P&P Live! Fred Logevall | JFK with Diane McWhorter

Join Professor Fredrik Logevall as he discusses his new book, "JFK" with Diane McWhorter on P&P Live!

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By the time of his assassination in 1963, John F. Kennedy stood at the helm of the greatest power the world had ever seen, a booming American nation that he had steered through some of the most perilous diplomatic standoffs of the Cold War. Born in 1917 to a striving Irish American family that had become among Boston’s wealthiest, Kennedy knew political ambition from an early age, and his meteoric rise to become the youngest elected president cemented his status as one of the most mythologized figures in American history. And while hagiographic portrayals of his dazzling charisma, reports of his extramarital affairs, and disagreements over his political legacy have come and gone in the decades since his untimely death, these accounts all fail to capture the full person.

Fredrik Logevall is Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs and professor of history at Harvard University. A specialist on U.S. foreign-relations history and modern international history, he is the author or editor of nine books, most recently Embers of War, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Francis Parkman Prize.

Diane McWhorter is a long-time contributor to The New York Times and the op-ed page of USA TODAY, among other national publications. Her young adult history of the civil rights movement is A Dream of Freedom. Her first book, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, chronicled the civil rights revolution—and her family’s role on the wrong side of it—in her hometown. She is originally from Birmingham, Alabama, and now lives in Washington, D.C.