Douglass Jfk and the Unspeakable Reviews New York Times
Kennedy, the Elusive President
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As the 50th anniversary of his assassination nears, John F. Kennedy remains all but impossible to pin down. One reason is that his martyrdom — for a generation of Americans yet the almost traumatic public event of their lives, 9/eleven nevertheless — has obscured much about the human and his accomplishments.
Was Kennedy a great president, as many continue to recall? Or was he a reckless and charming lightweight or, worse still, the outset of our celebrities-in-chief? To what extent practise his numerous personal failings, barely reported during his lifetime but amply documented since, overshadow or undermine his policy achievements? And what of those achievements — in civil rights and poverty, to name two issues his administration embraced. Weren't the breakthroughs really the doing of his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson?
Fifty-fifty the basic facts of Kennedy's death are still subject to heated argument. The historical consensus seems to have settled on Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin, but conspiracy speculation abounds — involving Johnson, the C.I.A., the mob, Fidel Castro or a baroque combination of all of them. Many of the theories take been circulating for decades and accept now constitute new life on the Internet, in Web sites delirious with unfiltered and at times unhinged musings.
Of course the Kennedy fixation is hardly express to the digital world. An estimated 40,000 books about him have been published since his death, and this anniversary year has loosed another vast outpouring. Yet to explore the enormous literature is to be struck non by what's at that place but by what'due south missing. Readers can choose from many books but surprisingly few good ones, and not one really outstanding one.
It is a curious state of affairs, and some of the nation's leading historians wonder well-nigh information technology. "There is such fascination in the country virtually the ceremony, only there is no great book about Kennedy," Robert Caro lamented when I spoke to him not long agone. The situation is all the stranger, he added, since Kennedy'due south life and decease course "ane of the smashing American stories." Caro should know. His ballsy life of Johnson (iv volumes and counting) brilliantly captures parts of the Kennedy saga, especially the assassination in Dallas, revisited in the latest installment, "The Passage of Power."
Robert Dallek, the writer of "An Unfinished Life," probably the best unmarried-volume Kennedy biography, suggests that the cultish temper surrounding, and perhaps smothering, the actual man may be the reason for the arrears of good writing most him. "The mass audience has turned Kennedy into a glory, and so historians are not really impressed past him," Dallek told me. "Historians see him more as a celebrity who didn't accomplish very much." Dallek also pointed to a second inhibiting cistron, the commercial force per unit area authors feel to come up with sensational new material. His ain book, as it happens, included a good deal of fresh information on Kennedy's astringent health problems and their cover-up by those closest to him. And yet Dallek is careful not to allow these revelations overwhelm the larger story.
Dallek is as well skilful on the fairy-tale aspects of the Kennedy family unit history, and he closely examines the workings of the Kennedy White Business firm. And then enthralled was he by this last topic that he has written a follow-up, "Camelot's Court," which profiles members of Kennedy's famous brain trust and is being released for the 50th anniversary. This time, even so, it is Dallek who doesn't offer much fresh material.
This in turn raises another question: How much is left to say about Kennedy'due south presidency? The signature legislative accomplishments he and his advisers envisioned were not enacted until after his death. Then there is the Vietnam conundrum. Some maintain that Kennedy would not have escalated the state of war every bit Johnson did. But the conventionalities that he would take express the American presence in Vietnam is rooted as much in the romance of "what might have been" as in the documented record.
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Indeed, a dolorous mood of "what might accept been" hangs over a adept deal of writing nearly Kennedy. Arriving in time for November. 22 is the loathsomely titled "If Kennedy Lived. The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: An Alternating History," by the television commentator Jeff Greenfield, who imagines a completed first Kennedy term and then a second. This isn't new territory for Greenfield, who worked for Kennedy's blood brother Robert and is the author of a previous volume of presidential "what ifs" called "And then Everything Inverse." (Dallek'south "Camelot's Court" and Greenfield's "If Kennedy Lived" are reviewed here.)
