Ask Not

by Thurston Clarke

""Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country." On the morning of January 20, 1961, when John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency and spoke these words, cold-war tensions were rapidly escalating. War seemed imminent to the millions listening as the new president began to describe his vision of the future." "What his listeners heard, across the land and around the globe, were words that instilled fresh hopes, calling all to "bear the burden of a long twilight struggle . . . against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself." Kennedy's address - considered by many to be the finest since Lincoln's at Gettysburg and the most memorable of any twentieth-century American politician - did more than reassure: it changed lives, ushering in a brief but memorable period of optimism." "Thurston Clarke has created a detailed rendering of the Kennedy inauguration: Ask Not takes us into the lives of the man, his family, and his advisers as t