Veteran journalists Thomas Oliphant and Curtis Wilkie, both political correspondents at the Boston Globe, have collaborated to write "The Road to Camelot: Inside JFK's Five Year Campaign". The work is a narrative history of the campaign by Senator John F. Kennedy to secure the Democratic nomination for the Presidency and, having done that, to win the Election of 1960. Much of this story has been told before, most brilliantly in Theodore White's "The Making of the President, 1960", but Oliphant and Wilkie provide more attention to the earlier phases of the campaign, before 1960, and make use of sources that were not available to White. Their account is highly enjoyable and informative. We know that Kennedy will win, but "The Road to Camelot" conveys a sense of suspense to the account as it reveals just how close a contest it was.

We learn in "The Road to Camelot" that John F. Kennedy insisted on running his own campaign, not the campaign his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, family patriarch, wanted him to run. Of course, the plan had been for the eldest son, Joe Kennedy Jr., to be the one who sought higher office, but that dream died with him in the Second World War. Instead, the frail and sickly second son, who nonetheless became a war hero and presented an handsome and charming face to the world, became the vessel of the family's political ambition. But from the first, John Kennedy as he won his first term as a freshman Congressman in the Election of 1946, disregarded his father's advice to apprentice himself to the political bosses who ran the Democratic machine in Boston. He early on demonstrated an independent streak that defied conventional political wisdom. He was still happy to accept his father's financial support and Joe Sr. tolerated his son's independent spirit, because he kept winning.

In 1952, JFK defeated Henry Cabot Lodge to become the junior senator from Massachusetts. Three years later, he decided to make a bid for the Presidency. He was 38 years old. At the Democratic national convention in Chicago in the summer of 1956, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois was nominated for a second time (he lost against Eisenhower in 1952) as the party's candidate for President. He left it up to the convention to choose his running mate, and the Kennedy people made a serious effort to get the Vice Presidential nomination. Fortunately, they lost and Kennedy was not tied to Stevenson as he was again defeated by Ike.

As Oliphant and Wilkie argue, Kennedy was a pioneer in modern campaigning. He and his crack team of advisors, many drawn from the academic world, others from journalism, invented the long-term scientific campaign. He hired the young Lou Harris as his professional pollster. And he decided to enter as many of the primaries as possible in 1960 to demonstrate his strength with voters and to win most of the delegates he would need going in to the convention in Los Angeles. This was an age when the party establishment still thought they could choose the candidate in the proverbial "smoke filled room" at the convention. JFK won all the crucial primaries and overcame the widespread bigotry against the idea of a Catholic President. With LBJ as his running mate, Kennedy won a razor thin victory over Nixon in November. His call to Coretta Scott King was possibly the act of moral courage that provided the margin of his election. ( )