5 comments about Jack and Lem: John F. Kennedy and Lem Billings: The Untold Story of an Extraordinary Friendship.

1. David Pitts offers a view of John F. Kennedy which is seldom found in the multitude of other books on JFK. The author had access to new material especially from the Billings material at the JFK library. However, considering all the assistance he acknowledges I can only wonder how a reference to the King of England in the late 1930s would be to "George V". Still, a book worthy of being read for its insight into aspects of JFK often overlooked.



2. David Pitts gives readers a big hint about what to expect in his introduction to this story of JFK and his lifelong best friend Lemoyne Billings: Pitts wanted to write a book about JFK but realized that it would be hard to stand out in that overcrowded field. Then he learned about Lem Billings and thought that the "untold story" of America's randiest president and his gay best friend would be the ticket.
   
   Yes, I'm a little cynical after reading this book. It is remarkable that from the 1930s on someone like JFK (Catholic, image-conscious, arguably a bit too interested in sleeping with every attractive woman he met) could sustain and value a friendship with a gay man. I didn't assume that JFK would have thrown over anyone who could potentially be a liability or who just wouldn't help him get what he wanted, but the depth of the friendship does present JFK in an interesting light.
   
   It's not an exactly untold story. I've read one other book about the Kennedys and Lemoyne Billings was a major source and character in that book. He wasn't exactly outed in it but it didn't take much reading between the lines to understand that he was gay. Pitts does offer new details about the start of the friendship but his focus is on JFK all the way.
   
   Which was quite frustrating for me. Sure, JFK was a congressman, a senator and then president and that's interesting stuff but could Pitts have spared more than a single paragraph about Billings' job? He had one. He was in advertising for decades but he might as well spent the entire time delivering newspapers for all the attention Pitts gives his job. Nor do we get a sense of Billings' romantic life. Was he in a relationship at any time? Or was he required to be the house eunuch to keep his room at the White House?
   
   Worst, when JFK is assassinated we don't get the story from Lem's perspective we get it pretty much as any American alive at the time would have found out, from television reports. His best friend is murdered and Pitts gives us nothing to understand what it meant to Lem. We just read that the next few years were tough for him. Maybe he lost himself in his work and Pitts didn't want to bore us with the details.
   
   Suddenly it's 1970 and don'tcha know, things have changed for gay men. Will wonders never cease! A whole chapter on how things have changed. Except Lem wasn't exactly throwing the first rock at Stone Wall so ... what did it mean for him? Did he come out to his colleagues at work? Did he move in with the love of his life? Did he wear louder ties? You won't find out here.
   
   Nor will you find out the details of Lem's descent into drug and alcohol addiction. Was Lem already an alcoholic before he started spending significant amounts of time with the younger generation of Kennedys? Did he lead tragic David Kennedy astray in a misguided attempt to recreate his lost friendship with JFK? Did they lead him astray? Was it more complicated than that? Pitts just mentions the "problem" in one line and that's it.
   
   In short, you won't find out much about Lem Billings. This is not a joint biography and that's a shame, in my opinion. There was a real opportunity here to contrast the lives of these two different yet similar men but Pitts gives Billings short shrift every time. If you want to learn a bit more about Lem Billings, read The Kennedys by Peter Collier. It's the book that inspired me to read this one. It's not exactly a sympathetic portrait of Billings but it's far more indepth.



3. This might have been an interesting magazine article. There was certainly not enough material to fill 250 pages. The author repeats himself constantly and pads sentences with redundancies and facts that he has already established in previous pages.
   
   As for Lem Billings, it's too bad he didn't have a life of his own.
   
   An interesting if not a compelling read.



4. I enjoyed reading Jack and Lem.
   
   Due to my age, I don't have first hand remembrances of Jack Kennedy - his life or presidency. I was a good student so I do have a learned historical perspective. Also, I am politically aware and involved so Teddy is a presence and Jackie was too.
   
