Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House

Description

Camelot's Court is an insider's look at the brain trust whose contributions to the successes and failures of Kennedy's administration were indelible, among them Attorney General Robert Kennedy, his "adviser-in-chief"; Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; Secretary of State Dean Rusk; National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy; and trusted aides Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger. Yet the very traits these men shared also created sharp divisions. Far from unified, JFK's administration was an uneasy band of rivals whose personal ambitions and clashing beliefs ignited fiery debates behind closed doors. Robert Dallek details the contentious and critical issues of Kennedy's years in office, including the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, civil rights, and Vietnam. He illuminates a president who surrounded himself with the best and the brightest, yet who often found himself disappointed in their recommendations. The result is a striking portrait that offers a cautionary tale for our own time.

Robert Dallek is the author of An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 and Nixon and Kissinger, among other books. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, and Vanity Fair. He lives in Washington, D.C.

"Dallek's portraits of advisers including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Walt Rostow are lapidary, and it is difficult to quarrel with his judgments." -- The New York Times Book Review "Dallek is an assiduous digger into archives... The story of how a glamorous but green young president struggled with conflicting and often bad advice while trying to avoid nuclear Armageddon remains a gripping and cautionary tale of the loneliness of command." -- Evan Thomas, The Washington Post "Think The Best and the Brightest meets Team of Rivals... Dallek is one of the deans of presidential scholarship." -- Beverly Gage, The Nation "Dallek brings us closer to the complexity and the humanity of Kennedy's geopolitics, and helps us grasp the uncertainties he and his men faced in an abbreviated presidency." -- USA Today