This was a well-researched and evenly written narrative about JFK. Robert Dallek gave all the information creating a thorough biography without giving his opinions. The book title I felt was appropriate to JFK's life in the sense of unfinished business and an unfinished life. The narrative provided some insight about carryover from the Eisenhower administration and the escalation into Vietnam. Overall this was a good biography of JFK; I don't know how it compares to others as this was my first biograohy about him. I would recommend it to anyone interested in JFK and his story. Thanks!

JFK is one of the most compelling figures in history. A rich Harvard educated playboy who aggressively and successfully seeks the highest office in the country.

Dallek delivers a meticulous work with over 700 pages to bring this iconic figure to life. He describes JFK's relationship with his eldest brother Joe Jr. who is killed in WWII and with his domineering father during the first part of the book. Joseph Kennedy was a great catalyst pushing his second and oldest surviving son to political success. Credit is due JFK for not squandering the opportunities afforded by his father's largess and influence.

Once Kennedy defeats Nixon in 1960 after nearly 4 years of carefully planning, JFK emerges from the shadow of his father and becomes his own man. Only 43 at the time he became president, Kennedy is faced with a number of domestic and international crises. The Civil Rights movement is the top of the domestic issues, while the Cold War dominates the international arena.

He gives what is considered one of the best and most optimistic inaugural addresses on a frigid Washington day. His inspiring words will be remembered for eternity. After a short honeymoon, his presidency quickly runs into major setbacks. His authorization of the Bay of Pigs invasion in an attempts to overthrow the Castro regime is a complete debacle. He also performes poorly when meeting Khrushchev during Vienna talks. He quickly learned from his mistakes and goes on to perform with excellence during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He takes a cautious but fair approach towards helping, although not championing, the Civil Rights effort. The Peace Corp initiative is launched successfully. His staunch support of the moon landing program is critical for the success of one of the greatest achievement of mankind. JFK does mistakenly get the US involved in the difficult conflict in Vietnam, and the country pays a heavy cost for this unpopular war in blood, treasure and prestige.

What might have been if Kennedy was not gunned down on that November day in Dallas in 1963? Would he have figured how to exit Vietnam rather than get drawn in deeper as his successor Johnson did? Would he have worked with the Russians to accelerate detente and nuclear disarmament? Would he have taken the bold measure that LBJ did to ensure key pieces of the Civil Rights Movement were passed? Would he have forged a better relationship or successfully overthrown the Castro regime?

These questions are unanswerable. His legacy is difficult to judge. Dalleck gives him much credit for his achievements. He clearly believes that Kennedy would have achieved more and set the nation and world on a better course had he been able to complete his two terms in office.

Dalleck goes into great detail about a hidden secret of JFK. Not his numerous affairs, which have been widely publicized, but his poor health. All his life JFK suffered from numerous maladies, including severe intestinal and back pain issues. It is surprising that this vivacious and energetic figure of athleticism and charisma was battling debilitation pain and able while successfully keeping these issues away from the public eye.

JFK was a courageous and determined man with a sharp intellect and the ability to master difficult crisis with calm, thoughtful and decisive action. He understood how to gain and wield power. Though he was not free of flaws and hypocrisy, he was genuinely interested in bringing out the best in his nation and its people. A fascinating man and one who will long be remember and studied. Dalleck's book, although overly biased in favor of the man, and often apologetic for his errs, is an excellent source to understand this ambitious man, who later emerged as a great man when afforded the authority.

DNF: I read about 150 pages of this and decided to put it 'on hold' for awhile. After a few days of reflecting, I decided that not only will this not be on hold, but I don't think I'll read this book again. I've read quite a bit about JFK in other books and don't find myself being enthralled about his upbringing of affluence. War hero, yes....lifetime of misery due to digestive ailments, yes, but overall his upbringing does not even make me interested enough to get to the part that I'm actually focused on: his Presidency.

His unfinished life is my unfinished book.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a book that speaks about his time in office rather than a complete biography?

Crushingly disappointing.

Dallek -a great author- received access to JFK’s medical records and seems determined to use them at every opportunity. Consequently, the reader knows a great deal ( perhaps too much!) of Kennedy’s medical history and nowhere near enough about pretty much everything else.

This is a very thoughtful and well written biography of a complex and riveting person. Not only does the book provide an interesting analysis of JFK it helps shed light his influence had on shaping today’s world. I highly recommend this book.

