Biography
of John F. Kennedy: How Author Depictions Have Changed Through Years
By
Don Lee
Kennedy’s
depiction in history has changed for the worse, and occasionally the better,
through the years. Each biography about the popular president seems to present
new information about his life.
The
“Camelot” image was the capstone of the Kennedy family’s assiduous management
of its public image. Jacqueline Kennedy put the word to the idea in the wake of
her husband’s death in Dallas, and his closest advisers and confidants were
eager to make that image last as long as possible.
As
Mark Ambinder wrote in The Week, during 2013’s run-up to the 50th anniversary
of the assassination, writers such as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Ted
Sorensen were crafting not only their own takes on history, but “the basic
textbook for figuring out how the Kennedy family wanted JFK to be viewed by
history.”
Chief
among those was Schlesinger, whose 1965 memoir, “1,000 Days: John F. Kennedy in
the White House, was called by Ambinder “thorough and largely accurate ...
(but) not remotely critical.”
Schlesinger
tried hard to hold onto the rosy view of Kennedy in the foreword to the 2002
re-issue of his book: “Revisionism, it should be said, did not affect popular
admiration of Kennedy. Ordinary Americans remembered a strong and stirring
president who ... tapped the republic’s latent idealism and infused a
generation with a passion for public service.”
So
carefully was the picture managed that journalists and historians who dug up
the dirt could not reconcile the new picture with the one that would not let
go.
And
the Kennedys saw to that. Writers have alleged that they pressured people not
to write, or publishers to not publish, or campaigned to get
less-than-laudatory bits trimmed from published pieces. When James MacGregor
Burns wrote “John Kennedy: A Political Profile” with Kennedy’s cooperation in
1959, Kennedy was “furious” at the result, which the Wall Street Journal called
an “astute, clear-eyed biography of the future president.”
As with
most celebrities, untimely death only magnified the positives of Kennedy’s
reputation.
“His
death is part of the answer. We want to know what he might have done,” Ambinder
wrote. Indeed, the first book to look
at Kennedy with less than admiration – Victor Lasky’s 1963 “The Man and the
Myth” – was pulled from print after the assassination, though it was reissued
three years later with new material.
As
public opinion swung away from the Vietnam War, the Kennedys’ control over
their image slipped, and critics of the Democratic Party became more pointed
and vociferous; JFK’s public image got seamier.
Then,
too, came the question of whether JFK’s character affected the decisions he
made as president – a question explored in books such as Seymour Hersh’s “The
Dark Side of Camelot” (1997) and Thomas Reeves’s “A Question of Character”
(1991).
“Jack
and Bobby Kennedy also learned from their father and grandfather that – as
Kennedys – they could enjoy freedoms denied to other men; the consequences of
their acts were for others to worry about,” Hersh wrote.
And
the peccadilloes of politicians only fed the fire, as Mimi Alford found out
when her four-decade-old secret involvement with JFK finally came to light,
writing in her own book about the affair: “The Monica Lewinsky scandal, which
had nearly brought down the Clinton Administration five years earlier, had
stoked the public’s interest for salacious details about the sex lives of our
leaders.
