Word: dallek
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...Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (Little, Brown; 838 pages), historian Robert Dallek has bravely set himself the task of trying, 40 years and a thousand books after Dallas, to reassemble the pieces of the Kennedy puzzle--essentially, to bridge the considerable distance between the dark side and the somewhat tattered radiance of the myth, between the tabloid hedonist and the martyred saint. It has become a familiar problem: How to explain that the irrational, risk-taking Hefnerian who went to bed with the girlfriend of the Mafia boss of Chicago, who routinely lied about his disastrous health...
...Dallek, author of a balanced two-volume life of Lyndon Johnson, is neither debunker nor hagiologist, but rather a fairly shrewd syncretist with a certain amount of new material to bring to light. Kennedy, it may be, learned concealment from his father and denial from his mother. Jack's hidden life involved not only sexual intimacies with many women but also an enormous quantity of pain and illness. As no biographer before him has done, Dallek has assembled medical records to speculate about the effect of so many ailments and drugs upon Kennedy's conduct in the White House...
...Dallek's verdict is, on the whole, pro-Kennedy. He gives J.F.K. credit for performing well under the pressure of pain and drugs that might have disabled another man. "The records of his maladies for August 1961," writes Dallek, "provide a window into his struggle to remain effectively attentive to the public's business. His stomach and urinary ailments were a daily distraction." He was taking codeine sulfate and procaine for his pain, penicillin for his infection, cortisone for his Addison's and so on. His back was killing him--the steroids had been weakening his spine. "Something as simple...
...That Dallek has no ax to grind or myth to explode gives his portrait, after all these years, a certain stability and completeness, and, therefore, with all the contradictions, a likeness to life. Like any good biographer, Dallek has grasped Jung's thought that "only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life...
...observed him in public as closely as any other journalist. I never saw Kennedy emotionally or physically impaired for any great length of time or at any important moment. The medical treatment I witnessed seemed reasonable for a man who had suffered so many years of discomfort. But Dallek's idea that Kennedy overcame pain and his faltering system through nonstop, heroic willpower and feverish pill popping is surely exaggerated. In his public appearances, Kennedy was nearly always working hard and displaying genuine good humor, a far cry from Dallek's image of a constantly pain-ridden biochemical...