Ex Libris: John F. Kennedy

President John F. Kennedy reading during his downtime. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

Before his assassination and afterwards, John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) was lauded by his admirers for reasons running from his policies as president to his charm and good looks. Some even associated his administration with a popular musical of the time, “Camelot,” with that play’s glamour and idealism transported from Broadway to the White House.

Over the last 50 years, other biographers and historians have taken the shine off this romance, exposing Kennedy’s personal flaws and hashing out the mistakes made by his administration. Today, he is probably better remembered, especially among the Gen Z crew, more for his assassination than for events like the Cuban Missile Crisis or American achievements in space.

A son of wealth and privilege, Kennedy was educated in exclusive private schools and earned a cum laude degree in government and international studies from Harvard. Riding on his wealthy father’s position as American ambassador to Britain’s Court of St. James, the young Kennedy also learned about the world beyond Boston through extensive travel, visiting numerous European countries before the outbreak of war in 1939.

John F. Kennedy during his time at Harvard. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

Books and reading were the third leg on this tripod of learning.

Reading in Bed

Plagued by illnesses and infirmities throughout his life, Kennedy spent a good deal of time as a boy either in hospitals or confined to bed. These long stretches of inactivity helped develop his voracious appetite for the printed word. In an article regarding this connection, The Christian Science Monitor’s Peter Grier noted that “visitors would remark that the thin, young patient could hardly be seen behind the books piled around his pillow.”

From those early days of reading through his presidency, Kennedy favored books about history. In a 1961 Life magazine article about the chief executive’s reading habits, Kennedy listed his top ten favorite books. Among these were biographies of Abraham Lincoln and John C. Calhoun, and a favorite, “John Quincy Adams” by James Flagg Bemis.

Hands Across the Water

Kennedy was especially drawn to Winston Churchill’s books of history and contemporary affairs. On his Life magazine list appears Churchill’s four-volume “Marlborough,” possibly Kennedy’s all-time favorite work by the Englishman and one of the outstanding biographies produced during the 20th century.

Winston Churchill published this four-volume set on the first duke of Marlborough, John Churchill. John F. Kennedy read this voluminous biography.

Even in his younger days, before World War II brought international fame to Churchill, Kennedy was reading his books. In 1934, a friend of the family who visited Kennedy in the Mayo Clinic later said, “I was very impressed, because at that point this very young child was reading ‘The World Crisis’ by Winston Churchill.”

At age 16, Kennedy was hardly a “very young child,” but that incident nonetheless vouches for his early interest in foreign affairs and in Churchill. In 1938, Churchill published “While England Slept,” a collection of his speeches about the dangerously passive European and British response to the growing power of the Nazis. In 1940, Kennedy paid an enormous compliment to Churchill and his book by publishing a complementary study which he called “Why England Slept.” Sales of Kennedy’s book were brisk in both the UK and in America.

007

Ian Fleming's thrillers became popular in America when John F. Kennedy mentioned "From Russia With Love" as one of his Top 10 books. This is the first edition cover of the book.

Like most serious readers, Kennedy had a place on his shelves for entertainments as well as for heavy-duty works, and on his Top 10 list we find Ian Fleming’s “From Russia With Love.” His inclusion of this spy novel sent sales of the James Bond thrillers soaring.

While some might dismiss the 007 novels as fluff and escapism, we should consider the times in which Fleming’s novels were published. The Cold War was going full tilt, and Bond’s battles with Soviet spies and assassins dramatized the tensions and stakes at play between the USSR and the West. Outside the pages of fiction, yet at the forefront of these very real confrontations, was Kennedy. More than most readers, perhaps, he could appreciate the thrust of Fleming’s stories.

By Way of Explanation

Kennedy also included on his Life magazine favorite books list John Buchan’s 1928 “Montrose,” a biography of the first marquess of Montrose. The choice is interesting, as biographers usually mention instead the impact on Kennedy of Buchan’s “Pilgrim’s Way,” which was originally titled “Memory Hold-the-Door” and from which Kennedy frequently quoted. David Shribman of The Detroit News wrote, “This volume was Kennedy’s favorite book. He read and reread it, lived by its precepts, adopted its worldview.”

"Pilgrim's Way: An Essay in Recollection" by John Buchan is often cited as a great favorite of John Kennedy.

Kennedy’s wife and widow, Jacqueline, agreed with this assessment. In a memorial issue of Look magazine, published a year after her husband’s death, she wrote, “‘Pilgrim’s Way,’ the memoirs of John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir, he once said was his favorite book. He gave it to me before we were married. The part for which he cared most was a portrait of the brilliant Raymond Asquith … who was killed in action in World War 1. The poignancy of men dying young always moved my husband—possibly because of his brother Joe dying in World War II. I think the first line [‘He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly but because he felt deeply’] could have been written of John F. Kennedy.”

“To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education,” John Buchan wrote. Like some of our other presidents, Kennedy lived close to great minds in part through his reading.

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