Perhaps no trio of brothers has impacted American history as much as John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy. In his most recent book, The Kennedys in the World, Lawrence J. Haas—whose career includes senior communications posts in the Clinton White House and frequent appearances as a pundit in national newspapers and cable news outlets—uses the Kennedy brothers as a lens to examine US foreign policy since World War II. Given the significance of international diplomacy to all three brothers and their combined engagement in foreign policy debates from the 1930s through the 2000s, this is an intriguing, if novel, approach.
Divided into three parts, each one tracking the foreign policies of John, Robert, and Ted respectively, the book begins with the evolution of John from a “schoolboy diplomat” (xvi) into the world's preeminent Cold Warrior. Thrust into the touchy sphere of Anglo-American diplomacy in 1939 by his father Joe, then serving...