The Bystander

Jonathan Yardley

Bryant, who studied American history and politics at Cambridge and Oxford, is that genuine rarity: a Brit who actually understands the United States. The Bystander does retrace too much familiar ground in too great detail, but it is solid, knowledgeable and perceptive.
— The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

In this critical look at Kennedy's handling of the civil rights struggle, Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, provides a riveting but flawed read. From Kennedy's first campaign for Congress, when he targeted black voters, to his last days wooing Southern moderates in Texas, this narrowly focused book depicts Kennedy as a "minimalist" whose "sometimes cynical, sometimes sincere" manipulation of black opinion gave him a false sense of accomplishment. It shows how Kennedy swerved from rapprochement with segregationist Democrats during his failed bid for the vice-presidency in 1956 to the liberal vanguard during his run for president. Bryant claims that until halfway through his presidency, Kennedy viewed the race problem with "cool detachment," worrying mainly that the Soviet Union would cast the U.S. as weak on human rights. His taste for "piecemeal reform" might have worked with the wider public, Bryant argues, but it emboldened both white and black militants, and his call for legislation to speed up school desegregation came too late. By the time he was assassinated, Kennedy had "abdicated his responsibility to lead the great social revolution of his age," Bryant asserts. While that may be true, this well-written book fails to consider the immense distractions of the other historic struggle that Kennedy faced: the Cold War, at its height. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Bryant (former Washington, current South Asia, correspondent, BBC) provides a harsh but fair assessment of JFK's civil rights policies, focusing arguably unprecedented attention on his six years in the House of Representatives and eight years in the Senate. Kennedy supported all civil rights legislation then, but once he became President, the Cold War became his focus. Bryant is especially good at showing Kennedy's deference to the racist Southern bloc that dominated Congress, demonstrating that this bloc was not as powerful as Kennedy believed. While Kennedy is credited for proposing what became the 1964 Civil Rights Act and for making racism socially unacceptable, Bryant notes that his safe symbolic gestures, such as promoting black self-improvement, came at the expense of confronting hard issues like school desegregation. In effect, Kennedy set in motion the violent and tragic civil rights battles that engulfed the 1960s. Bryant's outstanding scholarship must be included with Nick Kotz's Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Laws That Changed America and Robert Mann's The Walls of Jericho: Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Russell, and the Struggle for Civil Rights as the best recent works on this important subject. Highly recommended for larger public libraries and for all academic collections.-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

JFK, martyred liberal icon, turns out to have been wholly indifferent to the question of civil rights for black Americans. Kennedy, who built a political career on the sinking of PT-109, once told a fellow survivor, "My story about the collision is getting better all the time. Now I've got a Jew and a nigger in the story and with me being a Catholic, that's great." Kennedy may have had Jewish supporters and advisers, but even in the White House, writes historian/journalist Bryant, most of the blacks he encountered were domestic staff. Thus, his brother Bobby, called to press the point that the summer of '63 was going to be long and hot, told him, "My friends all say the Negro maids and servants are getting antagonistic." Kennedy was not so much bigoted-never mind the casual use of the "n" word-as he was opportunistic; he needed the Southern Democrats in order to advance his political ambitions, and while in Congress he played to them so much that throughout the '50s he was praised in Deep South newspapers as an ally of segregation. The very suggestion seems anathema, but it certainly explains Kennedy's actions in helping denature the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Shocking, too, is Kennedy's alliance with white-supremacist politician John Patterson, which led the great baseball player and civil-rights activist Jackie Robinson to voice "his displeasure by refusing to have his photograph taken with Kennedy at a New York dinner." Kennedy admired Martin Luther King Jr., but mostly for his rhetorical skills; King, in turn, thought Kennedy not a bad man but in need of much guidance. The Birmingham strike of 1963, with Sheriff Bull Connor's setting attack dogs on black demonstrators, finally turnedKennedy. But before Connor did so, only four percent of Americans thought civil rights was the country's most urgent issue, while 52 percent thought so afterward. A necessary tarnishing of Camelot's gleaming image.