JFK biographer Robert Dallek looks back at the life of the 35th president (+video)

JFK biographer Robert Dallek discusses the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy's relationship with his vice-president, and what we can learn from his life.

By Randy Dotinga / November 21, 2013

President John Kennedy wanted smart advisers, and he got them - a gang of successful men brimming with confidence and not a small dose of arrogance, too. But there were other men there first, the members of the capital's military and intelligence establishment, and they wanted to manipulate the young and largely inexperienced JFK.

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Kennedy Historian Robert Dallek reflected on the day of the assassination.

This isn't an exceptional story in American politics. A century earlier, a cadre of military and political advisers tried to run over another inexperienced president named Abraham Lincoln. He'd develop his own circle of trust and his own savvy and stubborn independence. As revealed in historian Robert Dallek's new book, Kennedy did much the same thing.

Dallek is best known for 2003's 'An Unfinished Life,' widely considered one of the best Kennedy biographies. In 'Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House,' he chronicles how JFK managed to navigated the roiling waters of those who sought to guide and manipulate him.

'The Kennedy who will emerge from the pages of this book is an astute judge of character and reasoned policy,' he writes. 'He was an imperfect man whose foibles made him receptive to some bad advice that triggered misjudgments.... [But] his successes eclipsed the failings of his thousand days.'

In an interview, Dallek talks about Kennedy's distance from his vice president, the lessons he learned from a foreign policy disaster and the risks of arrogance.Q: We know that Barack Obama was influenced by how Lincoln created a 'Team of Rivals,' as Doris Kearns Goodwin put it. What was Kennedy's approach to choosing those who'd work with him?A: There were at least two things that played on his mind. One was the fact was that he had won the 1960 election by only 118,000 votes. He felt compelled to bring some Republicans into his administration to create a kind of national government.

So he brought in Robert McNamera as secretary of defense and McGeorge Bundy as national security adviser, both Republicans. He kept J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, and Allan Dulles, who'd been Eisenhower's director of the CIA, and he took C. Douglas Dillon from the Eisenhower administration to be secretary of the treasury.

The other consideration was that he wanted to have what journalist David Halberstam described as the 'The Best and the Brightest,' what his adviser Ted Sorenson called a 'Ministry of Talent.' He needed someone he could put his feet up with and talk with candidly.Q: Did he have any trust in Lyndon Johnson, his vice president?A: He wanted him on the ticket because he was accurately convinced it would help him win some Southern states and, in particular, win Texas. But he kept Johnson at arm's length.

Johnson wanted Kennedy to expand the powers of the vice president, and Kennedy simply didn't want to do it. He didn't want Johnson as a co-president.