Three paths to the presidency

The Best Year of Their Lives: Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in 1948 -- Learning the Secrets of Power
By Lance Morrow
Basic, 312 pp., $26

So much has been published about John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon that a downright exciting new book about any of them -- much less all three of them simultaneously -- seemed unlikely circa 2005.

Well, Lance Morrow has accomplished the unlikely. In an extended essay containing little new factual information but brimming with fresh insights, he examines how the personal histories of the three men, combined with national and international events occurring during 1948, set the stage for future presidents of the United States.

Morrow holds a faculty position at Boston University, though he lives primarily in upstate New York. He combines journalism and intellectualism about as skillfully as anybody writing in the United States today. Evidence of that combination can be found in his previously published books (a philosophical rumination on evil, plus two memoirs), his cover stories for Time magazine, and his in-depth features for National Geographic Traveler and Harper's.

In this new book, Morrow's original thinking is given additional power by clear, compelling writing. His intellectualism allows him to define 1948 as the decision year for future presidential quests among men who seemingly had almost nothing in common -- except the desire to reach the White House combined with the vision to devise plans that would overcome seemingly insurmountable hurdles on the path to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

What happened during 1948 to seed the presidential aspirations of Nixon and Johnson was exceedingly public. What happened to Kennedy was exceedingly private.

Nixon, a first-term, socially inept, brainy congressional representative from California, became recognized as a Cold War communist hunter, with a civil servant named Alger Hiss as his primary quarry. Johnson, a veteran but largely unknown congressman from Texas, ascended to the US Senate by defeating a popular down-home former governor in a nearly dead-even race -- a difference of 87 votes -- that almost certainly involved ballot fraud.

Kennedy, a first-term congressman, spent 1948 doing damage control to his reputation by building a myth that few nonfamily outsiders penetrated until long after his assassination. One part of the myth assured voters that Kennedy enjoyed good health, when in fact he was suffering from a debilitating disease requiring heavy medication. Another part of the myth involved sexual predation rampant within the Kennedy clan. In 1948, Kennedy's beloved sister Kathleen died in an overseas airplane crash while with her married lover. The Kennedy clan lied about the circumstances of Kathleen's death, and got away with the lie. John F. Kennedy learned that he could get away with lies about his own sexual improprieties, and did so for the remaining 15 years of his life.

Morrow's extended essay would pack intellectual power if all he had done was chronicle the biographical turning points of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon during 1948, then outline their divergent paths to the presidency in 1960, 1963, and 1968. Instead, Morrow sets the bar much higher. He is determined to demonstrate how the varied geographic and socioeconomic upbringings of the three men led to the development of their outsize, flawed, ultimately dominant characters. Simultaneously, Morrow is determined to link the three distinct character types that resulted with alternate visions of the United States circa 1948.

The intellectual tour de force arises in a chapter titled ''Ellis Island, the Frontier, and the Taft-Hartley Act." The opening paragraphs of the chapter demonstrate Morrow's productively creative thinking better than any paraphrase could do.

''The birthplaces -- and the gravesites -- of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon are widely scattered across America: Kennedy born in Brookline, Massachusetts, and buried in Arlington National Cemetery; Johnson born and buried in the Hill Country of Texas; Nixon laid to rest in Yorba Linda, California, outside Los Angeles, just yards from where he was born. The places, like the men, represent an American triangulation -- three lines of meaning, three geographical personalities and histories.

''The meanings can be approached by looking at basic poles of American experience: Ellis Island and the Frontier. . . . Americans tend to be attracted, like iron filings, to one or the other of the national narratives, with its attendant attitudes and sympathies.

''America is a large, complicated country, with cultural admixtures that every year make it less susceptible to generalization. But it remains useful to study the interplay between Ellis Island and the Frontier . . . to measure the political distance between them, and the frequent hostility between them as organizing metaphors."

The Ellis Island metaphor, Morrow explains, is essentially urban, noisy, and ethnic. The frontier metaphor is essentially spacious, silent, and homogeneous. The metaphors collided over a piece of legislation called Taft-Hartley, after its congressional sponsors. As the metaphors collided, so did the three future presidents. The proposed legislation carried a probusiness label, as it made organizing and maintaining labor unions more difficult.

Congressman Kennedy opposed passage of the legislation, thus putting himself at odds with his wealthy businessman father, who bankrolled his political ambitions. In Morrow's terminology, ''Between the extremes of Frontier and Ellis Island, Kennedy located himself somewhere a little to the left of the Frontier individualism that his father had adapted to his freewheeling purposes on Wall Street and in Hollywood."

Congressman Nixon, who favored the legislation, ''located himself farther to the right, on what might be called the Chamber of Commerce Frontier."

As for Johnson, hoping to win a Senate seat or suffer the near-certain death of his career in politics, he tried to embody both the Ellis Island and Frontier metaphors while misrepresenting his election opponent's stance on Taft-Hartley. The Johnson lies almost certainly reduced his opponent's vote total.

Morrow's book is filled with such original thinking, the kind that leads to epiphanies. It might never become the conventional wisdom for the KennedyJohnson-Nixon era of history, but it should.

Steve Weinberg is a director of the National Book Critics Circle.