Four decades after the death of John F. Kennedy, Jack Kennedy: The Education of a Statesman calls into question much of what we think we know and understand about America's thirty-fifth president. In this groundbreaking biography, Barbara Leaming paints a startlingly original portrait of one of the most famous figures of the twentieth century. Drawing on extensive new primary materials and interviews, Leaming reveals for the first time what Kennedy himself saw as the aims and aspirations of his life and presidency.".
"At the heart of this revelatory look at Kennedy's life is Leaming's account of the dramatic process by which Kennedy - torn between loyalty to the ideas and values of a father he revered and those of that father's longtime adversary - came to be shaped by the speeches and writings of Winston Churchill. It has long been known that Kennedy admired Churchill, but Leaming is the first historian to document the crucial influence of Churchill's ideas on Kennedy. At his presidential inauguration on January 20, 1961, Kennedy moved to do nothing less than to take up Churchill's mantle in the postwar world. In this book we see Kennedy emerge as a man still deeply at odds with himself, yet determined to win his place in history by doing what Churchill had been unable to do: put into practice the strategy that the aged prime minister had conceived to avoid a third world war and to begin the peaceful defeat of Communism..
For the first time a Kennedy biographer succeeds in finding the dramatic line that runs through the full continuum of Kennedy's complicated life, the trajectory of the friendships and forces that led to the White House and shaped his actions there