John F. Kennedy
Alan Brinkley
Henry Holt and Co.
<p><P><B>The young president who brought vigor and glamour to the White House while he confronted cold war crises abroad and calls for social change at home</B></P><P>John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a new kind of president. He redefined how Americans came to see the nation's chief executive. He was forty-three when he was inaugurated in 1961--the youngest man ever elected to the office--and he personified what he called the "New Frontier" as the United States entered the 1960s.</P><P>But as Alan Brinkley shows in this incisive and lively assessment, the reality of Kennedy's achievements was much more complex than the legend. His brief presidency encountered significant failures--among them the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which cast its shadow on nearly every national-security decision that followed. But Kennedy also had successes, among them the Cuban Missile Crisis and his belated but powerful stand against segregation. </P><P>Kennedy seemed to live on a knife's edge, moving from one crisis...</P></p>