies, and certainly the most beautiful, ever to grace that ancient domicile. Most significant of all, he was the first President born in the twentieth century, a truly modern man.

“He belonged uniquely to us—to this time and place, to this nation and generation—and to no other,” Emmet John Hughes, who had been President Eisenhower’s speech writer, wrote in Newsweek. “In all history, what else could he have been, where else be seen, and when else heard? A Hapsburg prince or a Bourbon sovereign? A minister to Victoria plotting designs of empire? A German chancellor fretfully patching the Weimar Republic? Or some earlier American President slackly presiding over the 1920s? Each weird image confirms how wholly and how rightly he found his home in this—our—generation.”

And then Hughes, in the most eloquent of the countless eulogies to the martyred President, added, “Sometimes it happens so: the instant of history and the instinct of the man appear almost to plot their meeting with secretly timed precision. So it seems with us. We were clearly meant to be together, for this while. And this is why the assassin, as he put a bullet in his brain, also put a scar upon our generation.”

But before that wound was inflicted upon the soul of America, Jack Kennedy wrote a remarkable chapter in his nation’s history. Despite incredible handicaps—of youth, of pain, of bigotry—he fought his way through the House of Representatives, through the Senate, and finally through the big iron gates that enclose the White House itself, until the fate of 182,000,000 Americans, and indeed of the entire world, lay in his hands.

It was an achievement that would have seemed fantastically out of the range of the boy who struggled with his allowance at boarding school; of the young Harvard undergraduate who had so little interest in politics on the campus; of the gallant Navy officer who suffered an agonizing ordeal to save his men. The girls who dated the eligible young millionaire at Palm Beach could never have imagined that the whole world would one day mourn his passing; and it would have been just as inconceivable to the Irish precinct captains who watched him win election to Congress after World War II, to the correspondents in Washington who saw him acquiring the skills of the legislator, to the vacationers on Cape Cod who waved to him on his sailboat.

In his short but eventful life were packed the elements of which legends are made: his defeat of Henry Cabot Lodge for the Senate in a year when Dwight D. Eisenhower swept Republican candidates into office with him in an overwhelming tide; the rejection of his bid for the Vice Presidential nomination in 1956; the award of the Pulitzer Prize to him for a book he wrote while recuperating from an operation on an old war wound.

No self-made man, not even in politics, he grew up with riches, enjoyed an excellent education, knew embassies and statesmen and the troubles of this modem world while still a youth. But in the end it was just this one man, John F. Kennedy, weighed against another, equally lonely young man, on that heart-stopping night when the voters expressed their wishes. One-tenth of one percentage point separated the victor from the vanquished when it was all over, but that one point made one man the leader of the most powerful country in the world.

And it cost him his life.

This is the story of that life. It is, in a way, almost the story of that generation.