Word: hamilton
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AUTHOR: NIGEL HAMILTON...
Life is short. Biography is long. Nigel Hamilton's massive JFK: Reckless Youth takes the playboy politician only to 1946, when he was first elected to Congress at the age of 29. There are thousands of pages to come...
...Hamilton, whose previous biographies include three volumes on Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, is currently the John F. Kennedy Scholar and Visiting Fellow in the John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs in Boston. He is well connected and indebted to valuable sources on both sides of the Atlantic. His acknowledgments read like a Tina Brown guest list. But his book does not have the consistent gloss of an official biography. In fact, young J.F.K. emerges as a bright, charming dilettante to whom everything came a little too easily...
...unclear if these symptoms were related to his Addison's disease, which went undiagnosed until 1947. Hamilton does not get ahead of the chronology. But leapfrogging source notes provide a glimpse of the "future," including clinical details about the persistent effects of gonorrhea. "Gave 600,000 Pen((icillin))," notes a specialist called by the White House on April 17, 1961, the day anti-Castro Cubans landed at the Bay of Pigs...
Just so. The Kennedy whom Hamilton pieces together from interviews, letters and memoirs is a blithe cynic whose wit and charm are substitutes for intimacy. "Were you ever in love?" a woman asks him later in his life. His smooth answer: "No, though often very interested...