Although John F Kennedy is perhaps the best-known American president of the 20th century, surprisingly he lacks a major, full-length, all-embracing biography. Barbara Leaming realised the omission as she wrote her most recent book, MRS KENNEDY, an account of Jackie Kennedy as First Lady. Whereas some see JFK as noble idealist, others as self-serving deceiver, to Leaming he is neither: ‘Time and time again,’ she writes, ‘I have been astonished to discover a man in crisis, a leader desperately and profoundly at odds with himself.’ She sees the formative years starting on the eve of the Munich crisis in 1938 in London where his father had just become US ambassador. Leaming spotlight the friendship between the Kennedy and Cavendish families made formal when Billy, heir to the Devonshire dukedom, married Kenndy’s sister ‘Kick’, the person to whom he was closest. But Kick died in a plane crash in 1948. Twelve years later Kennedy, now the 35th US president, found himself dealing with a friend from those formative years, the British PM, Harold Macmillan, whose wife was a Cavendish. In Leaming’s view – and she is the only writer to have seen the full Macmillan-JFK-Jacky letters – Macmillan, and others from the pre-war period, played a far more important role in his presidency than have hitherto been given credit for.