   While I was familiar with many of the events of Jack's life through other reading, David Pitts made these seem new (I guess seeing them through different eyes - Lem's) and helped keep my interest. I thought Lem was presented as a compelling character. His devotion to Jack was very moving and important to reveal. I don't think the friendship could have continued for 30 years if Jack hadn't had a similar regard for Lem. I think the theory was proved that Jack had great character in keeping Lem as a friend. And Lem had every right to make that claim too.
   
   I know there have been questions about a biography of a behind the scenes individual. Since we cannot all be the great one, the one on whom the spotlight shines, I find it helpful to know who is (was) in the background. David Pitts performed a valuable service researching this book - the letters between Jack and Lem reflect on Jack as much as Lem.
   
   Obviously, not every fact or event can be included in any one work. While there seems to be a long-standing rapport between Lem and Rose Kennedy, the limited references to her (absent during Jack's illness while he was a Choate and not attending Kathleen's (Kick's) funeral) make me wonder whether Lem liked her.
   
   There appears to be an error on page 116. The photo credit is 1945, but the pages that precede the photo indicate that Lem went to the South Pacific in 1944 and while the war ended in 1945, it wouldn't be until 1946 that Lem was able to return home. He could not have been in Palm Beach in 1945.
   
   There are a few instances of David Pitts using his authorship to editorialize. These appear in parenthesis. As a resident of D.C., I agree with one of these (the District of Columbia is without full representation). Another is a reference to Tony Blair, (as the current prime minister). These parenthetical statements are temporal so if we - when we - get representation and a different person holds elected office they will date the book. Instead of editorializing, it would have been reasonable to stick to the facts only.
   
   Jack and Lem included some very touching recollections of these two men's lives, separate and together, and made me think about and better understand life in another time. I found "The Sea Change (1933 vs 1973)," the penultimate chapter, very interesting. I have sometimes wondered how much earlier I would needed to have been born to not feel comfortable today as a gay man. Most of my adult life I have been out to my family, co-workers, and neighbors. I'm also not confusing comfort with safety. I'm not naïve. Far too frequently there are press reports of hate and violence against not just gay people (the nooses of late are appalling). But not from the people I am fortunate to be surrounded in my world. I owe much to people in the generations before my own who "fought" for acceptance that I now enjoy. Again, my age limits my first-hand knowledge of events of 1969 and before. I'm grateful for the placement of this concise chapter that provides context to Lem's life and times.



5. I have read literally dozens of Kennedy biographies and Lem Billings is always a shadowy character. Whether it's a book about JFK, or RFK, or Jackie or even Christopher Lawford, Lem is mentioned often but never in depth. After a while, one begins to wonder, "who was that guy?" This book answers the question. It's an affectionate and detailed portrait. His relationship with President Kennedy was a close one, emotionally intimate, and it lasted 30 years. His relationship with the Kennedy Clan spanned generations and lasted until his death. Pitts, an author who puts a gay perspective on this story, maintains that JFK was the unrequited love of Lem's life. Just because Lem was gay, I can't make that assumption. I wonder if he could have virtually lived with JFK and Jackie if he was romantically in love with Kennedy. I think another spin is just as moving and just as powerful, they were each other's best friends and loved one another that way. It was hard on the Billings family because over the years, Lem became more Kennedy than Billings. It was daring and brave of Kennedy to remain loyal and unapologetic of his gay friend in the less tolerate 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. And it was extraordinary for the very Catholic Kennedy women to accept Lem as completely as they did, knowing he was homosexual. The book ends with Eunice Shriver's eulogy of Lem, "Heaven is Jesus and Lem and Jack and Bobby loving one another." What a moving, and inclusive, tribute that was.

No comments about The Life and Letters of Madame Bonaparte.

No comments about Kennedy in Berlin (Publications of the German Historical Institute).

2 comments about Samuel Adams: America's Revolutionary Politician (American Profiles).