I had to read this entire book for my English dialectical (a journal where you have to take a page of notes on every chapter).

Considering that this was around 700 pages and had more than 40 chapters, this was not a fun reading experience for me.

Regardless though, the biography itself was rich and extensive. Honestly, though I was a fan of JFK before I read this, but afterwards, not so much.

He womanized and cheated so much, and he only got into Congress because of his father's money and influence: basically the Irish political bosses, and he was really apathetic on civil rights and other important issues.

Ehh... :p My least favorite type of politician: extremely popular with good reputation but tarnished on the inside.

The Kennedy's were the closest America has ever had to royalty, and it is a family filled with tragedy. JFK was pretty amazing in the fact that his presidency was only a thousand days. He had so many hidden health issues and his womanizing was notorious -- I don't believe in the current age of constant tweeting that he would have been able to hide any of it from the masses. Yet with all the underlying issues or baggage he had as our country's leader -- he was the leader at one of the most incredible phases in modern history. Some key issues his tenor had experienced were civil rights, Vietnam, communism issues in Cuba and globally, and yes, the Cold War nearing the brink of nuclear interaction or war. Some historians feel his was more personality over substance. However I feel we were very lucky to have his "cool" wherewithal during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Good book -- recommended.

I really had to think before I started this book because the nearly 1,000 pages were a tad daunting. But it's a really good read. This is one of the third generation books about John F. Kennedy. Following his assassination, there were countless books that romanticized him and his presidency. Then years later, the highly critical books began to be published. This look at Kennedy by Robert Dallek, a professor of history at Boston University, looks at Kennedy from childhood through his assassination, then muses on what might have been if he had lived and been reelected in 1964. At a Yale commencement, Kennedy commented that "the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie--but the myth." This book bears that out. Dallek is willing to focus on both the strengths and the weaknesses of the president. One of Kennedy's strengths was his ability to change his mind and remain flexible when facing political issues--this was particularly important in dealing with the fall-out after the Bay of Pigs and in dealing with the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, his weaknesses were equally important. Dallek criticizes Kennedy for his cautious and political approach to civil rights that was often watered down because of his desire not to alienate southern Democrats before the 1964 election. Dallek has access to more records and archives when writing this book than any other biographer of Kennedy and it clearly shows. Dallek doesn't flinch from describing how much pain Kennedy was in for most of his life and details the huge amount of medication that he took daily for the pain and for his various physical ailments. This book is well written, accessible, and a must read for anyone interested in the political history of the United States in the middle of the 20th century. Highly recommended.

In my opinion, this is a good biography of JFK, but not a great one. This is the first major biography of JFK in thirty years. Dallek had complete access to the Kennedy family documents. There is nothing new in the book, except information about an affair with a White House intern.

The book is well written and researched. The book appears to be unbiased. Dallek does mention JFK’s “Womanizing”. But most of the book is on his political career. About half the book is about the presidency. Dallek provides information on his medical conditions. There is very little information about Jackie, the children or his siblings.

The book makes a good review of JFK. I remember his presidency as if it was yesterday. My how time flies!

I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. The book is nine hours and fifteen minutes. Richard McGonagle does a good job narrating the book. McGonagle is an actor, voice actor and well-known audiobook narrator particularly of presidential biographies. Note: The audiobook was not marked as an abridged version but it sure appears to be one.

Dallek presents a balanced and solid biography of JFK. He is especially good at fleshing out the myths purporting to JFK's WWII command of PT-109 in the Pacific, his lifelong penchant for womanizing, and his myriad and never-ending medical difficulties. He presents JFK as both a foreign policy realist and an idealist - and how he straddled the line between both views.

Dallek does not delve deeply into the close relationship between JFK and RFK, which began in the 1950s. While certainly alluding to it several times throughout the chapters on the 1960 election and JFK's subsequent time in office, I found Arthur Schlesinger Jr's magisterial "Robert F. Kennedy and His Times" to be much more enlightening on this subject. However, I don't think that was Dallek's goal, and I can understand that.

Dallek is especially strong JFK's foreign policy triumphs and missteps. The chapters concerning Cuba, Vietnam, and JFK's dealings with Khrushchev are particularly detailed and well-written. He also does a good job of showing how JFK was way too slow to respond to the growing Civil Rights disturbances in the South.

