""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 they prepare for power at the dawn of an era they would make their own. At the heart of the story is Kennedy's quest to create an address that would distill American dreams, ensure his place in history, and inspire a new generation." "Beginning with JFK's first sustained work on the speech - during a flight on his private jet to his family's Palm Beach mansion - Clarke shows how JFK struggled to find words to define his great ambitions and introduces new evidence establishing that JFK and not his speechwriter, Theodore Sorenson, was the creator of the inaugural's most stirring and poetic passages. And he brings to life the dramatic occasion that was the inauguration day itself." "Thurston Clarke's portrait of JFK during what intimates call his happiest days reveals this ultimate politician at his most dazzlingly charismatic and cunningly pragmatic. For everyone who seeks to understand an era and the endless fascination with all things Kennedy, the answer can be found in Ask Not."--BOOK JACKET.