his prosecution of Alger Hiss. These all happened before 1951, two decades before Watergate. Nothing in JFK's political career compares with them.
The book's ill-explained origin is not its only problem. In its final form, it seems to be a rush job. I have rarely seen a biography by a veteran writer (which Clay Blair was) so poorly edited, written, and organized. The book is nearly 700 pages long. It could have been cut by a third without losing anything of quality or substance. The book is heavily reliant on interviews which are presented in the main text. Some of them at such length-two and three pages-that they give the volume the air of an oral history. To make it worse, after someone has stopped talking, the authors tell us the superfluous fact that his wife walked into the room, making for more excess verbiage (p.60). And on top of this, the Blairs have no gift for syntax or language, let alone glimmering prose. As a result, even for an interested reader, the book is quite tedious.
The Blairs spend much of their time delving into