The chapter on the 1960 election and campaign is good. For a much more detailed account (not read to be a criticism of Dallek here): see David Pietrusza's "1960: JFK vs LBJ vs Nixon."

I would have liked to have seen some more analysis re: the assassination, and who Dallek really thinks was behind it. It seems like he leans towards Oswald as a lone gunman, but doesn't quite fully venture out on that limb.

One issue I do take with Dallek is his assertion at the end that JFK would have enjoyed a similar ultra-successful legislative experience that LBJ had, had Kennedy lived. While we will never know for sure, I doubt that JFK would have equaled LBJ's domestic achievements in 1964-1965. LBJ was a master of Congress in general and the Senate in particular, and he knew exactly who to pressure and prod to support his legislation and how to do it. And, LBJ was helped by the fact that many people felt that since JFK had alread proposed some of these bills or programs, that the Congress should accede to his wishes.

Robert Dallek's biography on John F. Kennedy is very well titled. It is a work that leaves you a little unsatisfied. Not because Dallek did a bad job, quite the contrary it is a very good book, but in the end you just feel like you watched a really good movie that ends suddenly and very incomplete. There is a lot of huff made in comparing Kennedy to President Lincoln, in the years they were elected, names of their vice presidents/successors, etc, etc. However, it is important to note the major difference of Lincoln serving a full term plus, and Kennedy's dying at the start of his re-election bid. Lincoln's story climaxes at the Gettysburg Address and concludes at his second inaugural, when he is later murdered by John Wilkes Booth, the mission that he started had already been completed beyond his, Lincoln's, wildest dreams. The Union had been saved and slavery, which he wanted to put on the path to destruction, was destroyed; Lincoln had fulfilled his place in history. Kennedy had been able to complete a good deal of the ground work that he needed to accomplish in his historic mission. The bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been proposed to the Congress; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had stated was the most powerful civil rights legislation ever proposed by a president. To help settle some of the political damage that it was going to cause in the South, Kennedy went to campaign in Dallas, Texas where he would lose his life.

Dallek's story begins with the history of the two families that would create John F. Kennedy, the Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds. Joseph P. Kennedy marries Rose Fitzgerald the daughter of Mayor John 'Honey Fitz' Fitzgerald uniting their two families. They would name their second son after his maternal grandfather. Everyone in the family expected a lot of John's older brother, Joe, Jr., who John was very close to growing up. His other brothers were far too young for him to have much of a relationship with. Kennedy's youth, although blessed with wealth, was cursed by a lack of health; he was always ill and spent a great deal of time with doctors. Throughout the whole misadventure Kennedy would maintain good humor about his situation.

"More puzzling medical problems punctuated Jack's second year at Choate. In January and February 1933, 'flu-like symptoms' plagued him, as well as almost constant pain in his knees. 'Jack's winter term sounded like a hospital report,' a fiftieth-anniversary remembrance of his attendance at the school recounted, 'with correspondence flying back and forth between Rose Kennedy and Clara St. John [the headmaster's wife]. Again, eyes, ears, teeth, knees, arches, from the top of his head to the tip of his toes, Jack needed attention.' X-rays showed no pathology in his knees, and so his doctor attributed his difficulties to growing pains and recommended exercises and 'built up' shoes." p.34-5

Nevertheless he would through sheer determination, get himself in shape enough to join the Navy and serve as a P.T. boat captain. He would famously captain the PT-109 and would get his most of his crew to safety when an enemy destroyed their boat. Unfortunately, for the Kennedy family they would suffer two tremendous tragedies during the war. The first, which took place before JFK's command, was his sister Rosemary's botched lobotomy that took her personhood. The second was the death of Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. who was killed on a secret mission.

When the war was over JFK, began to pursue his own political career, his father's ended the moment he misjudged the political situation of World War II, going as far to praise the German Dictator Adolph Hitler. The young Kennedy, however, was going to rise and rise fast. Kennedy wrote a book, Why England Slept, in which he separated himself from his father's opinion of World War II. He would be elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1946. There he would befriend another freshman Congressman, named Richard M. Nixon. A pure status-type of politician Congressman Kennedy became bored of the House and, in 1952, ran for the United States Senate against the incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge II, whose grandfather for whom he was named, helped bring down Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations proposal. Kennedy would win and would enter the Senate that would soon be ruled by an all-powerful majority leader named Lyndon B. Johnson. Kennedy's eight years in the Senate were rather unremarkable but he did find the time to write, or at least be the leader chief editor, for the Pulitzer Prize winning book Profiles in Courage.

