John F. Kennedy remains a vivid presence in the popular imagination almost 60 years after his assassination, yet we have had to wait until now for the first installment of a comprehensive biography, drawing on the rich holdings of the Kennedy Library in Boston, many of them only recently released. The first efforts at biography, by his aides Arthur Schlesinger Jr and Theodore Sorensen, were published within a few years of his death and cast his life in a roseate hue. But a reaction was inevitable, and 25 years later the revisionist tide crested in Thomas C. Reeves’s 1991 A Question of Character, which depicted the thirty-fifth president as a pathological philanderer and monster of narcissism. With this volume, Fredrik Logevall goes beyond the sterile debate between keepers of the flame and debunkers, offering a dispassionate, thoroughly documented account of Kennedy’s ascent to national prominence, set against the background of America’s emergence as a world power and the tumult of the early Cold War.

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书评：肯尼迪：美国世纪的成年期，1917-1956

约翰·肯尼迪 (John F. Kennedy) 在他被暗杀近 60 年后仍然生动地出现在大众的想象中，但我们不得不等到现在才能看到一部综合传记的第一部分，它借鉴了波士顿肯尼迪图书馆的丰富藏品，其中许多他们最近才发布。他的助手小亚瑟·施莱辛格 (Arthur Schlesinger Jr) 和西奥多·索伦森 (Theodore Sorensen) 在他去世后几年内出版了传记的第一部作品，并为他的生活注入了玫瑰色。但反应是不可避免的，25 年后，修正主义浪潮在 Thomas C. Reeves 1991 年的A Question of Character 中达到顶峰，将第三十五任总统描述为病态的花花公子和自恋的怪物。在这本书中，弗雷德里克·洛格瓦尔超越了火焰守护者和揭穿者之间毫无意义的辩论，以美国崛起为世界强国和早期动荡的背景为背景，提供了一个冷静的、完整记录的关于肯尼迪崛起的记录冷战。