high noon in the cold war: kennedy, khrushchev, and the cuban missile crisis / the kennedy assassination tapes / jackie: a life in pictures

[January 5th, 2005]

^high noon in the cold war: kennedy, khrushchev, and the cuban missile crisis

By Max Frankel (Ballantine Books, 206 pages, $23.95)

^the kennedy assassination tapes

By Max Holland (Knopf, 453 pages, $26.95)

Here's the perfect prescription for those pre-inaugural blues: a book about a Democratic president who was actually elected to office, faced down a real threat to U.S. national security, and then prevailed without resorting to military force.

Despite his presidency's many flaws--the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, his weak-kneed stance on civil rights, his complicity in the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem--John F. Kennedy should be remembered as one our greatest chief executives for one thing if nothing else: his deft handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. As we learned some 30 years later, many of the missiles in Cuba were already armed with nuclear warheads in October 1962. If Kennedy had wavered in his resistance to his hawkish advisers and invaded Cuba, much of the Southern United States and its eastern seaboard would now be a radioactive wasteland. Like Washington, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt before him, Kennedy's leadership preserved the very existence of the United States as a nation.

New York Times news veteran Max Frankel concisely refutes the assessment of Kennedy Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that America simply "lucked out" in the crisis. Instead, his pithy account argues convincingly that Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev were both determined to avoid war at all costs, but that Kennedy's ability to view the crisis through the eyes of his adversary ultimately averted Armageddon.

Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, went to his grave believing that covert U.S. attempts to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro probably cost the young president his life in Dallas in 1963. The Kennedy Assassination Tapes reveals how this cataclysmic event tormented Johnson almost as much as the stalemate in Vietnam. The reader listens in on LBJ's telephone conversations as he initially opposes then personally handcrafts the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination; as he consoles Jacqueline Kennedy but fumes over Robert Kennedy's moves to undermine his administration at every turn; as he muses that JFK's death may be "divine retribution" for Diem's assassination three weeks earlier but steadfastly refuses to voice his fears that Castro assassination plots may, too, have backfired on Kennedy.

Author Max Holland poses no groundbreaking new theory on the assassination (sorry, folks: Oswald done it), but he applies exhaustive research to clear up many misconceptions about the Johnson tapes and powerfully refute the many charlatans who have tried to misuse them to buttress their own conspiracy theories. Matt Buckingham

^jackie: a life in pictures

Edited By Pierre-Henri Verlhac and Yann-Brice Dherbier (powerHouse Books, 272 pages, $39.95)

Her name was mired in muddy tabloids for most of her adult life. Then "informed" authors all but kicked her gravestone over in countless biographies. But through it all the graceful visage of Jacquelyn Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis remains untarnished.

The iconic image of the mythic Missus shines brightly in Jackie: A Life in Pictures. This pictorial highlights America's queen of "Camelot" from her earliest debutante days, through the years with (and without) Jack, to her wild, Ari-filled cruise-and-booze nights, right up to her final days in New York as a book editor and longtime companion of businessman Maurice Tempelsman.

Ignoring the impulse to out-paparazzo the paparazzi, this voluminous, nearly text-free tome (from the editors of John F. Kennedy: A Life in Pictures) allows Jackie to do what Jackie does best: look pretty. And although she shines with a light from within that is as brilliant as any one-named movie star, there is a certain vacuous stare that permeates even the most intimate of images. It's almost like Jackie, as seen here, is the female equivalent of Chauncey Gardiner, the character in Jerzy Kosinski's Being There. Like Chauncey, this private woman shows a quiet strength that, given her privileged stature, takes on messianic overtones. This leaves viewers to wonder whether they are indeed seeing the legendary woman as she actually was, or just as the image we wanted to see. We'll never know. And after years of her being hunted like a dog by photographers, perhaps it's only right that we just get the scraps. Byron Beck