WHY ANOTHER KENNEDY book? Facing up to the question in a preface, Robert Dallek tells us that much new material has surfaced since he embarked on his project some six years ago. Without trawling through upwards of a hundred books about JFK this is a difficult claim to test. But what is undeniablv new is Dallek's detailed, gruesome, yet fascinating account of Kennedy's stlectacular number of illnesses Ad the trouble he and his family I took to keep them secret.

Robert Dallek is a highly respected biographer. Uniquely he was given access to the medical files in the Kennedy Library, an opportunity long denied to others by the controllers of the Kennedy papers. These files show a man not onlv in almost constant discomfor; and pain since hls schooldays, but