The Best Year of Their Lives: Kennedy, Nixon, and Johnson in 1948: Learning the Secrets of Power

by Lance Morrow

Book Overview

In 1948, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon were all ambitious young congressmen at pivotal points in their lives. LBJ was in a desperate Senate race, running against a more popular... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465047238
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.0" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

1948 was a template for three future presidents, Kennedy,

Johnson & Nixon. The title, taken from the best movie of 1946 is apt. The cold war still persisted in the years they collectively served 1961-74, as it did in 1948 with the Soviets. Lance Morrow approaches his subjects in several different ways. He delves into their childhood which was the great depression. JFK was born to a very well to do family on the verge of becoming very rich. He actually never had to work hard physically. Privledge opened doors as his father held government positions before the war. Growing up he was a very sickly child & not believed to live long. He inherited his father promiscuity & competitive sprit. Nixon childhood was shadowed by an overbearing but loving mother, a Quacker, who would withhold affection from young Richard as she saw fit. He experienced the death of two younger brothers & a hard scrabble poor existence. His father was a hardworking man but basically a loser. Little of LBJ early years is revealed except that they were poor. His father was a hard drinker who had lost all of the Texas farmland the family had once owned. LBJ lived a childhood with his family basically always in debt. As he grew JFK social life picked up. Sexual recklessness seemed to be a Kennedy trait. Except perhaps for Pat, Nixon's sex life was not much of factor. Politics was his all cosuming passion. LBJ was a pig. His toilet habits revealed an arrested sexual development. Gentlemen don't refer to their wives as "the best lay in Texas". Morrow even takes a dip into the Seven Deadly Sins pool. JFK, lust but couragous. LBJ, avarice but generous. Nixon, anger but diligence. JFK won his congressional seat in 1948. He might have lost had it been revealed he was near death much of the year. That was hidden from the voters. LBJ won his Senate seat that year by stuffing the ballot boxes in a run-off that apparently his opponent had won. He became Senator Johnson by a ridiculously small margin. He was known as "Landslide Lyndon". It was a most important year for Congressman Nixon, as he was rooting out Communists. The book spends considerable time on Congressional hearings involving the Whitaker Chambers/Alger Hiss case. Nixon was very involved in the questioning & made a national name for himself. Alas, 26 years later they had all come to grief. In 1973, LBJ died a broken man. His handling of the Vietnam War ruined him politically. Nixon was run out of the White House two years early by the Watergate scandal. JFK suffered no such fate, but was tragically murdered. This book does not cover the years after 1948. Much of this had been published previously but Morrow brought it together in an enjoyable way.

Digging Deep And Turning Up Gold

The Party did its best to paint Richard Nixon as some sort of war hero, but it didn't have too much to work with. Apparently Nixon spent most of the war amassing a small fortune in winning crap games and poker, gambling and the dog races, making a specialty of fleecing other members of his platoon on payday. He came away from WWII with a substantial little campaign fund, more power to him, but not easy to bulk up into hero status. LBJ too tried to re-cast his war years as his personal voyage into the danger zone but of course that was just so much hogwash. Lance Morrow shows us JFK's war as being the only one really that had the oomph of legend, as witness his book PT-109, which had something Americans identified with, perhaps a willingness to push through even when things look darkest. And things seemed bleak in 1948, the year Morrow focuses on in his new, exciting psychobiography. Unexpectedly bleak, for Americans had been longing for years for the war to end, when, it was said, they would find the answers and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Instead what did they discover? Only more uncertainty, and a nation once again divided among itself. It was actually a great time to be a politician; as Morrow points out, pols thrive on misery and do their best work while energizing a demoralized public into action one way or another. For Kennedy, the year involved accepting first the wild love life of his sister "Kick," whose involvement with the Cavendish family would have assuredly led to a Profumo like scandal later in life, and then her tragic death, with its reverberations of his brother's earlier death in the War. The shades of night were creeping in fast for Jack, who learned around the same time something of the dimension of his own Addison's disease, a psychic wound as well as a physical threat. If he hadn't hitherto looked to sex for an escape, he certainly began to do so now. Nixon wasn't threatened by illness, but the way he jumped onto the Pumpkin Papers revealed a man with a certain mania on his brain. Was it the urge, like all politicians, just to see his picture in the paper no matter what the context? Or did he believe he was saving the country from those who had plunged us into war--a war which, he imagined, was really a liberal jihad unrelated to Americans' ordinary concerns? People liked Nixon because he was one of us, from the lower middle class, he wasn't pretentious like FDR or JFK or, heaven forbid, Alger Hiss; and Nixon's dogged pursuit of Hiss--like a terrier with his teeth firmly in Alger Hiss' patrician ass--carried with it the fanatical strains of Madame Defarge from the TALE OF TWO CITIES. He was the little man pulling down the big man, and the crowd roared in approval. Johnson's attack on Coke Stevenson is the weak link in Morrow's otherwise brilliant account. Caro did this part so much better and at greater length in Vol 2 of his biography, that rehashing it here produces no new insights, lit

