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The Best Year of Their Lives is not a typical presidential biography in that it forgoes the comprehensive approach to history. Instead, Lance Morrow shows why 1948 was a watershed year not just for John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon personally, but for the nation as well. That is the year that Johnson, in his bid for the Senate, used huge sums of corporate money to bombard the media with lies about his opponent, finally stealing the election by 87 votes by having a ballot box stuffed (thus earning the nickname "Landslide Lyndon"). Had he lost, he would have arguably been out of politics forever and the course of history would have been changed. At the same time, Nixon, as a freshman congressman, launched his political career by using his seat on the House Un-American Activities Committee to relentlessly pursue Alger Hiss, making himself a prominent national figure in the process. (Four years later he became Eisenhower's running mate.) Meanwhile, Kennedy was working hard to suppress the fact that he had Addison's disease. He continued to lie about his health for the rest of his life just as he later hid his reckless personal behavior. Through anecdotes and analysis (including personal contact; all three were presences in Morrow's childhood), Morrow shows how secrets and lies were to shape the behavior of all of them. This "convergence of personal ambition with secrecy, amorality, and a ruthless manipulation of the truth" would have tremendous implications for the country. The events of 1948 also foreshadow the tragedies and scandals that would end all three of their administrations.
Externally, the three presidents were radically different. Internally, argues Morrow, they were identical in many ways in that they "shared a tendency toward elaborately deliberated amorality; all three behaved as if rules were for others, not for them." Along with a rapidly changing American society, the start of the Cold War, and looming atomic destruction, 1948 ushered in modern politics and these men were the embodiment of it. Absorbing and unconventional, The Best Year of Their Lives adds to the considerable bodies of work already available on all three presidents. --Shawn Carkonen
Book Description
Three future presidents-JFK, Nixon, and LBJ-in the crucial year of 1948, when all were young congressmen facing major turning points, while America itself was poised as a new global superpower.
In 1948, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon were all ambitious young congressmen at pivotal points in their lives. LBJ was in a desperate Senate race, running against a more popular candidate. Campaigning frantically by helicopter across Texas, LBJ won only with the help of corrupt political bosses, whose illegal ballot-stuffing put "Landslide Lyndon" into the Senate by 87 votes. At the same time, Nixon was having his first meetings with Whittaker Chambers, the witness in the Alger Hiss trial that would make Nixon a national figure and lead to his selection as Eisenhower's running mate four years later. And Kennedy was still recovering from the near-fatal attack of Addison's disease he had suffered the previous year. From that point on, he would conceal the truth about his health, just as he concealed his reckless personal life. In all three politicians, Morrow finds a streak of amorality and ruthlessness-each believed that the rules didn't apply to him. Lies of one kind or another-lies they told or exposed-would propel each of them to power; lies would also undo LBJ and Nixon's presidencies and, ultimately, tarnish JFK's reputation.
Morrow also tells the story of America in 1948, when it, too, was learning the secrets of power, and coming to grips with the vast changes of the postwar world. For readers of Robert Caro and Robert Dallek, The Best Year of Their Lives offers a fresh look at a crucial turning point in the lives of three presidents, by one of America's most observant and thoughtful journalists.
Customer Reviews:
BORING !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.......2006-06-12
Almost 300 pages of nothing - including several pages wasted on the camparison of Nixon to Lana Turner (I still cannot make the connection). Morrow rambles on endlessly about minor details of the 3 main characters lives - and most of it is BS. This book was horrible - no wonder why it was in the discount section of the bookstore. What a waste !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What a Disappointment.......2005-12-20
This book starts with a great premise -- three future Presidents at a common turning point in their lives, 1948. I bought this book thinking it was history. But I soon discovered that the occasional random historical nugget was buried among piles and piles of pretentious psychobabble, strained metaphors, obscure pop culture references, and delusions of literary grandeur. I'm not sure what's more bizarre -- the discussion of Nixon's sex life, or the pages and pages exploring the similarities between Nixon and Lana Turner.
