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As the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy draws near, bookstores are flooded with remembrances, histories and conspiracy theories centred around the beloved president.

John F. Kennedy loved the clam chowder at Boston's Union Oyster House. He loved a lime daiquiri. He loved crew-neck sweatshirts and polo shirts, almost never tucked in. He loved the Army-Navy game, a match of tennis and a breezy sailing afternoon on a yawl named the Manitou.

And he loved to read. He read in the bathtub, he read while knotting his tie, sometimes he stayed in bed all afternoon at Camp David, polishing off two books before dinner. He read history, biographies, memoirs: Edmund Burke, Churchill's Marlborough, even a spot of Ian Fleming.

In her taped testimony about America's 35th president, Jacqueline Kennedy lingered on how her husband always had several books going at once. So there is a certain poetry to the Niagara of books – histories, biographies, memoirs, several score of them – that has poured forth from publishing houses to mark the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination Nov. 22.

This amounts to perhaps the last real Kennedy moment, a grand repast of reminiscence, a festival of books about the life and the death of – and here the irony is too pungent to ignore – the first television president.

Many of these books are reprints, many are anthologies. Most are heroic. A very few offer new, important insights. But all are poignant reminders of another time–and of the terrible shared experience of that fateful Friday in November a half century ago.

The class of the field, Robert Dallek's Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House, is itself a reminder of how, in the Kennedy years – when the word "fallout" was a mortal health threat and not a common metaphor – the notion of nuclear war tumbled effortlessly from the lips of men who prided themselves on their probity and sobriety. Dean Acheson, commissioned by Kennedy to examine American options in Berlin, urged Kennedy to "accept nuclear war rather than accede to the demands which Khrushchev is now making." And it is a reminder of how, in the first months of the Kennedy administration, domestic and international pressures bore down on a president who was immensely unprepared for either. He had a fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, a jarring summit with Nikita S. Khrushchev, and challenges in Laos and Vietnam that he feared made him look weak, which they did. "There are limits to the number of defeats I can defend in one 12-month period," he told John Kenneth Galbraith, the Canadian-born economist.

Later, the president was challenged by missiles in Cuba, and depended heavily on the one aide who mattered most, Robert F. Kennedy, whom Dallek portrays as an "instrument of his brother's ideas and intentions," a role that "allowed Kennedy to provide the sort of effective leadership that carried the country and the world to a peaceful resolution of the most dangerous Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union." Not so successful in those early years was the Kennedy domestic record, for there was scant progress on the most pressing issue at home, civil rights, despite his soaring rhetoric to the contrary. This is where a second important new book comes in, Thurston Clarke's JFK's Last Hundred Days, which makes the (plausible if not entirely persuasive) argument that in his last months Kennedy emerged as a president no longer merely of promise but one finally of prominence, even greatness. Nowhere is this more evident than in civil rights, where Kennedy moved from the passive voice to the active, becoming a believer in integration and voting rights rather than a beleaguered observer of someone else's movement.

Clarke's is an imaginative book, positing that, unlike the preceding patrician president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose first hundred days paved his way to historical glory, Kennedy's last hundred days did so – the tragedy being, of course, that JFK never served his first full term nor reached his presidential potential.

The structure of the book – more a daily diary than a sculpted narrative – sometimes gets in the way of the theme, which is more implied than explained. That said, this is an intelligent work, chock full of insights. One example: With the death of his older brother Joe Jr., whose hair was flecked with stardust and whose character was charged with destiny, John Kennedy "ended up living Joe's life instead of his own, having the brilliant career that his father had always imagined for Joe." And yet Clarke shows us how in his last hundred days JFK became something else entirely, his own man, modifying his views on the urgency of the civil rights movement (he came to see delay as disingenuous); the saliency of winning the space race (he invited the Soviets into a joint lunar mission); and the trajectory of the Cold War (he spoke increasingly of peace, not confrontation). This was a political figure who as a White House candidate had called Khrushchev "the enemy" but who, in his last October, sent surplus American wheat to the Soviet Union.

