Red Széll

bears out the old adage that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I absolutely love the new kind of trend of narrative history and narrative biography where you're really looking almost at a character study of the subject

of the book.

And I've got an interview coming up on My Life in Books in March with a guy called J. Randy Tarabarelli, who is a really celebrated biographer and one of the most respected authorities on the Kennedy family.

And his latest book, JFK, Public Private Secret, gives a really fabulous three-dimensional portrait of John F. Kennedy.

And, you know, the public side, you know, his service as a senator and a president is

the private side as a son, a brother, and a husband, and then the secret side, which shows his personal flaws, the sex scandals, the terrible problems he had with illness through his life.

He had awful back problems.

He had a back operation that nearly killed him.

None of this came out in his lifetime whatsoever.

And Tarabarelli delves into Secret Service files, into open source history.

But he also has 35 years of interviewing people who knew JFK, who were intimate with him.

He has personal memoirs from...

a couple of JFK's lovers.

He talks to JFK's mother-in-law, who just gave a fascinating insight into JFK.

And also Joe Kennedy, John F. Kennedy's father, was having an open affair with his personal assistant for much of the time.

And even though this woman's now, I think, 102 years old,

J. Randy Tarabarelli talks to her and gets incredible insight into why JFK was such a flawed man, how his upbringing and what he saw around him informed him.

I...

I came away thinking, oh, my goodness, the story of the Kennedys is like a Greek tragedy.