A history of these three presidents in 1948 would make a great book. Maybe someday someone will actually write it.
Mr. Morrow Needs Prozac or was he on some bad acid trip.......2005-09-24
I thought Mr. Morrow was a Senior Editor of Time, not the National Enquirer. This is an abysmal attempt to summarize and extrapolate on Caro's Years of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Morriss' Years of Richard Nixon, and most especially Garry Wills' Nixon Agonistes. Wills especially should sue Morrow for impersonation.
Three titles in search of a story.......2005-09-10
I should have known better. The last book I read that had a title, subtitle, and sub-subtitle confused me and that seems to have happened again. Morrow offers three titles, labels, or come ons: "The best years of their lives," "Learning the secrets of power," and "Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon in 1948." I'm still not sure which one is the `real' title. The three concepts each had promise. These are three American icons, both loved and despised. The year - 1948 - happened to be a pivotal year, not just for these three, but also for the rest of America. The hot war was cold, and the cold was getting hot, and the Baby Boom was booming. Opportunity and optimism seemed unlimited, especially to young, power hungry politicians like Nixon, Johnson and Kennedy.
The disappointment I felt was that none of the promises implied in the three labels for the book earned much attention from the author. Morrow tells us more about Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss than Richard Nixon, about George Smathers and Joe Kennedy than Jack Kennedy, and Coke Stevenson and Lady Bird rather than Lyndon Johnson. If these three presidents of the future learned any secrets of power in 1948, the secrets remain undiscovered by me. Maybe I'm not reading well enough into the analysis. Morrow waxes poetic about eerie parallels in lives, like Lana Turner and Richard Nixon, notes the impact of all the dead, diseased and disturbed relatives and their effects on the three main characters, and offers an encyclopedia of armchair psychoanalysis and cultural sidebars, mixing religion, crucifixion complexes, politics, Hollywood, and Albert Kinsey. Theories, not secrets.
It is not even clear how -if at all - that 1948 was the best year of each man's life. The attempt to link these three lives to the Hollywood film reminded me that 1948 was the best year of "our" lives, so I guess all Americans had a pretty good year in 1948, especially war veterans. But Johnson was not much of a veteran (Johnson's Silver Star makes John Kerry's Purple Hearts look like Medals of Honor) and Kennedy, well Morrow acknowledges that the PT-109 story was more of a court martial offense than the makings of a heroic legend. Even Nixon was more of a Mr. Roberts than any battle-scarred veteran. These men had more to be embarrassed about than proud when it comes to war service, but politics makes legends out of molehills and Morrow provides us with three moles. Morrow's tangential summary description of the role, character and accomplishments of George Marshall makes these three men look like the three blind mice.
Reading on, looking for integration or even a consistent narrative, the pages slipped away, leaving me scratching my head. When a 300-page book has only four chapters, maybe that should have been a sign. The stories jump all around, often into Jack Kennedy's sex life and his coarse way of rationalizing his need for sex, and Morrow seems to obsess about dark secrets, homosexuality, suicide, drunkenness and bankruptcy. These may be secrets a lot of people would like to keep a secret, but they don't tell me anything about "the secrets of power."
Stephen Ambrose (Nixon), Thomas Reeves (Kennedy) and Robert Caro (Johnson) are much better chroniclers of the more complete, factual, historic versions of the lives of thee important figures, including 1948.
Digging Deep And Turning Up Gold.......2005-08-03
The Party did its best to paint Richard Nixon as some sort of war hero, but it didn't have too much to work with. Apparently Nixon spent most of the war amassing a small fortune in winning crap games and poker, gambling and the dog races, making a specialty of fleecing other members of his platoon on payday. He came away from WWII with a substantial little campaign fund, more power to him, but not easy to bulk up into hero status. LBJ too tried to re-cast his war years as his personal voyage into the danger zone but of course that was just so much hogwash. Lance Morrow shows us JFK's war as being the only one really that had the oomph of legend, as witness his book PT-109, which had something Americans identified with, perhaps a willingness to push through even when things look darkest.
