Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [176]
He did that. He, Jack Kennedy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The person I owe most for this book’s completion is my son Michael Matthews. At a critical juncture, he transformed a mountain of historic material—chapter themes, interview transcripts, oral histories and citations from other sources—into coherent notes. He has a beautiful historic sense.
I want to thank Michele Slung for an editing and literary craft that gave shape and life to my narrative.
I owe my TV producer Tina Urbanski for her role at every stage of Jack Kennedy. Taking on this project amid the schedule of six television programs a week is a chore no one can accomplish alone.
I want to thank Helen O’Donnell for providing me with the vast oral history recorded by her father with correspondent Sander Vanocur. Kenneth O’Donnell was at Jack Kennedy’s side from that first senate race in 1952 to the end. His sharp political mind is well on display here. It took a reporter of Vanocur’s moxie to ask him just the right questions, and ask them he did.
I want to thank the inimitable Vincent Virga for the design and selection of the photographs that give this book its artistic completion. He is a visual choreographer. I want to thank U.S. Congressman Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Mark Johnson, a teacher of history, for reviewing my manuscript with sharpness and intelligence.
In an important way, this book emerges from my decades of real-time interest in Jack Kennedy. It benefits, of course, from the foundation of research I did for Kennedy & Nixon. Two other books have provided sturdy scaffoldings: Nigel Hamilton’s JFK: Reckless Youth, the best-ever work on Kennedy’s early life, and Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life, which reveals for the first time his full medical history.
I need to credit Jon Meacham, author of Franklin and Winston, for the inspiration on how to craft this biography from the perspectives of those around him.
Jack Kennedy lived his life in a golden circle of friends and close associates. By bringing together their firsthand memories, I’ve sought to bring to life the man at their center. For the first-person accounts in this book I interviewed many witnesses to the life of Jack Kennedy: Letitia Baldridge, Charles Bartlett, Benjamin Bradlee, Mark Dalton, Fred and Nancy Dutton, Red Fay, Paul Ferber, John Glenn, Lester Hyman, Peter Kaplan, Patrick Lucey, Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., Dave Powers, Terri Robinson, Tazewell Shepard, George Smathers, Ted Sorensen, Chuck Spalding, Billy Sutton, Bill Wilson, Christopher Lawford, and, especially, Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith.
For those I could not interview—Torbert Macdonald, James Reed, and Rip Horton—I depended on the oral histories archived at the John F. Kennedy Library. I owe the personal accounts of Lemoyne Billings to the excellent Jack and Lem: The Untold Story of an Extraordinary Friendship by David Pitts, as well as the wonderful chapter on the Jack-Lem relationship in Best of Friends by David Michaelis.
I benefitted greatly from Thomas P. O’Neill’s Man of the House, Lawrence F. O’Brien’s No Final Victories, Red Fay’s The Pleasure of His Company, Ben Bradlee’s Conversations with Kennedy, Ted Sorensen’s Counselor, Deirdre Henderson’s Prelude to Leadership: The European Diary of John F. Kennedy: Summer 1945, and Arthur Schlesinger’s Journals.
Other books on John F. Kennedy are essential to any understanding of him. Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy by Herbert Parmet, Kennedy by Theodore Sorensen, President Kennedy: Profile of Power by Richard Reeves, Mrs. Kennedy by Barbara Leaming, and A Thousand Days and Robert F. Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger.
I need to thank Lorraine Connelly and Judy Donald of Choate Rosemary Hall for the great help in understanding Jack’s early years; David McKean, Tom Putnam, Laurie Austin and Maryrose Grossman of the John F. Kennedy Library and Christopher Peleo-Lazar who did the excellent