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    JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and The Emergence of a Great President
    Unavailable
    JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and The Emergence of a Great President
    Unavailable
    JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and The Emergence of a Great President
    Audiobook14 hours

    JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and The Emergence of a Great President

    Written by Thurston Clarke

    Narrated by Malcolm Hillgartner

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A revelatory, minute-by-minute account of JFK's final days that asks what might have been

    Fifty years after his assassination, President John F. Kennedy's legend endures. Noted author and historian Thurston Clarke reexamines the last months of the president's life to show a man in the midst of great change, both in his family and in the key issues of his day: the cold war, civil rights, and Vietnam, finally on the cusp of making good on his extraordinary promise. JFK's Last Hundred Days presents a gripping account that weaves together Kennedy's public and private lives, explains why the grief following his assassination has endured so long, and solves the most tantalizing Kennedy mystery of them all-not who killed him but who he was when he was killed and where he would have led us.


    From the Trade Paperback edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJul 16, 2013
    ISBN9781101620236
    Unavailable
    JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and The Emergence of a Great President
    Author

    Thurston Clarke

    Thurston Clarke has written a dozen widely acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, including several New York Times Notable Books. His Pearl Harbor Ghosts was the basis of a CBS documentary, and his bestselling Lost Hero, a biography of Raoul Wallenberg, was made into an award-winning NBC miniseries. His articles have appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Washington Post and many other publications. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and other awards and lives with his wife and three daughters in upstate New York.

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    Reviews for JFK's Last Hundred Days