Thurston Clarke, the author of two previous and quite serviceable books on the Kennedys, also dwells on fanciful "what might have beens" in "JFK's Last Hundred Days," suggesting that the death of the presidential couple'due south last child, Patrick, brought the grieving parents closer together and may have signaled the end of Kennedy'south compulsive womanizing. What's more, Clarke makes a giant (and dubious) leap about Kennedy as leader, arguing that in the final 100 days he was becoming a keen president. I example, according to Clarke, was his persuading the conservative Republicans Charles Halleck, the Business firm minority leader, and Everett Dirksen, the Senate minority leader, to support a civil rights beak. One time re-elected, Kennedy would take pushed the neb through Congress.
Kennedy as Arthurian hero is also a feature of what has been called "pundit lit" by the historian and announcer David Greenberg. The purpose of this genre (books past writers who themselves are famous) is, in Greenberg's words, "to extend their authors' brands — to make money, to be certain, and to express some set up of ideas, however vague, only mainly to keep their celebrity creators in the media spotlight." The champion in this growing field is Bill O'Reilly, who has milked the Kennedy assassination with unique efficiency.
O'Reilly'due south latest contribution, "Kennedy's Final Days," is an illustrated recycling, for children, of his mega-all-time seller "Killing Kennedy." This new version, it must exist said, distinctly improves on the original, whose choppy sentences, many written in the nowadays tense, lose zilch when recast for younger readers. "He is on a collision class with evil," O'Reilly declares. No less elevated is his discussion of Kennedy'southward conclusion to visit Dallas despite warnings of roiling violence, including the physical attack on his United Nations ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, who had given a spoken language in the metropolis in October 1963. "J.F.Yard. has decided to visit Large D," O'Reilly writes. "At that place is no backing down." Happily, the wooden prose is offset by the many illustrations. My favorite is a spread on the outset family unit's pets, including puppies and a pony.
Bad books by glory authors shouldn't surprise us, even when the subject is an American president. The true mystery in Kennedy's case is why, l years after his expiry, highly accomplished writers seem unable to set him on the page.
For some, the trouble has been idolatry. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who wrote three magisterial volumes on Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, attempted a like history in "A Yard Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House." Published in 1965, information technology has the virtues of immediacy, since Schlesinger, Kennedy's Harvard contemporary, had been on the White Business firm staff, brought in as court historian. He witnessed many of the events he describes. But in his admiration for Kennedy, he became a main builder of the Camelot myth so failed, in the end, to give a persuasive account of the actual presidency.
In 1993, the political journalist Richard Reeves did better. "President Kennedy: Profile of Power" is a minutely detailed chronicle of the Kennedy White House. Every bit a primer on Kennedy's decision-making, like his handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis, the book is fascinating. What's missing is a film of Kennedy's personal life, though Reeves includes a passing mention of Marilyn Monroe being sewn into the $5,000 flesh-colored, skintight dress she wore to celebrate the president's birthday at Madison Square Garden in 1962. (This is the place to annotation that Reeves edited "The Kennedy Years," The New York Times's own addition to the always-expanding Kennedy creation, and I wrote the foreword.)
Balancing out, or warring with, the Kennedy claque are the Kennedy haters, similar Seymour M. Hersh and Garry Wills. In "The Dark Side of Camelot," Hersh wildly posits connections betwixt the Kennedys and the mob, while Wills, though he offers any number of vivid insights into Kennedy and his circle of courtiers, fixates on the Kennedy brothers' (and male parent's) sexual escapades in "The Kennedy Imprisonment."
The sum total of this oddly polarized literature is a kind of void. Other presidents, proficient and bad, have been served well past biographers and historians. We take kickoff-rate books on Jefferson, on Lincoln, on Wilson, on both Roosevelts. Even unloved presidents have received major books: Johnson (Caro) and Richard Nixon (Wills, among others). Kennedy, the odd man out, still seeks his true biographer.
