The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy
by Prof. Larry J. Sabato
Bloomsbury, 2013
624 pp, $32
One of the 2013 works published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the November 1963 assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States, was Prof. Larry J. Sabato’s study, The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy.
At 603 densely-printed pages, with another 32 pages of photos, the epic girth and heft of the volume contradicts one of Sabato’s own conclusions, namely that “The Kennedy magic, which has entranced people for a half-century, will lose potency as his brief presidency ceases to have an outsized effect on personal memory and a nation’s history.”
As a political scientist, the founder and director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, Sabato emphasizes rightly that Kennedy’s Administration directly accomplished very little, and much of what it did do was neither memorable nor consequential: “The seventh-shortest presidency, JFK’s time in the White House was too brief for a lengthy list of accomplishments.”
Sabato is also correct to rate Kennedy “style” as the substance of his achievement, or, perhaps, “allure”: Dreams and deeds arrived gift-wrapped with rhetoric, wit, and photo-ops, often involving glamorous First Lady and wholesome children or the extended Kennedy clan, plus Las Vegas Rat Pack entertainers and Hollywood starlets, to further burnish the charisma.
Thus, “Kennedy’s place in the pantheon of presidencies should not be exaggerated.”
True enough. But for all of his solid analysis and sifting of the record (especially of the assassination itself), Sabato overlooks a crucial—if not the most vital—reason for JFK’s continued relevance, and that is, I think, his appeal to artists of all types—poets, musicians, singers, actors, novelists, filmmakers, etc.
Whether or not that appeal—or lustre—is based on anything more than rhetoric or image, it will sustain Kennedy’s vitality as a cultural icon and even as a political touchstone.
Indeed, it is only in the artistic imagination that JFK’s terrible contradictions can be reconciled: A serial, sleazy womanizer and the leader who inspired humanity to aspire to reach the moon; a hot cold-warrior and the first promoter of what would later be labeled détente; a cold-blooded plotter of assassinations and a cool, level-headed negotiator of the Cuban Missile Crisis; a hesitant supporter of black equality and the inventor of the Peace Corps, etc.
Sabato insists, “In the sweep of history, nothing JFK attained will matter more than his daring bet on NASA and a moon landing….” Or perhaps also his savvy and courageous diplomacy in facing the threat of nuclear war.
Yet, British author Jed Mercurio, in American Adulterer (2009), brackets all of JFK’s most notable doings with medically accurate accounts of his diseases and addictions, plus true and fictionalized accounts of his pathological philandering. As a subject for art, JFK is beautifully ambiguous: Dashing and dirty; inspiring and perspiring.
So attractively does JFK combine both the candid and the sordid, the gross and the ingenious, it is unlikely that any other presidents have generated as many novels, histories, poems, biographies, documentaries and dramas, memorials and testimonials (from astronauts to mistresses, coroners to mobsters), even sculptures and paintings.
Sabato records the salient truth that every successor president, from Lyndon Baines Johnson to Barack Obama, has had to live with “the larger-than-life monument that is John Kennedy,” and all have tried to mirror some aspect of his style or legislation.
Of course, his assassination also elevated Kennedy from simple murder victim to secular saint, a “martyr.” Yet, one is hard-pressed to say for what it was he supposedly gave his life: Idealism? No: He himself presided over brutal, covert actions. Nor did he die for “Civil Rights.”
Yet, in mourning the loss of a dynamic, ideals-spouting Chief Executive, the U.S. finally did pass measures to mandate black equality. The bloodshed of Dallas dissolved the logjams in Congress.
Disputing Sabato’s ultimately unscholarly conclusion, it is very likely JFK will still loom large in American—and artists’—minds well throughout the next 50 years.
