The Politics of Deception

November 24, 2014
President Kennedy regularly misled the American public, writes veteran journalist Sloyan in this collection of painful, well-documented, and no longer controversial incidents from his last year in office. Dissatisfied with the heavy-handed leadership of South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, J.F.K secretly approved the 1963 coup, and Sloyan agrees with most observers that “Kennedy’s order to get rid of Diem was the real beginning of the American war in Vietnam.” His hostility to the civil rights movement included smearing Martin Luther King Jr. by circulating FBI wiretaps of his sexual encounters. By comparison, his ongoing efforts to murder Fidel Castro may seem silly—but only because they failed. Nevertheless, Sloyan points out that J.F.K.’s deception may have saved the world in 1962. Infuriated at American missiles in Turkey, Soviet Premier Krushchev installed his own in Cuba and then offered to withdraw them if Kennedy did the same. Since many Americans would have preferred war to “capitulating” to Communism, they were fed the story of a courageous J.F.K. going “eyeball to eyeball” with Krushchev. Dogged by crises, Kennedy often took advantage of a traditional but disreputable presidential tactic, and Sloyan delivers an engrossing, squirm-inducing account. Agent: Ronald Goldfarb, Goldfarb & Assoc.

December 1, 2014
A journalist revisits John F. Kennedy's legacy.Beginning in 1960, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Sloyan wrote for the Washington bureau of United Press International, which gave him, he writes, "unimaginable power and influence." Like many other journalists at the time, he saw Kennedy as a strong leader, "cool but daring." In his debut nonfiction book, Sloyan revises that view, portraying Kennedy as a craven politician-"devious, ruthless...more pragmatic than principled." The author examines Kennedy's last year, when Cuba, the incendiary civil rights movement and Vietnam dominated his agenda. Angry and disillusioned, he aims to reveal how Kennedy "duped me and other journalists into misleading readers, librarians, schoolteachers, historians, and filmmakers." Basing this expose on tapes Kennedy made using microphones he hid in the Cabinet Room and the Oval Office (a recording system he manipulated at will), as well as oral histories, interviews and historians' accounts, Sloyan argues that Kennedy lied blatantly to burnish his image. Although journalists reported that he triumphed over Nikita Khrushchev in the Cuban missile crisis, the author asserts-as did Michael Dobbs in One Minute to Midnight (2008)-that he secretly acquiesced to the Soviet leader's demand for missile exchange: Russia would remove missiles from Cuba if the U.S. took theirs out of Turkey. Like Gus Russo in Live by the Sword (1998), Sloyan details Kennedy's attempts to have Castro assassinated, but Russo's account is stronger. He attributes Kennedy's reluctance to support civil rights to his need for Southern votes: He refused to fulfill his campaign promise to end housing segregation, "ignored civil rights leaders on judicial appointments in the South, where justice was brutal for blacks," and targeted Martin Luther King, Jr. for intense surveillance, with the goal of blackmail. Sloyan devotes most of the book to Vietnam, where he lays the murder of Ngo Dinh Diem at Kennedy's feet, as did Ellen Hammer in A Death in November (1987). Despite new sources, Sloyan fails to offer a fresh assessment.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 1, 2015

Investigative journalist Sloyan, a veteran of the White House Press Corps, uses primary sources (including government records and recently released audiotapes) to augment the work of John F. Kennedy revisionist historians Robert Dallek and Richard Reeves. By so doing the author updates the largely laudatory in-house chronicles of Arthur Schlesinger and Ted Sorensen in this fast-moving narrative and analysis of what turned out to be the president's last months in office. Kennedy, not much accustomed to criticism before becoming president, manipulated the mass media as he made policy decisions influenced by his looming reelection campaign. The author benefits from both access and hindsight in demonstrating that Kennedy's tacit approval of the coup--opposed by many civilian and military advisors--that toppled and killed South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem led to America's deeper involvement in Vietnam. Sloyan also maintains that Kennedy's tactical stance toward the civil rights movement owed more to his perceived political chances in the South than to his personal commitment to social justice, and his successful handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis actually resulted from his, rather than Khrushchev's, flinching. VERDICT This study will appeal to general readers and researchers intrigued by the Kennedy mystique and its relationship to reality by showing the pragmatic president as part of a long-standing tradition of hard-nosed decision makers, a fact that tempered his idealism.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.