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Why is this the case? One reason is that even during his lifetime, Kennedy defeated or outwitted the most powerfully analytic and intuitive minds.
In 1960, Esquire mag commissioned Norman Mailer's showtime major piece of political journalism, request him to study on the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles that nominated Kennedy. Mailer's long virtuoso article, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," came as close every bit whatsoever book or essay ever has to capturing Kennedy'due south essence, though that essence, Mailer candidly acknowledged, was enigmatic. Hither was a 43-yr-old man whose irony and grace were keyed to the national temper in 1960. Kennedy's presence, youthful and light, was at once soothing and confusing, with a bear upon of brusqueness. He carried himself "with a absurd grace which seemed indifferent to adulation, his mode somehow similar to the poise of a fine boxer, quick with his hands, neat in his timing, and two feet away from his corner when the bell concluded the round." Finally, even so, "there was an elusive detachment to everything he did. One did non have the feeling of a man nowadays in the room with all his weight and all his mind."
Mailer himself doesn't know "whether to value this elusiveness, or to beware of it. One could exist witnessing the fortitude of a superior sensitivity or the detachment of a human who was not quite existent to himself."
And yet Kennedy's unreality, in Mailer's view, may have answered the item craving of a particular historical moment. "It was a hero America needed, a hero central to his time, a man whose personality might suggest contradiction and mysteries which could reach into the alienated circuits of the undercover, because just a hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and and so be good for the vitality of his nation." Those words seemed to prophesy the Kennedy mystique that was to come, reinforced by the whisker-thin victory over Nixon in the general election, by the romantic excitements of Camelot and so by the horror of Dallas.
L years afterwards nosotros are still sifting through the facts of the assassination. The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Kennedy had been killed by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. Edward Jay Epstein and Marking Lane were among the first writers to challenge that finding, and their skepticism loosed a tide of investigations. The 50th anniversary has done in some new ones. Among the more ambitious is "A Brutal and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Bump-off," a work of more than 500 pages. Its writer, Philip Shenon, a former New York Times reporter, uncovered a new lead, in the person of a heretofore overlooked woman who may have had suspicious ties to the assassin. Merely when Shenon finds the woman, now in her 70s, in Mexico, she denies having had a relationship with Oswald, and Shenon's encounters with her prove more mysterious than illuminating.
Kennedy'due south murder was spring to attract novelists, and some have approached the discipline inventively, if with strange results. Stephen Rex'due south "eleven/22/63," a best seller published in 2011, takes the form of a fourth dimension-travel romp involving a high school English teacher who finds romance in Texas while keeping tabs on Oswald. At more than than 800 pages, the novel demands a commitment that exceeds its amusement value.
I rather like Mailer'south "Oswald's Tale," published in 1995. It is, like his earlier masterpiece "The Executioner's Vocal," a work of "faction," which is Mailer'south term for his hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration. Mailer and his colleague, Lawrence Schiller, spent vi months in Russian federation examining Oswald's 1000.G.B. files, and the huge quasi novel that came out of it contains a practiced deal of engrossing material about Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina, as well as the odd array of people the couple mixed with in Texas. Mailer's narrative skills are biggy, but in the end he has footling to tell us that wasn't already uncovered past Priscilla Johnson McMillan in "Marina and Lee," her nonfiction portrait of the troubled couple from 1977. (Mailer properly credits McMillan's book.)
Well-nigh critics seem to think the outstanding example of Kennedy assassination fiction is "Libra," Don DeLillo's postmodern novel, published in 1988. The narrative is indeed taut and bracing. But the claiming DeLillo set for himself, to provide readers with "a way of thinking about the bump-off without being constrained by half-facts or overwhelmed by possibilities, by the tide of speculation that widens with the years," exceeds fifty-fifty his lavish gifts.
