Melbourne

JFK's favorite book

Like many of your regular customers, I am also a regular viewer of C-Span "book weekend." It goes without saying that this is an expensive combination--i.e. having the ability to find ANY book ever published (often long out of print and long gone from the local Border's) and to purchase that book in one click; prices are often ridiculously low, but it all adds up.
One morning, I saw a C-Span feature on the JFK Library--part of their series on Presidential Libes all over the country. The docen mentioned that "Melbourne" was JFK's favorite book. When I saw that it could be had for next to nothing on Alibris, I was a goner. I am currently on vacation and have had a chance to get through it. It was published in 1954, but it is certainly a timely book for an aging baby boomer--raised in the age of the "flower children" and a natural liberal. Melbourne was Queen Victoria's first Prime Minister. He was something of a Liberal, but he was able to see both sides of the issues of his day and to understand how schemes aimed at poverty and injustice dreamt up by starry-eyed "do-gooders" can often go awry.
Of necessity, he was a tutor to the Queen at the time of her ascension to the throne, and he seems to have done a masterful job of helping to transform a naive teen-ager into one of the great leaders of the nineteenth century.
This book was clearly worth the trouble.