1. This biography focuses on the political life of Samuel Adams and his key role in leading Massachusetts to rebel against Britain to protect its liberties. Little is written about Adams' personal or family life and the coverage of his participation in the Continental Congresses is also slim, apparently due to a lack of sources, since Adams destroyed most of his correspondence and Congressional deliberations were secret. There are issues that I wished would have been discussed in more detail, e.g. the author has only a limited discussion of Adams' alleged role in replacing Washington as commander-in-chief (apparently a canard spread by his enemies).
   
   The author explains well the development and sources of Adams' political philosophy and how it guided his actions before, during, and after the Revolution.
   
   The prose is well-written with many short quotations from Adams. Overall, an informative and fairly interesting biography of a key and often overlooked figure of the American Revolution.



2. Samuel Adams comes alive in John K. Alexander's enthralling biography of the pioneer of American political warfare.
   
   Separating myth (that Adams operated by mob rule) from reality, Alexander carefully shows how the Boston patriot - steeped in the ancient classics, John Locke and an abiding Christian faith - combined reason, rhetoric, political organization and perseverence to achieve the goal he arguably founded of American independence.
   
   Alexander's book chronicles how Adams pioneered modern political agitprop by organizing the Committees of Correspondence to link Massachusetts towns, sympathizers in Europe and ultimately all the 13 colonies in a communications underground. It describes Adams' masterful political takeovers of town and colonial legislatures, hugely successful political theater, economic warfare, social stigmatization of enemy collaborators, and the creation of extralegal parallel institutions that usurped political power from the crown and empowered the common citizen.
   
   Adams is an underappreciated Founding Father: he helped pen the Declaration of Independence, served on the Constitutional convention and almost singlehandedly wrote the original language of much of the Bill of Rights. Alexander acknowledges Adams' human flaws while demonstrating how the Boston revolutionary remained true to his beliefs for half a century without seeking personal profit or aggrandizement.
   
   The book is unfortunately lacking in footnotes and it paraphrases Adams more than it quotes him, though it contains a substantial bibliographical essay.
   
   Alexander has authored an important biography of the founder of American political warfare. He is one of the few Adams scholars who gets the nuances about Samuel's political warfare genius. In reading the book, one understands Thomas Jefferson's emphatic comment that, if anyone was the helmsman of the American Revolution, "Samuel Adams was the man."

No comments about Barack Obama - Hope and Change (Biography).

5 comments about Life and Death of Adolf Hitler.

1. Although this book showed the reader that Payne knew the topic of Adolf Hitler well, the reader begins to wonder where Payne acquires all of this information, for he rarely credited his sources.



2. This was number one on the New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks when it was released in 1973. I read it as a child and enjoyed it, but I didn't realize as a 10-year-old that it was laden with ridiculous errors. Payne writes well, but entire chapters are completely fabricated, thus making the book worthless. A salient example is chapter 6 where Hitler makes a year-long visit to Liverpool to visit his brother. This is the most embarrassing idiocy to ever appear in a Hitler biography (and there's loads of competition for this dubious distinction).
   Hitler was never in England, as his apartment records clearly show from Vienna. Payne relies upon discredited sources again and again, such as William Patrick Hitler and Kurt Krueger, invented Hitler psychiatrist.

   The book is good for a few laughs, nothing more. It's aged dreadfully and its errors become more ludicrous as the years past. If you want a solid, reliable and definitive biography of Hitler, consult John Toland's 1977 masterpiece.




3. I agree with some of the reviews: the book IS outdated, and I jumped when I read about his trip to Liverpool. We know almost from day to day his movements in Vienna, and that he never was so down and out as Hitler himself and the author want us to believe. But as I read on, the book started to fascinate me. I understood the atmosphere in Germany in the 20's and 30's better than in any other book I've read about Hitler and the Nazi Germany. So I give the book a 5 star for that reason.



4. I was surprised and a bit disappointed to see all the negative reactions here to Robert Payne's fine work on Hitler - in my opinion the most readable and enjoyable of the English-language biographies on that infamous tyrant. I respectfully submit that some of my fellow readers were too busy taking issue with its flaws to see its intrinsic genius.
   
