Jack: A Life Like No Other

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This full-scale John F. Kennedy biography utilizes a wealth of new material, including Oval Office tapes and a 1937 JFK travel journal. Biographer Perret, whose previous subjects include Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, discusses Kennedy's private life as well as his congressional career and presidency.

Michael Lind

Geoffrey Perret's Jack: A Life Like No Other presents a portrait of Kennedy that is thoroughly grounded in fact, free of partisan bias and believable.
— nytimes.com

Publishers Weekly

Perret (Ulysses S. Grant, etc.) delivers a flawed biography of JFK in which the subject trapped in the crosshairs of shoddy research and poor prose style seems unable to come to life. Perret's machine-like, event-driven narrative delivers one well-known fact after another, but the author repeatedly fails to get close to the normally ingratiating Kennedy. Further, Perret's narrative is too often driven by the few new sources he's been able to discover. Thus due to a recently unearthed travel diary we get every detail concerning JFK's generally uninteresting 1937 tour of Europe. Other of the book's problems stem from sweeping generalizations and various errors of both fact and interpretation. Discussing Joseph Kennedy Sr.'s Wall Street activities, Perret informs readers that "big stock market speculators" were blamed (by whom? the public? the government? the newspapers?) for the 1929 stock market crash. As regards errors of fact, a few include Perret's misquoting the widely known Catholic prayer "Hail Mary," his references to "Catholic ministers" and his assertion that Jack's bad back did not date from childhood (as medical records clearly show). Perret embarks on yet another arguable sidetrack from reality when he asserts that Kennedy who always took great pains to separate his public life from his religious life backed out of a 1948 event involving Protestant ministers after being "ordered" to do so by "the Catholic hierarchy," and then took the unusual step of confessing the same to journalist Drew Pearson. The anecdote, originating with Pearson, deserves scrutiny that Perret does not seem disposed to deliver. And that, sadly, is the story of this book. Photos not seen by PW. (Oct. 30)Forecast: With this title, Laurence Leamer's The Kennedy Men and a couple of titles on Jacqueline Kennedy, it's another big Kennedy season. But how much more do readers want to know about America's almost-royal family? Perhaps a lot first serial rights on this have gone to GQ, and Perret is booked on the Today Show. He will tour N.Y., D.C. and Boston. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This biography of John F. Kennedy has been damned and praised in almost equal measure. Narrated by Dick Hill, with his familiar, low-key, almost soothing voice, Jack is interesting and revelatory, well written and logical, but superficial in its overall impact. Kennedy's sexual escapades became public knowledge and so did the pain the president lived through most of his life, caused by Addison's disease and back problems. Perret asserts that JFK would have been in a wheelchair by the end of his second term. Then, too, his foreign policy decisions, from the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban Missile Crisis, have been exhaustively analyzed from all shades of political opinion. Here the author is generally even-handed. But Kennedy appeared to believe, during the 1960 election, that there was a "missile gap" with the Soviets in the face of massive evidence to the contrary, dropping the idea only after assuming office. And he was driven to live life intensely because he felt that his life would be short. He had often been sickly, he drove like a maniac, and there was always the chance of assassination. Recommended for most collections.DDon Wismer, Cary Memorial Lib., Wayne, ME Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An intriguing take on JFK? Yes. "A Life Like No Other"? Hype. No unknown scandals or significant surprises spring from these pages. The major qualities that made Jack Kennedy so compelling a figure are here: intelligence, good looks, and charm. New documents-mostly diaries, letters, and oral histories from the JFK Library-allow, however, for the mapping of what the author calls "a hinterland . . . deep, strange and surprising": John F. Kennedy as a romantic who lived life full-tilt because he correctly feared an early death. Biographer-historian Perret (Eisenhower, 1999, etc.) underscores the similarities between his subject and Lord Byron: Both lacked maternal love and suffered through ill-health in childhood, then as adults lived recklessly, bedded countless women, and inspired a whole generation through idealism and their own untimely deaths. In some ways, Perret depicts a more paradoxical, and sometimes vulnerable, man than the one we thought we knew: The self-mocking wit who reduced a roomful of listeners at a Thanksgiving celebration by mournfully singing "September Song"; a nominal Catholic who sought consolation in faith as his infant son Patrick lay dying; an avatar of youth and vigor who fretted over the jowly chin created by his medication. Kennedy's charisma is shrewdly assessed (it combined "the two essential traits of the movie star-emotional power and psychological authority"), as is the impact of Addison's disease and chronic back problems on his outlook and career. Unfortunately, though, Perret's summaries of his subject's character are filled with platitudes ("At eighteen, youth takes as its right a sense of being eternal, even when surrounded by the solicitous in whitecoats"), or by redundancies (notably, the stress on JFK's penchant for speeding). Worse, Perret does not adequately explain why he dismisses some claims about the Kennedys (such as Joe Sr.'s illegal business practices) while accepting others (abortions procured by JFK for three different lovers). For a cradle-to-grave biography free of piety and pathography, start here. For fresh disclosures on this most intensely examined president, turn elsewhere.