It is telling that DeLillo reverts to the shadowy realm of "half-facts." Their persistence raises the question of just how many secrets remain, not simply about Kennedy's expiry but also nigh his life. And if at that place are secrets, who is guarding them, and why?
One clue has been furnished by the historian Nigel Hamilton, whose book "JFK: Reckless Youth," published in 1992, was the first in a planned multivolume biography that promised to be a valuable add-on to the current literature. (He has since dropped the project.) While the volume was gossipy, especially on the subject of the young Kennedy's sexual adventures, Hamilton also provided a vivid and lively business relationship of Kennedy'southward successful 1946 entrada for Congress. But when Hamilton began work on the next volumes, he said he came under a sustained barrage by Kennedy loyalists. "The family leaned upon well-known historians such every bit Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Doris Goodwin to write protest messages to the press," Hamilton wrote in 2011 in The Huffington Post. "I was warned that no Kennedy-era official or friend would exist 'allowed' to speak to me for my proposed sequel."
Kennedy may have enjoyed the company of writers, but the long history of secrecy and mythmaking has surely contributed to the paucity of skillful books. The Kennedys — especially Jackie and Bobby — were notoriously hard on authors whose books they didn't like. And they enlisted Schlesinger, Theodore Sorensen and other intimates to act as a kind of history police, not merely withholding primary materials but also bullying writers. A prominent historian recently told me he was once warned by Schlesinger, with whom he had been friendly, that because he had invited Hamilton to a coming together of the American Historical Association he might himself be banished from the organization. In recent years, the protective seal seems to have loosened. The Kennedy family, including Edward Kennedy and his sister Jean Kennedy Smith, gave unfettered admission to their begetter's papers to David Nasaw, the writer of "The Patriarch," a well-received biography of Joseph P. Kennedy that appeared last year.
Caroline Kennedy has been even more open to the claims of history. She herself was involved in the publication of two books and the release of accompanying tapes. One of them, "Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy," contains the transcripts of the commencement lady'due south interviews almost her husband with Schlesinger, conducted in 1964 but kept secret until 2011. They are revealing and mesmerizing. The other, "Listening In," offers White House conversations captured in a secretly installed taping system in the Oval Office. Since Kennedy controlled the device, these conversations are more guarded, but the volume includes at least one memorable moment, when the president hilariously loses his temper over unflattering press about the $5,000 toll of Mrs. Kennedy's hospital maternity suite — "Are they crazy up in that location? Now you know what that's gonna exercise? Whatsoever congressman is going to get up and say, 'Christ, if they can throw $5,000 abroad on this, let's cut 'em another billion dollars.' You just sank the Air Force budget!"
The most agonizing case of the family's attempts to command history came early on on, and it involved William Manchester, the historian called by the Kennedys a few weeks after the assassination to write the authorized account, "The Death of a President." Manchester was selected because of a previous, and fawning, book he had written near Kennedy, "Portrait of a President." (In a bizarre twist, this was one of the books Lee Harvey Oswald checked out of a New Orleans public library merely months earlier the assassination.) Manchester was given sole access to nearly all the president'due south men as well as to his widow and virtually every principal figure. (Lyndon Johnson submitted answers in writing through his staff.) Information technology seemed the ideal arrangement — until Manchester presented a manuscript to the Kennedys.
In a gripping piece from his 1976 collection of essays, "Controversy," Manchester described what happened next. First there were the many insertions and deletions fabricated by various Kennedy minions, who applied and then much pressure that Manchester became a nervous wreck. An especially depression betoken came when Robert Kennedy hunted Manchester down in a New York hotel room and banged on the door, demanding to exist let in to argue for still more changes. Side by side, Jackie Kennedy, who had not bothered to read the manuscript, accepted the view of her factotums that many of its details, similar the fact that she carried cigarettes in her pocketbook, were too personal. Farther angered by the $665,000 Manchester had received from Look mag for serial rights, Mrs. Kennedy went to courtroom to enjoin the author from publishing the book. Eventually, she settled out of court and finally read "The Death of a President" when it was published in 1967. She deemed it "fascinating."