And things seemed bleak in 1948, the year Morrow focuses on in his new, exciting psychobiography. Unexpectedly bleak, for Americans had been longing for years for the war to end, when, it was said, they would find the answers and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Instead what did they discover? Only more uncertainty, and a nation once again divided among itself. It was actually a great time to be a politician; as Morrow points out, pols thrive on misery and do their best work while energizing a demoralized public into action one way or another. For Kennedy, the year involved accepting first the wild love life of his sister "Kick," whose involvement with the Cavendish family would have assuredly led to a Profumo like scandal later in life, and then her tragic death, with its reverberations of his brother's earlier death in the War. The shades of night were creeping in fast for Jack, who learned around the same time something of the dimension of his own Addison's disease, a psychic wound as well as a physical threat. If he hadn't hitherto looked to sex for an escape, he certainly began to do so now.
Nixon wasn't threatened by illness, but the way he jumped onto the Pumpkin Papers revealed a man with a certain mania on his brain. Was it the urge, like all politicians, just to see his picture in the paper no matter what the context? Or did he believe he was saving the country from those who had plunged us into war--a war which, he imagined, was really a liberal jihad unrelated to Americans' ordinary concerns? People liked Nixon because he was one of us, from the lower middle class, he wasn't pretentious like FDR or JFK or, heaven forbid, Alger Hiss; and Nixon's dogged pursuit of Hiss--like a terrier with his teeth firmly in Alger Hiss' patrician ass--carried with it the fanatical strains of Madame Defarge from the TALE OF TWO CITIES. He was the little man pulling down the big man, and the crowd roared in approval.
Johnson's attack on Coke Stevenson is the weak link in Morrow's otherwise brilliant account. Caro did this part so much better and at greater length in Vol 2 of his biography, that rehashing it here produces no new insights, little new info.
I found myself wishing that Morrow had introduced a fourth character, perhaps Truman himself, to give yet more shadows to his picture of a fateful year. Could have been like a new Mount Rushmore! (Or the 4 Marx Brothers, depending on how jaundiced your view of politics.)
Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Historian, published by Thomson Gale on December 22, 2006. The length of the article is 519 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: The Best Year of Their Lives: Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in 1948: Learning the Secrets of Power.(Book review)
Author: James W. Hilty
Publication:
The Historian (Magazine/Journal)
Date: December 22, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 68
Issue: 4
Page: 839(2)
Article Type: Book review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
The March of the Ten Thousand is one of the most famous military adventures in the ancient world. Its fearless army of Greek mercenaries marched through western Asia (modern Turkey and Iraq) in 401–399 B.C., their hopes and hardships recounted by Xenophon, the Athenian, an admiring pupil of Socrates. Xenophon’s history of the Long March, or Anabasis, is a classic of Greek literature.
In this book, twelve leading scholars explore the Anabasis, a deceptively simple and profoundly rich source of social and cultural history and the mentality of the ancient Greek participants. The contributors explore a wide range of topics, from Xenophon’s values, motives, and manner as a writer to the outlook of his companions as mercenary soldiers, from his descriptions of religion in soldiers’ lives to their relations with women, boys, and the many foreign peoples encountered during the march.
Customer Reviews:
An Artifact in Itself........2007-01-23
A dozen specialists assemble to discuss their speciality. They write papers and read them to one another. The papers repeat what they know and a few things that are new. These are published in a book.
They remind each other that a parasang was a unit of time, not space; that Xenophon was often self-serving; and that motives of Greeks on the march were mixed. These are worth being reminded of, but not new. Recent discoveries in Persian studies are mentioned, but not examined. None realizes that the Cyropaedea is as much a treatise on an ideal curriculum, an issue that was on Plato's mind, as it is an encomium for Cyrus. Many, based on their own attention spans, are certain that Xenophon could not possibly have reported long speeches verbatim, decades after the fact, without contemporaneous notes. None speculates that Xenophon's name, "foreign voice," might have significance.