Magisterial yet accessible - a new way of looking at history

Forget what "overblown silliness" says below. Lance Morrow's 1948 is one of the freshest, most insightful pieces of popular history to come around in ages. In looking at both the lives of JFK, LBJ, and Nixon in 1948 and the historical significance of that year for the United States as she really came into her own in the post-war world, Morrow gives an incredible insight both into the lives of the respective politicians, and the country itself. What is most interesting, though, is that underlying all the post-war rah-rah optimism, Morrow captures a current of worry, of anxiety, and of moral unease: the US won World War II, Morrow suggests, but also lost a certain innocence in the process. New technologies (atom bombs, television) and a new breed of politician all came on the scene in this critical year, and Morrow's book captures it brilliantly. This book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in modern American history, and how we became what we are today.

Three Men Face Decisions in 1948 That Lead to Their Fate

This fascinating book chronicles a pivotal year in the lives of three ambitious politicians each of whom became President. In 1948, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon were all on the rise as young congressmen who according to author Lance Morrow, went to great pains - physically, psychologically and morally - to ensure their place on the American political scene. Like David Halberstam who wrote the classic "The Best and the Brightest", journalist Lance Morrow is able to shape a cohesive chapter of American history through seemingly unrelated events and brings a present-day relevance to what he writes. LBJ won the U.S. senate seat for Texas by a highly suspicious 87 late-counted votes over the more popular Coke Stevenson. In one of the bellwether events of Communist witch-hunting, Nixon used the headline-grabbing Alger Hiss case as a springboard for national prominence, and it indeed led to him to become Eisenhower's running-mate in 1952. And JFK, despite the image of youthful vigor, was dealing with the death of his glamorous sister "Kick" (Kathleen) and hiding the debilitating effects of Addison's disease. Morrow does a superb job intertwining these three men by focusing on the secrets each kept to move to the next level of political ascendancy. Why this takes on a greater relevance is what the year 1948 represents in American history - the redefining period between the end of WWII and the crystallization of the Cold War. Many held secrets far larger in scope than these three. After all, the Cold War was all about Communist infiltration within the U.S. government, concealed knowledge courtesy of informers under the guise of friends, clandestine acts of espionage and who would end up detonating the A-bomb. That's why the secrets held by LBJ, JFK and Nixon seem so indicative of the prevalent behavior - LBJ did anything, no matter how unscrupulous, to take attention off the controversial votes that sent him off to the Senate; Nixon destroyed civil liberties and took witch-hunting to a new level with his obsessive pursuit of Hiss and Whittaker Chambers; and JFK went to great lengths to hide his medical condition knowing he would never otherwise have a chance to become President. Each drama turned on secrets. What Morrow does best is show how the rather amoral behavior of each shaped each of their destinies and how each was challenged later on when Vietnam brought down LBJ and Watergate did the same for Nixon. Vietnam almost proved to be JFK's undoing, though we'll never know as his life was cut short in Dallas. Each was not so much into breaking rules as much as they saw them as irrelevant to them. Their shared priority was in creating their legacies no matter the cost. 1948 saw many more prominent turning points - Gandhi's assassination, the birth of Israel, the Kinsey Report was published - but this comprehensive history book really shows how the next generation of leaders were formed and ultimately damaged by the decis