May 14, 2017

Stephen Kennedy Smith and Douglas Brinkley

Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome STEPHEN KENNEDY SMITH and DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, editors of JFK: A Vision for America, for a panel discussion on this new compendium of JFK’s most important speeches. The book's editors will be joined by contributors Ambassador SAMANTHA POWER and RON SUSKIND for a discussion moderated by historian FREDRIK LOGEVALL. The event will include a book signing with the editors.

Details

Published in commemoration of the centennial of President John F. Kennedy’s birth, here is the definitive compendium of JFK’s most important and brilliant speeches, accompanied by commentary and reflections by leading American and international figures—including Senator Elizabeth Warren, David McCullough, Kofi Annan, and the Dalai Lama—and edited by JFK’s nephew Stephen Kennedy Smith and renowned historian Douglas Brinkley. Combined with over seven hundred documentary photos, it tells the story, in words and pictures, of JFK’s life and presidency, and depicts his compelling vision for America.

JFK brings together in one volume John F. Kennedy’s greatest speeches alongside essays by America’s top historians, analysis from leading political thinkers, and personal insights from preeminent writers and artists. Here is JFK at his best—thought-provoking, inspiring, eloquent, and wise—on a number of wide-ranging topics, including civil rights, the race to the moon, the environment, immigration, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and much more. JFK demonstrates the deep relevance of his words today and his lasting power and influence as an outstanding American leader and orator.

Elegantly designed and enriched by more than 500 photographs and facsimiles of Kennedy’s marginalia on drafts of speeches, his notes from important meetings, letters, and other fascinating documents, JFK is a major contribution to American history.

The august list of contributors includes Secretary John Kerry, Ambassador Samantha Power, Congressman John Lewis, Senator John McCain, Senator Elizabeth Warren, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Robert Redford, Conan O’Brien, Dave Eggers, Gloria Steinem, Don DeLillo, David McCullough, George Packer, Colum McCann, Michael Beschloss, Robert Dallek, David Kennedy, Ted Widmer, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Drew Faust, Tariq Ramadan, Pastor Rick Warren, Jonathan Alter, E. J. Dionne, Ron Suskind, Paul Krugman, Kofi Annan, Governor Jerry Brown, Paul Theroux, Jorge Domínguez, and many others.

About Author(s)

Stephen Kennedy Smith is a lecturer at the Sloan School of Management as well as a fellow at the Connection Science Group at MIT. He received his BA from Harvard University, JD from Columbia University, and EdM from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has served on the staff of the Senate Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees and is a three-time recipient of the Danforth Award for Excellence in Teaching at Harvard University. He continues to be active in Democratic politics and lives in New York City.

Douglas Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University, the CNN Presidential Historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Audubon. The Chicago Tribune has dubbed him “America’s new past master.” His recent Cronkite won the Sperber Prize for Best Book in Journalism and was a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year. The Great Deluge won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and the Council on Foreign Relations. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and three children.

Samantha Power was the United States permanent representative to the United Nations from 2013 to January 2017. She has been called the “conscience” of U.S. foreign policy. A leading voice internationally for principled American engagement in the world, global cooperation, and human rights, she has a unique perspective—spending half of her career explaining complex geopolitical events as a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, war correspondent, and Harvard professor, and the last eight years helping to shape them. The youngest-ever U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, she was also a member of President Obama’s Cabinet and a senior adviser at the White House.

Ron Suskind is a Pulitzer-winning journalist, bestselling author, and the founder of Sidekicks. He is the author of multiple New York Times bestsellers and the critically acclaimed A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League. His latest bestseller, Life, Animated, chronicles his family’s twenty-year journey raising and connecting to their autistic son. His other books include Confidence MenThe Way of the WorldThe One Percent Doctrine, and The Price of Loyalty. He was the senior national affairs writer for The Wall Street Journal, where he won the Pulitzer Prize, and is currently the Senior Fellow at Harvard's Center for Ethics.

Fredrik Logevall is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of History. A specialist on U.S. foreign relations history and modern international history, he was previously the Anbinder Professor of History at Cornell University, where he also served as vice provost and as the director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Logevall is the author or editor of nine books, most recently Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History and the 2013 Francis Parkman Prize. His other recent works include America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity and the college-level textbook A People and A Nation: A History of the United States