Withal, the Kennedy family, which controlled publication rights to "The Death of a President," allowed it to become out of print, and for a number of years copies could be establish but online or at rummage sales. The good news, maybe the all-time, of the 50th ceremony is that Little, Brown has at present reissued paperback and e-book editions.
It'south expert news because, remarkably, and against all odds, Manchester (who died in 2004) wrote an extraordinary book. In that location are obvious defects. Predictably, he blares the trumpets of Camelot, and he has a weakness for melodrama. It'south hard to believe, even at the fourth dimension of Kennedy's murder, that to the world it was "as though the Axis powers had surrendered and Adolf Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt had died in the hours betwixt noon and midafternoon in Washington of a single day in 1945." Just these excesses don't really matter, cheers to Manchester'south vivid reporting, masterly narrative and authentically poetic touches.
Information technology is in pocket-sized, quiet scenes that Manchester'south relate accumulates its greatest force. When it is fourth dimension for Dave Powers, the slain president's adjutant and sidekick, to choice out the wearing apparel Kennedy volition habiliment to his grave, he selects from eight suits and iv pairs of shoes brought out by Kennedy's valet, George Thomas. Powers settles on a blue-greyness accommodate, black shoes and "a blue tie with a slight blueprint of calorie-free dots." An embroidered "JFK" on the white silk shirt is hidden from view. The valet remembered that Kennedy'due south "dislike of flamboyant monograms had extended to handkerchiefs," Manchester writes. The president "had advisedly folded them then that the initials would not prove, and Thomas did it for him now, slipping the handkerchief into his coat pocket."
Of all that has been written and that volition be read on this 50th anniversary, it is the last paragraphs of "The Death of a President" that deserve to stand out from everything else. Manchester describes viewing the bloodstained pink adapt Jackie Kennedy wore on November. 22, 1963, which had since been stowed in a Georgetown cranium:
Unknown to her, the clothes Mrs. Kennedy wore into the vivid midday glare of Dallas lie in an attic non far from 3017 Northward Street. In Bethesda that night those closest to her had vowed that from the moment she shed them she should never encounter them again. She hasn't. Yet they are yet there, in 1 of ii long chocolate-brown newspaper cartons thrust between roof rafters. The first is marked "September 12, 1953," the appointment of her marriage; it contains her wedding gown. The block-printed label on the other is "Worn past Jackie, November 22, 1963." Inside, neatly bundled, are the pink wool suit, the black shift, the low-heeled shoes and, wrapped in a white towel, the stockings. Were the box to be opened by an intruder from some land so remote that the name, the appointment and photographs of the ensemble had not been published and republished until they had been graven upon his memory, he might conclude that these were only fashionable garments which had passed out of fashion and which, because they were associated with some pleasant occasion, had non been discarded.
If the trespasser looked closer, however, he would be momentarily baffled. The memento of a happy time would exist cleaned before storing. Obviously this costume has not been. There are ugly splotches along the front and hem of the skirt. The handbag's leather and the inside of each shoe are caked night cerise. And the stockings are quite odd. Once the same substance streaked them in mad scribbly patterns, but time and the sheerness of the cloth take altered it. The rusty clots have flaked off; they lie in tiny brittle grains on the nap of the towel. Examining them closely, the intruder would see his error. This clothing, he would perceive, had not been kept out of sentiment. He would realize that it had been worn by a slender young woman who had met with some dreadful accident. He might ponder whether she had survived. He might even wonder who had been to blame.
Unfortunately, the tapes of Manchester's 2 five-hour interviews with Jackie Kennedy, who seems to accept regretted her frankness, remain under seal at the Kennedy Library until 2067. This is a final sadness for a reader sifting through these many books. Taken together, they tell us all as well piddling about this president, now gone l years, who remains as elusive in expiry equally he was in life.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/books/review/the-elusive-president.html
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