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

Amazon.com
The Best Year of Their Lives is not a typical presidential biography in that it forgoes the comprehensive approach to history. Instead, Lance Morrow shows why 1948 was a watershed year not just for John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon personally, but for the nation as well. That is the year that Johnson, in his bid for the Senate, used huge sums of corporate money to bombard the media with lies about his opponent, finally stealing the election by 87 votes by having a ballot box stuffed (thus earning the nickname "Landslide Lyndon"). Had he lost, he would have arguably been out of politics forever and the course of history would have been changed. At the same time, Nixon, as a freshman congressman, launched his political career by using his seat on the House Un-American Activities Committee to relentlessly pursue Alger Hiss, making himself a prominent national figure in the process. (Four years later he became Eisenhower's running mate.) Meanwhile, Kennedy was working hard to suppress the fact that he had Addison's disease. He continued to lie about his health for the rest of his life just as he later hid his reckless personal behavior. Through anecdotes and analysis (including personal contact; all three were presences in Morrow's childhood), Morrow shows how secrets and lies were to shape the behavior of all of them. This "convergence of personal ambition with secrecy, amorality, and a ruthless manipulation of the truth" would have tremendous implications for the country. The events of 1948 also foreshadow the tragedies and scandals that would end all three of their administrations.

Externally, the three presidents were radically different. Internally, argues Morrow, they were identical in many ways in that they "shared a tendency toward elaborately deliberated amorality; all three behaved as if rules were for others, not for them." Along with a rapidly changing American society, the start of the Cold War, and looming atomic destruction, 1948 ushered in modern politics and these men were the embodiment of it. Absorbing and unconventional, The Best Year of Their Lives adds to the considerable bodies of work already available on all three presidents. --Shawn Carkonen

From Publishers Weekly
Time essayist Morrow (Evil: An Investigation) does an excellent job of showcasing three future presidents as young congressmen standing at the seductive threshold of power. Morrow also depicts the sowing of the seeds of the corruption that thrives alongside authority and success. We see L.B.J., once a starry-eyed do-gooder, making Faustian bargains in order to bootstrap himself from the House of Representatives to the Senate (he won via stuffed ballot boxes, arranged in part by segregationists whose views he devoutly, but quietly, despised). We see J.F.K., on the mend from a near-fatal bout with Addison's disease, begin tying a knot of lies about his health and private life that would be unbound only after his death. And we see the equally young Richard Nixon commence his assignations with Whittaker Chambers, the former spy who would make Nixon's reputation by testifying against Alger Hiss. At the heart of Morrow's tale lurks that most potent yet dangerous tool of public and personal politics: deceit. This is the story of the birth and nurturing of cynicism in three future political giants: Morrow sees each man as a study in moral compromise and shows us how, starting in 1948, each continually and routinely--if sometimes sadly--sacrificed ethics before the altar of ambition. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Book Description
Three future presidents-JFK, Nixon, and LBJ-in the crucial year of 1948, when all were young congressmen facing major turning points, while America itself was poised as a new global superpower. 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 candidate. Campaigning frantically by helicopter across Texas, LBJ won only with the help of corrupt political bosses, whose illegal ballot-stuffing put "Landslide Lyndon" into the Senate by 87 votes. At the same time, Nixon was having his first meetings with Whittaker Chambers, the witness in the Alger Hiss trial that would make Nixon a national figure and lead to his selection as Eisenhower's running mate four years later. And Kennedy was still recovering from the near-fatal attack of Addison's disease he had suffered the previous year. From that point on, he would conceal the truth about his health, just as he concealed his reckless personal life. In all three politicians, Morrow finds a streak of amorality and ruthlessness-each believed that the rules didn't apply to him. Lies of one kind or another-lies they told or exposed-would propel each of them to power; lies would also undo LBJ and Nixon's presidencies and, ultimately, tarnish JFK's reputation. Morrow also tells the story of America in 1948, when it, too, was learning the secrets of power, and coming to grips with the vast changes of the postwar world. For readers of Robert Caro and Robert Dallek, The Best Year of Their Lives offers a fresh look at a crucial turning point in the lives of three presidents, by one of America's most observant and thoughtful journalists.

About the Author
Lance Morrow has won two National Magazine Awards, written more than 150 Time cover stories, and has contributed to publications such as Harper's, Civilization, CondŽ Nast Traveler, and National Geographic Traveler. Morrow is a University Professor at Boston University, and is the author of several books, including The Heart: A Memoir, The Chief: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons, Fishing in the Tiber (a selection of his essays), and Evil: An Investigation. He lives in Chatham, New York.


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A study of three intersecting political lives in the annus mirabilis of 1948, when Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson "committed themselves to a mature and focused political ruthlessness."That year, writes award-winning Time columnist Morrow (Evil, 2003, etc.), marked crises for each. Having been through WWII, each in his own way, the three were ready for more than the kind of qualified readmission to society promised in the emblematic film The Best Years of Their Lives, from which Morrow borrows his title. They sensed that destiny had come a-calling after their "formative ordeals": As if reborn, they took on knightly errands. Nixon earned his first measure of fame in the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings of 1948-50, far and away the most intelligent of all those who served that dubious cause. Johnson was employing hitherto unknown dirty tricks, to say nothing of presciently media-savvy electoral techniques, to defeat a popular Texas governor in his run for the Senate. Kennedy fended off the onset of Addison's disease while chasing bevies of beauties until his powerful father ordered him to make good and take public office. The three Washington newcomers were friends; astoundingly, Kennedy was also friendly with Joseph McCarthy and loyal to his fellow freshman to the last. They also had many failings in common, and Morrow attributes to each of the future presidents a personality disorder-paranoia in Nixon's and Johnson's cases, and something like a lack of moral sanity in Kennedy's. As his story progresses, though he never loses sight of his immediate subject, Morrow turns more and more toward a meditation on an American golden age gone suddenly bad, arrivingfinally at a novel moral inventory of each politician: Nixon's "defining deadly sin was surely anger," for instance, whereas Johnson's was greed; Johnson's virtue was to turn that greed to social good, while Kennedy's virtue was courage, and so on. A trenchant philosophical essay reminiscent of the best of Garry Wills; smart moralizing in a time governed by its archly stupid variant.


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