Jumpin'Jack Flash

By R.Z. Sheppard

TITLE: JFK: RECKLESS YOUTH

AUTHOR: NIGEL HAMILTON

PUBLISHER: RANDOM HOUSE; 861 PAGES; $30

THE BOTTOM LINE: The first volume of a new Kennedy biography raises but does not settle the character issue.

Life is short. Biography is long. Nigel Hamilton's massive JFK: Reckless Youth takes the playboy politician only to 1946, when he was first elected to Congress at the age of 29. There are thousands of pages to come.

Hamilton, whose previous biographies include three volumes on Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, is currently the John F. Kennedy Scholar and Visiting Fellow in the John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs in Boston. He is well connected and indebted to valuable sources on both sides of the Atlantic. His acknowledgments read like a Tina Brown guest list. But his book does not have the consistent gloss of an official biography. In fact, young J.F.K. emerges as a bright, charming dilettante to whom everything came a little too easily.

Apart from unsafe wenching, Kennedy was not as reckless as the subtitle proclaims. He cut up a bit at prep school and wrote raunchy, callow letters ("Have jewed sled down to $3 and maybe down more"). But there was none of the wildness usually associated with offspring of rich, flamboyant families. Instead we find a likable boy with a cool head and an IQ of 119 who was more interested in good times than good grades. He was a competent sailor, played some football and swam competitively until stomach trouble, fevers and a puzzling weight loss curtailed his activities.

It is unclear if these symptoms were related to his Addison's disease, which went undiagnosed until 1947. Hamilton does not get ahead of the chronology. But leapfrogging source notes provide a glimpse of the "future," including clinical details about the persistent effects of gonorrhea. "Gave 600,000 Pen((icillin))," notes a specialist called by the White House on April 17, 1961, the day anti-Castro Cubans landed at the Bay of Pigs.

Lechery is an expectedly prominent theme of this biography of perhaps the randiest American hero since Benjamin Franklin. J.F.K.'s model was, of course, his father, Joseph P., financier, politico and womanizer who, foreshadowing his second son's White House trysts, brought his mistress home. An old chum reports that Jack's favorite phrase was "Slam, bam, thank you, ma'am." Inga Arvad, the Danish-born journalist who was Kennedy's lover during the early 1940s, remembers "a boy, not a man, intent upon ejaculation and not a woman's pleasure." Lem Billings, Kennedy's oldest friend, is more sympathetic. "I think he wanted to believe in love and faithfulness and all that but what he'd seen at home didn't give him much hope. So he sort of bumped along."

Just so. The Kennedy whom Hamilton pieces together from interviews, letters and memoirs is a blithe cynic whose wit and charm are substitutes for intimacy. "Were you ever in love?" a woman asks him later in his life. His smooth answer: "No, though often very interested."

Beneath the worldliness there is an anxious young man who equated his sensitivities and illnesses with unmanliness. He could have spent World War II in bed with Inga, whom the FBI suspected of being a spy because she had once socialized with Goering, Goebbels and Hitler. Instead Kennedy pulled strings to get into the Navy, where his reputation as a war hero was based entirely on efforts to save himself and the crew after PT109 managed to get rammed by a Japanese destroyer.

Hamilton is more than fair when describing J.F.K.'s exploits, most of which were clearly pumped up for future political consumption. His Harvard thesis was accepted with lowest honors before Joe Kennedy's influence got it published in its editorially enhanced version as Why England Slept. Young J.F.K.'s foreign-affairs expertise seems to have been embellished to compensate for a glaring lack of interest in domestic problems.

Paraphrasing sources, Hamilton notes that Kennedy enjoyed the chase far more than what came after. "Once the voters or the women were won," he writes, "there was a certain vacuousness on Jack's part, a failure to turn conquest into anything meaningful or profound." This was certainly borne out in the House and Senate, where Kennedy's record was lackluster and politically expedient.

Hamilton may judge the record less harshly. Although he has yet to deal with the late '40s and the '50s, he rhapsodizes about J.F.K.'s postwar idealism, the beginning of "a liberal spirit that would, one day, define a whole generation of Americans." This windup, like Hamilton's subtitle, overdoes it. With his Peace Corps and space program, Kennedy may have inspired a generation. What defined it was not J.F.K.'s idealism but his cold-war reflexes that sent U.S. troops to Vietnam.