JFK: Celebrity-In-Chief or Commander-In-Chief?

The Kennedy Obsession is an apt title for a book. Sixty years after newspapers praised Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy’s brood as “America’s best known large family” ¹ and almost forty years after Joe’s second son became president of the United States, Americans remain fixated on their “royal family.” As 1998 began, the President’s widow was the subject of a Broadway farce, “Jackie”; the President’s son was editing a magazine called George which should have been called “John-John”; the latest fallen Kennedy, Bobby’s son Michael, was eulogized on the cover of Newsweek; and yet another scandalography chronicling “The Dark Side of Camelot” was a bestseller.

Amid the many questions swirling about the Kennedy family and the Kennedy presidency, two in particular stand out: why are Americans so obsessed with this particular family and what, if anything, did John F. Kennedy accomplish during his “Thousand Days”? Fortunately, two new books help answer these questions. The Kennedy Obsession is a slim yet illuminating volume that assesses “the popular hero ‘John F. Kennedy’” (p. x), a legendary figure in whom “Americans saw the ideals of American mythology incarnated” (p. ix). The Kennedy Tapes is a massive yet gripping volume that belies the caricature of John Kennedy as a testosterone-crazed warmonger.

It is fitting that these additions to the Kennedy literature are not conventional historical monographs, for John Kennedy’s historical reputation continues to be shaped by assorted authors using all kinds of media. One book is a literary analysis by an English professor, and the second is, primarily, a collection of tape transcripts superbly edited by two historians. Still, these two scholarly endeavors help counter the many crass entries into the Kennedy historical sweepstakes.

Jacqueline Kennedy, among others, understood that her husband’s reputation needed nurturing. That is why, only days after the assassination, she deputized Theodore White to rescue Jack from “those bitter old men” who write history. ² Showing that she had learned from her husband how to market their image, the widow Kennedy offered “Camelot” as the defining image for the Kennedy era. Two years later, when Arthur Schlesinger finished A Thousand Days (1965), his ode to this fallen leader, Mrs. Kennedy exulted: “Now no one will ever be able to hurt Jack because your book is a testament against them—and for all that he could not finish.” ³

Ten years after the assassination, President and Mrs. Kennedy’s Camelot still sparkled. In a 1973 documentary commemorating the sad anniversary, CBS praised the Kennedys for giving America “a touch of royalty.” Amid moving footage of the eternally young president and his family, with Judy Garland singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in the background, the narrator intoned: “Some day somebody may separate John Kennedy’s wit from his wisdom, his sense of style from the substance. What his generation remembers is the mixture.” ⁴

Still, revisionism was spreading. The Chappaquidick drowning, along with the convulsions of the 1960s and 1970s, led some to reexamine the Kennedy mythmaking machine. In 1975 the combined effect of First Lady Betty Ford’s candor about her family’s personal life and the discovery by Frank Church’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that a “close friend” of President Kennedy had ties to mob boss Sam Giancana helped break reporters’ “gentleman’s code of silence.” ⁵ The next year, The Search for JFK by Joan and Clay Blair (1976) “cut through the cotton candy” to show how “major events and episodes in Jack’s life” had been “left out” of “the standard accounts” (pp. 9–10).

As the United States prepared to celebrate its Bicentennial, its citizens witnessed the primal scene of presidential politics. Americans peeked into the presidential bedroom, invited by Betty Ford...