In 1960, John F. Kennedy changed history by running for president, not just being the first Catholic to win the office, but he changed the way presidents were nominated. Kennedy took the primaries more seriously than any candidate in the past; enough so that when the convention started Kennedy was able to capture it on the first ballot. The master of the Senate, much to the suffering of the candidate's younger brother, Robert F. Kennedy, was going to be on the ticket for vice president. Kennedy would go the general election facing his old friend Vice President Richard M. Nixon. Together they were going to participate in the first televised presidential debates. Nixon seemed to win on substance but Kennedy would win on style. When Election Day, came Kennedy would prevail in one of the closet elections on record and would take office on January 20, 1961.

"In the final analysis, the most important question is not why Kennedy won but why his victory was so narrow. Harry Truman was amazed at the closeness of the race. "Why, even our friend Adlai would have had a landslide running against Nixon,' he told Senator William Benton of Connecticut. Given the majority status of the Democrats, the discontent over the state of the economy and international affairs, and Kennedy's superior campaign and campaigning, he should have gained at least 52 or 53 percent of the popular vote. Everyone on his staff had predicted a victory of between 53 and 57 percent. The small margin shocked them. What they missed was the unyielding fear of having a Catholic in the White House. Although about 46 percent of Protestants voted for Kennedy, millions of them in Ohio, Wisconsin, and across the South made his religion a decisive consideration. It was the first time a candidate had won the presidency with a minority of Protestant voters." p.296

Kennedy's presidency has been described as Camelot and there certainly was that feel. A new young President and his family had moved into the White House and things were going to be different. Kennedy's administration would change the nation in a number of ways; this presidency saw an increase of national support for NASA and the moon program. In addition, there were some real highs and lows of the Cold War. The botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was a national embarrassment but more importantly President Kennedy saw us through the scary Cuban Missile Crisis.

"The Peace Corps proved to be one of the enduring legacies of Kennedy's presidency. As with some American domestic institutions like Social Security and Medicare, the Peace Corps became a fixture that Democratic and Republican administrations alike would continue to finance for over forty years. It made far more friends than enemies and, as Kennedy had hoped, convinced millions of people abroad that the United States was eager to help developing nations raise standards of living."p.340

On Civil Rights, like Lincoln a hundred years before him, he would be pressured from all over the political spectrum, to the advocates on the ground he was too slow and to conservatives he was too fast and radical. The first two years of his presidency, Kennedy wanted to move slowly though executive actions rather then fight for legislation. Later the President began to take more forceful action on that front, but he not live to finish the job. That would be carried on by his successor President Lyndon B. Johnson*.

Assassination creates secular saints and when Lee Harvey Oswald, murdered the President on November 22, 1963, Kennedy's martyred image would aid the new administration in establishing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and would be an asset to what President Johnson called the Great Society. Dallek does an incredible job detailing a great deal of these events, and I strongly recommend this book.

*That is something Lincoln did not have, his replacement, President Andrew Johnson, caused all sorts of problems during his incompetent stay as the nation's chief executive.

4.5 Stars

An Unfinished Life is different from the usual Kennedy biographies I like to read. I usually prefer to read gossipy more tawdry books about the Kennedy's because they're more fun. I like to read about sex, the mafia, and murder coverups.

But...

An Unfinished Life is a serious look at the life and presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Robert Dallek doesn't spend much time on gossip or rumors, he prefers to stick to the facts. I couldn't tell if Robert Dallek liked or disliked JFK, I never felt like he was trying to sway my opinion of JFK. Dallek simply laid out the facts and tried to contextualize way he made the decisions he made.

A lot of our opinions on JFK are based on myths and distortions but through Dallek we get a more complex view of the life of the 35th president.

This book spends a whole lot of time focusing on the policies of the Kennedy administration and I'll be honest sometimes its a rather boring read. I found myself skimming some of the sections on tax reform, Robert Dallek is a superb writer but not even he could make taxes an interesting read.

An Unfinished Life is a deeply engrossing read that gave me a better understanding of who John Kennedy the man and the President were.

A Must Read!