Word: morrow
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Unfortunately, Morrow is not quite as focused as his subjects, and many of his tidbits about characters and events tangentially related to the three presidents feel out of place. For example, the book includes a glowing biographical sketch of former Secretary of State George C. Marshall that is only very loosely tied to the big three. Another chapter entitled “Brumidi’s Frescoes and Film Noir” seems similarly detached. Constantino Brumidi was an Italian artist who attempted to overthrow the pope in the early 1850s. He went into exile in the United States...
Despite these differences, Morrow goes to great length to find similarities among the three main characters. Both Kennedy and Nixon had siblings who died young, for example. JFK and Johnson both had voracious sexual appetites—as Morrow reminds us time and time again. Kennedy said he could not sleep without having had sex. While his wife Jacqueline was delivering their first child stillborn, JFK and a fellow senator were entertaining women on a yacht in the Mediterranean. Johnson too had many affairs, but he stands out more for his trademark crudeness. “[H]e liked...
Like Nixon, Morrow sometimes lets his own internal monologue loose. He spends five puzzling pages comparing Nixon to the actress and sex-symbol Lana Turner, of all people, arguing that they both “were isolated, manipulative, calculating, detached.” Even Morrow acknowledges that the overlong exercise is “on the face of it, a preposterous and frivolous comparison,” and the narrative flow, which is interrupted by a mini-biography of Turner, would have benefited from its absence. At times, the book feels more like a biographical pastiche of famous figures rather...
...credit, Morrow’s portraits of his three main characters are at times quite touching. Morrow vividly describes the Kennedy family, dominated by patriarch Joe and rocked by repeated tragedies. John’s older brother and younger sister were dead by 1948; these repeated reminders of mortality spurred JFK to make the most of every moment. Kennedy might have operated on the assumption that since the gods had mistakenly overlooked him, “then better to take advantage of it before the gods get wise and call in the debt,” Morrow writes with...
However, when it comes to focusing on 1948, which the book promotes as so important, Morrow stumbles. In that year, Kennedy’s sister Kathleen died in a plane crash. Kennedy, then a congressman, concealed the severity of his own illness from the public. These episodes clearly affected Kennedy, but so did many other setbacks—such as his brother Joe Jr.’s death and his sister Rosemary’s lobotomy. The lasting impact of 1948, for JFK at least, is not so clear...