Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero

A new portrait of John F. Kennedy based on interviews with those who knew him best, by Chris Matthews, bestselling Kennedy expert and host of Hardball.

By following the journey of Jack Kennedy’s life from his school days to the White House, through war and illness and his greatest triumphs, Chris Matthews brings us much closer to the man Jack Kennedy really was.

We know so much about President John F. Kennedy, yet even his wife Jacqueline described him as “that elusive man.” To MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews, Kennedy has long been both an avatar and a puzzle, a beacon and a conundrum. “Whenever I spot the name in print, I stop to read. Anytime I’ve ever met a person who knew him—someone who was there with JFK in real time—I crave hearing their first-person narrative.”

For years, Matthews has been collecting those stories. In Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, the bestselling author and Kennedy expert has woven those firsthand encounters with JFK into a great American Bildungsroman, telling the tale of how Kennedy grew from a child of privilege into a war hero and finally President of the United States, all the while coping with a life-threatening disease.

“In searching for Jack Kennedy my own way,” Matthews writes, “I found a fighting prince never free from pain, never far from trouble, never accepting the world he found, never wanting to be his father’s son. He was a far greater hero than he ever wished us to know.”