In honor of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the New York Times has authorized a new book, The Kennedy Years: From the Pages of the New York Times, edited by CCLP Senior Fellow, Richard Reeves.
The book draws on the paper’s extensive coverage of the Kennedy presidency. Reeves, the author of the bestselling Portraits of Camelot and President Kennedy: Profile of Power, edited this collection of the New York Times’ “unsurpassed coverage of the tumultuous Kennedy era which spanned the Civil Rights Movement, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the space program, and the Berlin Wall,” with covered in articles by top reporters. The Kennedy Years also includes new essays by leading historians and New York Times’ journalists.
When asked what he hoped readers might see in the collection, Reeves told us, “This is the way it was in the 1960s, the Kennedy years, as written by the best reporters of the day – James Reston, Tom Wicker, David Halberstam, Russel Baker. And their first draft of history is updated by some of the finest historians working today, including Robert Dallek, Thomas Maier, Andrew J. Bacevich and Sam Tanenhaus.”
Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley calls The Kennedy Years “a deeply illuminating, journalistic romp through Camelot from the eyes and minds of the great New York Times reporters of that era and beyond,” adding, “Richard Reeves has corralled the best and the brightest Kennedy scholars to offer fact-checked wisdom.”
Reeves is a Senior Lecturer at USC Annenberg’s School of Journalism as well as an author and syndicated columnist whose column has appeared in more than 100 newspapers since 1979. He was the Chief Political Correspondent of The New York Times, National Editor and Columnist for Esquire and New York Magazine, was named a “literary lion” by the New York Public Library, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and juror.