The book covers important issues and reports current directions of scholarship for specialists in other fields as well as laity. But its most interesting aspect may be the character of examiners themselves. Their intellectual style, strategies, and speculations reveal the pathology of those who dedicate themselves to knowing more and more about less and less. This makes it diverting, as well as improving, for the careful reader.
Book Description
1 MP3-CD, With Music and Sound Effects, 7 Hours 33 Minutes THE MARCH OF THE TEN THOUSAND, (The March Upcountry, The Anabasis, The Persian Expedition, March to the Sea) is one of the most admired and widely read pieces of all ancient literature. Xenophon employs a very simple, straightforward style to describe what is probably the most fabulous military adventure ever undertaken. When Cyrus, brother to the Great King of Persia, attempts to overthrow his feckless sibling, he employs a Greek mercenary army of 10,000 hoplites. Xenophon is among the common soldiers. When this army becomes stranded as a result of the death of Cyrus, and then witnesses the treacherous murder of its entire officer corps, despair overtakes them. Xenophon rallies the Greeks, has them elect new officers, then leads them to freedom across 1,500 miles of hostile territory seething with adversaries. It is an epic of courage, faith and democratic principle.
Customer Reviews:
Gripping eyewitness to history.......2007-04-30
This is a gripping tale of an army of men trapped deep in enemy territory 1,500 miles from home - alone, leaderless and outnumbered - and their ability to regroup and safely retreat against all odds. Google around the web for a few good maps to help you follow the march.
I especially enjoyed the several magnificent speeches Xenophon gives to rally the troops or to defend himself against accusers. One of his best quotes: "a prince's finest possessions are justice and generosity."
This very human study shows human behavior does not change. It's easier (or clearer) to deal with enemies than friends, as friends come in many guises. Interesting for insight into political machinations of the ancient world. But one could substitute more familiar terms such as "senate" or "mayor" and recognize the same types of people and patterns of behavior.
Good reader, good pacing.
Product Description
This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1818 edition by John Murray, London.
Average customer rating:
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COLOMBIA: TENS OF THOUSANDS OF INDIGENOUS MARCH FOR RIGHTS, AGAINST FREE-TRADE TREATY.: An article from: NotiSur - South American Political and Economic Affairs
Manufacturer: Latin American Data Base/Latin American Institute
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Release Date: 2005-08-01 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from NotiSur - South American Political and Economic Affairs, published by Latin American Data Base/Latin American Institute on September 24, 2004. The length of the article is 1493 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: COLOMBIA: TENS OF THOUSANDS OF INDIGENOUS MARCH FOR RIGHTS, AGAINST FREE-TRADE TREATY.
Publication:
NotiSur - South American Political and Economic Affairs (Newsletter)
Date: September 24, 2004
Publisher: Latin American Data Base/Latin American Institute
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Historian, published by Thomson Gale on March 22, 2006. The length of the article is 851 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: The Long March: Xenophon and the Ten Thousand.(Book review)
Author: Paul Cartledge
Publication:
The Historian (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 22, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 68
Issue: 1
Page: 175(2)
Article Type: Book review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from New Criterion, published by Thomson Gale on October 1, 2005. The length of the article is 1974 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Thalatta! Thalatta!(The Long March: Xenophon and the Ten Thousand)("The Sea! The Sea!": The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination)(Book Review)
Author: Victor Davis Hanson
Publication:
New Criterion (Magazine/Journal)
Date: October 1, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 24
Issue: 2
Page: 66(4)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy, published by Kluwer Law International on January 1, 2003. The length of the article is 2413 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Marine Protected Areas: Tools for Sustaining Ocean Ecosystems.(Book Review)
Author: Peter H. Flournoy
Publication:
Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2003
Publisher: Kluwer Law International
Volume: 6
Issue: 1-2
Page: 137(6)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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