The Kennedy Obsession: The American Myth of JFK (review)

Book Reviews 487 position in the campaign race, and the variation between the use of attacks or acclaims as tabulated by which campaigner is leading or trailing in the election race. In all, Benoit's Seeing Spots is a useful contribution to the body of literature on presidential campaign commercials. His more complex division and reading of the spots fosters a better understanding of the tactics and strategies candidates employ in their TV ads. He gives readers a richer, more contextualized sense of the most likely rationales for why candidates ran the spots they did, possible reasons for what did or did not work, and suggestions for ad strategies of future candidates. This book is recommended for teachers and students of contemporary political rhetoric, as well as creators and critics of televised campaign media. Ellen W Gorsevski Washington State University The Kennedy Obsession: The American Myth of JFK. By John Hellmann. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997; pp. xvi + 205. $16.95 paper. Historians and political scientists have had a difficult time making sense of the disjunction between John F. Kennedy's presidential record and his stature in the public mind. How can a president whom scholars rate as merely above-average rank above Lincoln and Washington in the popular view? Focused on the "real" JFK behind the image, Kennedy biographers have been hard pressed to explain the depths of his appeal. Perhaps as a result, we still do not have a first-rate biography of Kennedy. The most innovative studies of Kennedy in recent years have concentrated on the image rather than the man. Thomas Brown captured the scholarly battles over Kennedy's reputation in his JFK: History of an Image (1988) and Paul Henggeler revealed the impact of Kennedy's image on his successors in the White House in his The Kennedy Persuasion: The Politics of Style Since JFK (1995). Now, John Hellmann, a professor of English at Ohio State University at Lima, has brought together biography and mythology in The Kennedy Obsession. Concise, evocative, and fun to read, Hellmann's book has more insights into the Kennedy mystique than previous studies of much greater length and detail. In Hellmann's telling, Kennedy's life is a deliberately constructed hero tale, first formed in the imagination of a sickly youth who loved to read about heroes and then given shape and drama by a maturing politician whose formidable talents for myth-making were aided by a powerful, media-sawy father and gifted publicists. The book "traces the doubling of John F. Kennedy during his lifetime into something like a fictional character" (x). Hellmann's JFK stars in a political fantasy that others help to elaborate, but he remains an author and performer of his own narrative . The images that he rides to the White House bespeak his own dreams, but their power comes from attracting the desires and longings of his mass audience. 488 Rhetoric & Public Affairs Hellmann draws upon the evidence in standard Kennedy biographies, but his most interesting sources are Kennedy texts rather than Kennedy's life: "Among the primary materials used in this book are the articles, books, speeches, and television appearances that constructed the hero" (xi). Each chapter relates a critical episode in the elaboration of the hero tale by examining the text or texts that advanced the progress of the fictional hero. Perhaps the best way to convey the form and themes of Hellmann's analysis is to cite his chapter titles: "How Kennedy Awoke: Jack's Reading and Why England Slept," "John Hersey's 'Survival': A Literary Experiment and Its Political Adaptation," "The Old Man and the Boy: Papa Hemingway and Profiles in Courage," "The Hollywood Screen and Kennedy's Televised Showdown with Truman," "The Erotics of a Presidency," and "An Assassination and Its Fictions." The most compelling chapters discuss Kennedy's early life. Hellmann portrays the young JFK as a frail but rebellious youth whose heroic dreaming was a compensation for his mother's indifference and his father's preference for his more robust and charismatic older brother. Only with his writing of Why England Slept, a Harvard senior thesis describing how hard it had been for the British to awaken...