For example, Tweety wrote a lot about JFK, but his book said very little. James Di Eugenio explains:
Why Mr. Hardball Found JFK Elusive
Exclusive: For weeks, Chris Matthews has been flogging his book, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, driving it up the ranks of best-seller lists, but the biography is as superficial and clueless as the MSNBC pundit often is, missing Kennedy’s true complexity, writes James DiEugenio.
By James DiEugenio
ConsortiumNews January 3, 2012
EXCERPT...
On the previous page, he stated that his other main source was the interviews he did for his 1996 book. But in reality it’s worse than that. For if one looks at the footnotes and reads Matthews’s own comments on the subject, one of his favorite book sources is Herbert Parmet’s two-volume biography of Kennedy, which first appeared in 1982. This consisted of
Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy, and
JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy.
I am familiar with these books since I used them in writing my first book entitled
Destiny Betrayed. Looking back, I should not have. Parmet is a conventional historian in the manner and method of say David McCullough and the late Stephen Ambrose. He is not the kind of man who, as historians say, pushes the envelope or forges a new frontier for others to follow.
And with Kennedy, that is necessary since many of the things he was doing were rather unconventional – to the point that new information was still being discovered 40 years after his death. And we are still learning about them today; many years after Parmet published his rather obsolete books. Yet, in the face of that, Matthews still swears by Parmet.
Let me name just four books that do push the envelope and forge a new frontier, all of them released since Parmet’s. They are:
JFK: Ordeal in Africa,
The Kennedy Tapes,
Battling Wall Street, and
JFK and Vietnam. These books deepen our understanding of both John Kennedy and that turbulent age much more than the Parmet study does.
Considering who Matthews is, the reader will not be surprised to learn that there is not one footnote in the entire book related to any of these sources. This is remarkable because, as many Kennedy experts would say, those four books are in the forefront of Kennedy scholarship today.
CONTINUED...
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/03/why-mr-hardball-found-jfk-elusive/
As Tweety will never invite him on his show to try and get a word out, I'll side with Oliver Stone on this one.
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