Word: sorensens
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Kennedy has its virtues, but they are well hidden. It is, to begin with, not terribly well written. Sorensen simply isn't the narrator Schlesinger is; stories that are well-told in one book come out flat in the other. Parts of the Sorensen book, too, sound embarrassingly like Kennedy speeches...
...Theodore Sorensen doesn't even try to stay afloat. The faults of his book are as obvious as the virtues of Schlesinger's and they have been freely jumped on by reviewers for a month now. Sorensen's virtues are less obvious...
...also disappointingly uncritical. Sorensen says at one point that this is his substitute for the book Kennedy would have written; at another he apologizes for appearing biased by saying "My only obligation is to the truth about Kennedy...
...supposed to be a hero to his valet, and Sorensen was Kennedy's intellectual valet too long for his praise to seem altogether honest. Richard Neustadt has called the book a lawyer's brief for the Kennedy Presidency, but no good lawyer would have written it this way, as Kennedy himself knew. Schlesinger shows him reading Eisenhower's memoirs and clucking that Ike apparently hadn't made any mistakes, and saying he wasn't about to write his own book that...
What is interesting about Kennedy is what it reflects about the topic of Sorensen's last book, Decision-Making in the White House. The last half is arranged in chapters that discuss the development of issues--the economy, civil rights, the alliance--from the beginning to the end of the administration. These chapters leave one with two impressions: first that the process of Presidential decision-making is frequently very hectic, and second that the President, and especially the White House staff, is ordinarily very isolated...