John F. Kennedy's Early Years with Fredrik Logevall

This American President

Society & Culture, Education, History

4.6 • 698 Ratings

🗓️ 19 January 2021

⏱️ 60 minutes

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Summary

John F. Kennedy's early years were formative for his knowledge of international relations, and provided him the ability to steer the nation through perilous events in the Cold War during his presidency. In this episode, we interview Pulitzer...

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The Today we have a special guest. His name is Frederick Logueval. He is a professor from Harvard University. He's the Lawrence Belfour Professor of International
0:40.7	Affairs at the John Fennedy School of Government. He won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for history for his book
0:47.6	Embers of War, the Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, which is really one of the must reads on that subject.
0:57.9	And he's now written a book on one of our most iconic presidents and important presidents.
1:03.9	The book is called JFK, Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917 to 1956.
1:16.3	And that book covers basically much of his life up until about four years before he ran for president. Professor Logovall, we're very pleased to have you.
1:21.5	We thank you for your time and being able to share your insights with us. Oh, I'm so pleased to be
1:26.6	with you. Thank you for having me.
1:28.2	One of the most interesting things about your book is that you use President Kennedy's life
1:34.0	and his lifespan as basically a lens, kind of like a window into what was happening with America
1:41.2	and American's foreign policy, especially with respect to its rise to
1:46.2	geopolitical dominance. And you point out that he was born in 1917, the year of U.S. entry into
1:52.6	World War I and the Soviet coup. So did President Kennedy ever noticed that? Did he ever talk
1:58.6	about kind of the significance of his birth? And what
2:01.2	led you to use this approach? Well, I don't know that he ever spoke, at least to my knowledge,
2:08.5	specifically to the fact that he was born just a few weeks after World War once started for the
2:13.0	United States. The U.S. entry was just a few weeks before. I'm guessing that he did.
2:19.8	He was a student of history.
2:23.9	It's one of the themes in my book that he had a kind of historical sensibility. And I think in the second volume, which is yet to be written, but which will cover his presidency,
2:29.4	I think we'll see evidence of the fact that he had this historical sense and that it mattered. I think what
2:37.0	mattered to me or what I thought that I wanted to do and have tried to do is to tell his story,
	...

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