   It is of course undeniably true that there are several glaring errors in Payne's research on Hitler which were exposed by subsequent biographers; it is equally true that he relied very heavily on source material of dubious authenticity to fill in various gaps in Hitler's life. Payne devotes an entire chapter to Hitler's visit to England in the early 1900s, a visit which apparently never happened; he also writes extensively on secret negotiations between Germany and the USSR which supposedly took place in 1943 and which also may never have occurred. These mistakes (and others) are glaring and embarrassing, but readers would do well to remember that Payne was writing in 1968, long before the collapse of East Germany and the Soviet Union, and had much more restricted access to documents than did, for example, Ian Kershaw. He was also trying much harder to paint a picture of Adolf Hitler, the human being, than was Kershaw, Bullock, or Toland, who were more concerned with trying to weave Hitler's life into the fabric of his times - i.e. to tell the "whole story" of the Nazi era.
   
   It is in this last category - Hitler the person - that Payne succeeds where the others often falter. If his details occasionally stray into the erroneous, his reconstruction of Hitler's youth in Braunau and Linz, his self-imposed misery in Vienna, his life as a soldier during the Great War, and the tumultuous early days of the National Socialist movement are all brought to life with the vividness of a novel. Payne may only be a second-tier historian, but he has the gift, as does John Keegan, of using prose to elevate facts, figures, dates and events into the realms the dramatic. He brings to life in vivid terms the beer-hall brawls, the back-room deals, the raucous political rallies, and the frequent moments of despair which often gripped the movement as it struggled for power, never letting us lose sight of the man who was behind it all. Kershaw is a masterful researcher, but like many historians he lags in the writing department, and his massive two-volume work on Hitler (which has become the standard in English-speaking countries) while exhaustive, never really put me in Hitler's shoes. Bullock had advanced writing and researching skills, but he was more interested in mapping out the era than in understanding the man. And Toland offered nothing more than a detailed timeline that never once attempted to penetrate Hitler's soul.
   
   The defects in Payne's work are indeed serious, but so long as one doesn't use THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER as the sole source of his knowledge on the subject, I would recommend it highly for people who are interested in achieving a personal understanding one of the most enigmatic and terrible men in history.



5. I read this book because someone recommended it as the biography that best dealt with Hitler's early life, which I was interested in learning about. I had read about his political career and the years as Fuhrer, but, beyond a broad outline, I had no idea about his childhood and early manhood. Indeed, in that regard, this book did not disappoint; I felt that the portrait of his early life was detailed, well-written and fascinating. However, the same cannot be said for the rest of the book, which leads me to question the accuracy of the first part.
   
   I don't know if Mr. Payne (actual name Pierre Stephen Robert Payne) actually did any original research for the chapters on Hitler's early life, but it is painfully obvious that he simply cribbed his material for the rest of the book from previously published works, WWII propaganda and Hollywood films. In addition to ranging from historically dubious to outright false on a thousand points, the chapters on Hitler's post WWI career is characterized by sloppy writing, undignified asides, a hysterical tone and a generally rushed and unprofessional approach to his subject. It gave the impression of a schoolboy who slapped together a term paper under the pressure of an approaching deadline. He would have done better to have concentrated exclusively on Hitler's early years rather than rush through World War II in 200 pages. How can one claim to have written a professional biography of Hitler and only devote 1 paragraph to Kristallnacht?
   
