by Sheldon M. Stern
Dr. Stern was historian at the JFK Library in Boston from 1977 to 2000. He is the author of Averting ‘the Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings
(2003), The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis
(2005) and The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths vs. Reality
(2012) in the Stanford University Press Nuclear Age Series.
Cover of Fredrik Logevall JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956
(Penguin-Random House, 2020); Kennedy at far right with crew of PT-109, 1943
Author's note: Logevall, in his Acknowledgments, cites my “steady guidance throughout” and grasp of JFK as “about as deep as anyone’s.” Most journals would likely exclude me from reviewing this book. This essay, however, is not a review as usually defined; rather, it reflects my personal thoughts grounded in years of extensive experience with the archival evidence in the John F. Kennedy Library.