JFK

“He was elated. He knew he’d been nominated.” Ben Bradlee, though, was stunned to see how little attention the exhilarated victor showed his wife that night. “Kennedy ignored Jackie, and she seemed miserable at being left out of things. She was then far from the national figure she later became in her own right. She . . . stood on a stairway, totally ignored, as JFK made his victory statement on television. Later, when Kennedy was enjoying his greatest moment of triumph to date, with everyone in the hall shouting and yelling, Jackie quietly disappeared and went out to the car and sat by herself, until he was ready to fly back to Washington.”

Chris Matthews' new book Jack Kennedy is quite good and documents contradictions to a number of common images of the man (relationship to father, for example). A good job with some surprising moments. Matthews argues that JFK's greatest legacy was avoiding nuclear war during the Cuban Missile crisis, and I tend to agree with him.