For all those reasons and more (a Hollywood-and-hagiography conspiracy, you might say) Kennedy is remembered today as a liberal Democrat, but in JFK: Conservative Ira Stoll argues just the opposite. This is a volume designed to capture Kennedy's underestimated reflexive conservatism, but in truth it wasn't ever really all that hidden. As early as 1946, when he was a congressional candidate, Look magazine produced a profile of the young Navy hero, describing him in its headline as a "fighting-Irish conservative." That he was. Indeed, it was a commonplace during the 1960 Democratic primaries that Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota was the liberal and Kennedy the conservative. Even so, Stoll has produced an unsettling book, not because it shatters the myth but because it shifts the emphasis and perspective.

At the heart of his argument is that Kennedy was a fiscal conservative, a Cold Warrior, a devout anti-Communist and a big-government skeptic. All true, of course. Plus he was uncommonly tolerant of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, he broke with liberal groups in supporting Eisenhower appointments in the Senate, he spoke in the rhetoric of the muscular Christianity now associated with the religious right, and, in language more often associated with 1950s Republicans, he criticized Harry Truman for losing China.

Which, along with Ronald Reagan's embrace of the Kennedy tax cuts during his own administration, may have been the inspiration for Kennedy and Reagan, a dual biography of the two most glamorous presidents of the 20th century – men who, Scott Farris argues, "battle for primacy in death." So far, of course, Kennedy is the winner.

But JFK is the ultimate tabula rasa, perhaps explaining why so many have written so much about him. And that is the reason the half-century commemoration of his death has revived so many reminiscences. These are at the center of Where Were You?, compiled by Gus Russo and Harry Moses as a companion volume to an NBC documentary, and the massive Life magazine retrospective, The Day Kennedy Died, which includes a replica of the famous – and so widely collected that many of the readers of this essay have a copy stowed in the attic – magazine issue chronicling the assassination and funeral. (Full disclosure: My own recollection of Nov. 22, 1963, is included in the Life volume.)

Kennedy, so much a product of Boston, is nonetheless now fatefully attached to Dallas, much the way Franz Ferdinand is attached to Sarajevo rather than to Vienna or Bohemia. So inevitably this fall's yield includes a Dallas book, an exploration of the milieu in which the assassination occurred. Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis's Dallas 1963 makes the point that the outlooks, the language, the accents, and the wardrobes of Dallas and the Kennedys had almost nothing in common.

Indeed, in the 1960s, when people spoke easily of the Boston/Austin axis – two academic towns tinged with state-capital politics – no one ever breathed a word about a Boston/Dallas alignment. It was more than just the contrast between Southern Methodist University and Harvard, or the difference between the Dallas Cowboys and touch football at the Hyannisport compound. The Kennedy inner-circle (the focus of the Dallek book) was, according to these two Texas authors, "disconnected to the Kennedy family's very personality, religion and principles." That may be the understatement of the fall publishing season.

All this is but a sampler of the feast of reading produced by the semicentenery of the Kennedy administration and assassination.

There's more, of course–magazine retrospectives, examinations of the Secret Service and its failures, studies of JFK's marriage and Senate career, picture books, anthologies, a book on New York Times coverage of the Kennedy years, and an evocative six-disc collection from the National Archives in Washington that includes speeches and even Kennedy family home movies, and fresh (and warmed-over) conspiracy theories.

But two of the most intriguing volumes won't be out until next year, and both are written by Canadians. One is a look at Kennedy's governing style by Tim Naftali, the former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. The other, written by Andrew Cohen, former Globe and Mail Washington bureau chief, is an hour-by-hour examination of two momentous days in the Kennedy years in which the president faced the issues of civil rights and nuclear war. We waited 50 years for the harvest now at your bookseller's. These two are worth another year's wait.

David Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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