JFK in the American Century

A bold new life of JFK cues Emerson's line: "there is no history, only biography," particularly when the life of a man and the American Century roll out together. John F. Kennedy was born — April 1917 — just days from the U.S. entry into World War One, one day after Lenin arrived at the Finland Station in Petersburg to start a revolution. August 1939, young Kennedy, princely & curious, turned up in Berlin, a week before Hitler invaded Poland. As a Harvard senior, he wrote himself a bestseller on why England (and much of the U.S.) had slept through the build-up of Hitler's war machine. And then as president with an expansive view of U.S. power, he put the first American troops into Vietnam — into what he’d often said was a trap.