    3.5/5

    20 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      There must be a million books written about John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, the admiring ones paint him as a gifted leader whose triumphant life story ended in an unspeakable tragedy just as he was about to make his mark on history. That is how Thurston Clarke sees it in this book that gives the reader a day by day account of the last three months of Kennedy's time in the White House. So many books have covered this ground and advanced this same theme in the last five decades, why read one more?Because JFK's LAST HUNDRED DAYS is as much about what might have been as it is about what happened. The John F. Kennedy of the autumn of 1963 was a man who was finally hitting his stride as President after nearly two and a half years of one crisis after another: The Bay of Pigs; the Berlin Wall; catching up to the Russians in space; Oxford, Mississippi, the steel companies, Vietnam, and the showdown with Khrushchev over the missiles in Cuba. According to Clarke, JFK had weathered the storms and trials of his first term and was looking forward to setting the agenda as he prepared to campaign for a second term; this Kennedy wants to achieve detente with the Soviet Union, forge a new relationship with Castro's Cuba, get America out of the mounting quagmire in Southeast Asia, make the struggle for equal rights for black Americans the foremost moral issue of its time by passing the toughest civil rights act since Reconstruction, and pass legislation that would spread more of the bounty of America's great prosperity to the middle class while helping more of those at the bottom rise out of poverty. In short, John F. Kennedy was a great man on the verge of doing great things.The problem with Clarke's assertion is that it is the same one made by virtually every other favorable biography written about Kennedy, starting with those by former aides Theodore Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger, which came out within two years of Dallas. This is the great myth of JFK admirers: that all the great turmoil of the 60's would never have come to pass if he had only come back from that trip to Texas alive. No war in Vietnam, the Cold War resolved with peace and brotherhood between the races at home. The problem with this picture is that it ignores some of the hard realities of the time: JFK would certainly have passed a Civil Rights bill, although maybe not until his second term, but he most definitely would have had to contend with the same forces of white backlash that bedeviled LBJ in his own second term and made George Wallace a force to be reckoned with along with Nixon's "Southern Strategy." There was no politically viable way the United States was just going to "cut and run" and leave South Vietnam to the Communists, it should be noted that all American plans for getting out of there were contingent on the South Vietnamese becoming self sufficient in fighting off the North, something that never happened, not for Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon and there is no reason to believe JFK would have fared any better. There is also no reason to believe the Soviet Union would have voluntarily given up what the Red Army had shed much blood to take in World War II, and certainly not a little more than ten years after Stalin's death when the country was still ruled by men who had risen to power in the dictator's shadow. The true end of the Cold War would have wait until Gorbachev and a new generation of leaders in the Soviet Union.These things were the forces of history, and no leader, not even one as gifted as John F. Kennedy could have turned them aside.What Clarke's book does give us is a portrait of a man and a family overcoming problems that would have sunk people of lesser character. The book opens with the birth JFK and Jackie's third child, a premature son named Patrick, who lived only a few days; how this tragedy affected Kennedy and his wife and their relationship is one one of the most interesting parts of Clarke's narrative. It has always been hard for biographers to square the admirable qualities of John F. Kennedy with his relentless and heartless infidelity; until the last months of his life, he seemed to possess an utter moral blind spot when it came to sex. Yet the death of his son seems to have made him rethink his behavior and let him grow closer to Jackie. There is also the matter of his precarious health and the sometimes questionable treatments he sought for the effects of Addison's Disease and chronic back pain. It appears that in those last months, Kennedy had at last rounded a corner as he appeared to be in the best health in years. Still, as the fall of 1963 passes and the days hurdle toward a fateful trip to Texas, John F. Kennedy was a man sitting two power kegs concerning secrets in his private life and his health; who knows if they would have detonated and come out sooner if he'd lived.Clarke spares us an account of the assassination itself, skipping instead to a moving look at the way America and the world mourned Kennedy; it is by far the best part of the book. And Clarke gives us many surprising details about our 35th President: a fling with Marlene Dietrich when she was past 60, but still in great shape; a rich fantasy life and a love for reading James Bond style fiction; he watched no television except for football games. All these things help humanize a President who has become an icon to most Americans.John F. Kennedy possessed a great sense of history, that he would be the subject of so many books would no doubt have pleased him, if not the reason why. I think he would have liked Thurston Clarke's book very much.
    • 5/5
      5813. JFK's Last Hundred Days The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President, by Thurston Clarke (read & Dec 2022) This book was published in 2013, fifty years after Kennedy's death and thus with perspective on the events so carefully recounted. There is a 7 and a half page bibliography, showing me that I will never be able to read everything I will never be able all I would like to read on Kennedy and his era. The author well shows the brilliance of Kennedy, and that he had a healthy skepticism of what generals told him, something LBJ sadly lacked--with the result that over 50,000 American lives were needlessly lost in Vietnam. I admit that I supported the Vietnam war for far too long and this is another reason JFK's death was an unmitigated tragedy This is wise book and well worth reading even at this late date..
    • 3/5
      Disappointed in the overwhelming platitudes in this book. Also think it is grammatically poor. many times I have had to read sentences over when 2 subjects are mentioned in one sentence and then a pronoun (he) is used in the following sentence in a way that makes it unclear to whom the author was referring.
    • 4/5
      My once all-consuming crush on John F. Kennedy lingers on, prompting me to read yet another biography, this one slanted to cover his last one hundred days as president. Overall, Clarke is a fair biographer, stating Kennedy's achievements clearly and proudly without glossing over his less than attractive qualities, but his 'week by week' diary format can be jarring and somewhat dry to read. I prefer reading about Kennedy's personal life and personality, rather than his political achievements, so the test ban treaty-tax cuts-civil rights-Vietnam-Cuba-Russia running narrative interested me somewhat less than trying to glean new facts about this charismatic but complex man.I did succeed, however, which is impressive, considering the amount of biographies I have read about Kennedy. I love how Clarke picks up on the president's habit of doodling when bored or pensive, boxing in or underlining key words, or drawing boats to amuse himself. And reading about the president's 'homage to James Bond', roping in Secret Service agents to stage his own death while under the surveillance of two reporters, made me smile and shiver at the same time.In fact, Clarke's constant references to occasions when Kennedy joked about assassination or talked to friends about death got to be almost conspiratorial in frequency and placement - like Kennedy might have had a premonition about exactly when and how he would die. Freaky, in hindsight. This is what I prefer to read about in Kennedy biographies, though - who he was, not what he was - and Clarke balances his political review with enough personal details to keep me interested. Like LBJ's observation that Kennedy, 'was always seeking to conciliate; he was always seeking to understand other people and what their motives were. He could never quite accept the fact that other people would not always return his good will'.Fellow fans of Kennedy will appreciate Clarke's honest and accessible account of the President's last one hundred days, from August to November 22, 1963, but there are far more extensive (and damning) biographies out there which cover the same ground as part of the bigger picture. Clarke is definitely pro-Kennedy (and anti-Johnson), which satisfies my own taste, and he has a comprehensive, easy-to-read style, only the 'countdown' to Dallas makes for a jumpy narrative. An effective summary of JFK's all too brief presidency, closing with the eternal question, 'What if ..?'
    • 3/5
      So-so. Did not really provide much of any new material, and tried to make President Kennedy out to be much more than he was. His policy issues seemed to be more about what kind of resistance he would get than about what he truly believed in.