Book chapter
The Kennedy Legacy: From Hagiography to Exposé and Back Again
The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy, pp.240-250
Cambridge University Press
2015
DOI: 10.1017/CCO9781107256699.019
Abstract
In the 1969 afterword to his classic 1960 study, Presidential Power and Modern Presidents, political scientist and Kennedy adviser Richard Neustadt claimed that John F. Kennedy had had too little time in office to establish a solid political legacy, but "he left a myth: the vibrant, youthful leader cut down senselessly before his time." In this chapter, I will briefly trace the arc of this "myth" over the last fifty years. Unlike traditional myths, which emerge authorless out of the depths of prehistory, this was a modern myth, consciously crafted by contemporary intellectuals with definite ideas about what myths mean and how they function in history, especially American history. Originally in collaboration with the Kennedy family, and then increasingly in opposition to it, American public intellectuals forged the figure of a glamorous, youthful hero, deified him in the wake of his assassination, and then proceeded to expose and dismantle him as a false god whose image concealed a craven, cowardly, and sickly man. Yet the myth of the hero persists, continuously reborn and refashioned to fulfill the needs of the present day. As the outpouring of books and articles attendant upon the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy's assassination attests, Americans are not through mythologizing the president who stays forever young.
John Kennedy, in cooperation with his staff and family, had been exploiting his youthful glamour and style as a political asset since his first congressional campaign, but it was Norman Mailer who began the process of rhetorically reshaping this image into a heroic myth in his article "Superman Comes to the Supermarket." The piece originally appeared in Esquire (under the title "Superman Comes to the Supermart," which was not Mailer's) only weeks before the election, and Mailer liked to think that it afforded Kennedy the slim margin of victory he managed to eke out in those final days.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- The Kennedy Legacy: From Hagiography to Exposé and Back Again
- Creators
- Andrew Hoberek - University of MissouriLoren Glass - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publication Details
- The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy, pp.240-250
- DOI
- 10.1017/CCO9781107256699.019
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press; Cambridge
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 2015
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9984397930902771
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