John F. Kennedy - Bibliography

Kennedy's aides and friends evocatively and sympathetically portray him in several works, including Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York, 1965); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston, 1965); Paul B. Fay, Jr., The Pleasure of His Company (New York, 1966); Pierre Salinger, With Kennedy (Garden City, N.Y., 1966); Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy (Garden City, N.Y., 1967); Kenneth P. O'Donnell and David F. Powers, with Joe McCarthy, "Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye": Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Boston, 1972); and Benjamin C. Bradlee, Conversations with Kennedy (New York, 1975).

Herbert S. Parmet has written the biographies Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (New York, 1980) and JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (New York, 1983). Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power (New York, 1993), is a well-researched assessment, critical but judicious. In the 1970s and 1980s, many revisionist evaluations of Kennedy appeared. Garry Wills, for example, debunks Kennedy and his defenders in The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (Boston, 1982), while Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York, 1984), critically surveys government initiatives that began under Kennedy. Three other recent studies with varying viewpoints are Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept: John F. Kennedy's New Frontier (New York, 1991), James N. Giglio, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (Lawrence, Kans., 1991), and Thomas Reeves, A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy (New York, 1991).

Meanwhile, there has been a growing number of monographs and specialized studies, including Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston, 1971); Carl M. Brauer, John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction (New York, 1977); Thomas G. Paterson, ed., Kennedy's Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963 (New York, 1989); Montague Kern, Patricia W. Levering, and Ralph B. Levering, The Kennedy Crises: The Press, the Presidency, and Foreign Policy (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1983); William J. Rust et al., Kennedy in Vietnam: American Vietnam Policy, 1960–1963 (New York, 1985); Thomas Brown, JFK, History of an Image (Bloomington, Ind., 1988); Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963 (New York, 1991); John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (New York, 1992); and Edwin M. Martin, Kennedy and Latin America (Lanham, Md., 1994).

Recent works include Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (New York, 2000); Barbara Leaming, Mrs. Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years (New York, 2001); Richard D. Mahoney, Sons and Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (New York, 1999); Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); and Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (New York, 1993).

For further sources consult James N. Giglio, comp., John F. Kennedy: A Bibliography (Westport, Conn., 1995).