We see America as a country inhabited by mad people and ruled by buffoons. It was not much different from our attitude towards most of his immediate predecessors: we were sniffy towards the elder Bush, we never got it about Reagan, we mocked Carter, laughed at Ford, despised Nixon (sometimes even we get something right) and saw only the bad side of Lyndon Johnson, arguably the greatest American politician of the past half century. This failure to take Clinton seriously was characteristic of too much of the liberal left's trivialised disdain towards real politics. Our appetite for tittle-tattle about Clinton's sex life and speculation about his marriage was endless, but too many of us glazed over when it came to the boring old political strategies and policies that were at the real heart of his heroic - yes, heroic - attempt to pick progressive politics up off the mat in the wake of the new right's transatlantic counter-revolution in the 1980s. We may think we love Bill Clinton now, and we may yearn for him to be miraculously - and unconstitutionally - restored to the presidency, but my God, we patronised him something rotten when he was actually there. In fact, over the past half century, such disrespect towards the man in the White House has been far more the norm than the exception. The result is a portrait of a bold, brave, human Kennedy, once again a hero.It would be a dreadful mistake to suppose that George W Bush was the first American president who has failed to capture the hearts and minds of liberal-left British opinion. Never shying away from Kennedy's weaknesses, Dallek also brilliantly explores his strengths.

Here is a vivid portrait of a man who, because he knew how close he was to death, lived as much as he could - sometimes hurting others in the process. While laboring to present an image of robust good health, Kennedy was secretly in and out of hospitals through-out his life, so ill that he was administered last rites on several different occasions. The audiobook carries us from Jack's work as a senator from Massachusetts, through the fiercely contested 1960 campaign against Nixon, and takes us on to the White House itself.Īn Unfinished Life also discloses for the very first time that Kennedy was far sicker than we ever knew. Here is the gripping story of Jack's transformation from an awkward speaker into a brilliant politician with irresistible charm. Dallek reveals for the first time the full story of Kennedy's wartime actions and the true details of how Joe was killed, opening the door to Jack's ascendancy. Forced into the shadow of his older brother, Joe, Jack struggled to find a place for himself until World War II, when he became a national hero and launched his career.

An Unfinished Life describes the birth of the Kennedy dynasty, the complexity of Jack's early years, and the mixture of adulation and resentment that tangled his relationships with his mother, Rose, and his father, Joseph.

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