   Among some of Mr. Payne's more ludicrous historical assertions are that Hitler lived for a time in England before WWI and that a secret peace conference was held between Ribbentrop and Molotov in German-occupied Russia in_1943_! When I read these revelations for the first time, I sat up and took notice, because I had never heard of them anywhere before. However, upon further investigation, I discovered that pretty much all historians find them completely without validity. Similarly, in his hysterical hatred of Hitler and aversion to primary source research, Mr. Payne repeats many assertions which I understand to have been debunked long ago. For instance, Mr. Payne tells us that Horst Wessel was killed by another Nazi, that Hitler was responsible for the Reichstag fire, that the SA under Roehm was not planning a putsch, that the Nazis made soap and lampshades out of Jewish remains and that the famous photo of the dead Hitler look-alike in the ruins of the Reichschancellery was actually Hitler. These, and many, many other similar examples make me seriously question Mr. Payne's reliability, even for the portions of the book which I found to be informative. Therefore, I cannot recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject.

4 comments about Red Diapers: GROWING UP IN THE COMMUNIST LEFT.

1. This highly orginal book did not get the press it deserved when it was first published. It is a collection of brief, yet moving reminiscences written by "red diaper babies" whose parents had a connection -- some more than others -- with the "Movement". It is a definite "must read" for anyone who grew up in the fifties -- whether or not he or she wore red, pink or any other shade of diaper! -- whose parents did not share the prevailing political opinions of the times.



2. This is a unique anthology of memoirs of kids who grew up in the 40's and 50's, in the "pink" shadow of the American Communist Party. Most of the nearly fifty contributors of this book are children of Eastern Jewish immigrants. Here are their fascinating memories: Joyous ones of Pioneer Camp, The Daily Worker, public rallies in support of women, workers, minorities, and disarmament. Fearful recollections of the Rosenberg executions, McCartyism, clandestine CP meetings, FBI surveillance, and the dreaded knock on the door in the middle of the night. Disillusioned remembrances of Khrushchev's denouncement of Stalin and the devastating revelation that "Uncle Joe" and the "Workers' Paradise" of the USSR were not what American Communists naively believed. Few of these writers still belong to the CP. A small number speak resentfully of parents who put the Party before family, exposing their children to bigotry and violence or to the anxiety and deprivation of a life "underground". The Party's over. But the great majority of these writers proudly retain their strong leftist values and ideals, and continue to practice the social activism instilled during childhood. This book gives a human and humane dimension to a misled but often wrongfully vilified American political movement.



3. I was assigned this book by an admittedly socialist professor. Perhaps she hoped it would open my eyes to "the people's glorious revolution." In fact, it confirmed in my mind that communists are seriously deluded people. The writers in this book lament their rejection by middle class Americans, seemingly oblivious to the fact that one of the major tenants of communism is the violent destruction of the middle class (I say "violent" because I doubt the middle class would simply relinquish its status when "the glorious revolution occurs). They also bemoan that their first ammendment rights were ignored. The first ammendment was wirtten to allow speech to improve the system. No nation has ever or will ever tolerate speech advocating the destruction of itself and the massacre of its citizens. They should get used to it anyway, as whenever a communist regime takes hold the first thing it does is eliminate free speech. Overall, this book is a worthless collection of narcissistic, revolutionary ramblings, myopic pseudo-history and whining, with no real educational merit at all.



4. -- the story of his life. I grew up small-town in the 50's when communists had horns. These people's childhoods were, compared to mine, like something from another planet. I didn't meet a socialist until I went to college. Looking back:
   1. the risk of internal communist subversion causing an American communist revolution was equal to today's risk of America becoming a moslem state under sharia -- nil. However the USSR was a threat and terrorism is a threat.
   2. the Communist Party USA allowed itself to become merely an arm of Soviet policy
   3. the people in this book and their parents suffered from thuggish and illegal harassment from the US government
   4. but I am very relieved that their political philosophy lost.

   Being idealogs, they avoided any disconfirmatory facts. They were shocked in 1956 when Khrushchev told them that Stalin was a Bad Guy.
   
   Most of the narrators look back with pride and wistfulness. Missing is any apology for supporting a system that caused mass murder, mass starvation, and Gulags.

No comments about Max Lerner: Pilgrim in the Promised Land.

No comments about Ernesto Che Guevara (Los Grandes).

No comments about First Lady: The Life of Lucy Webb Hayes.