Kennedy, the Elusive President

By JILL ABRAMSON
Published: October 22, 2013

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 still the most traumatic public event of their lives, 9/11 notwithstanding
has obscured much about the man and his accomplishments.
Was Kennedy a great president, as many continue to think? Or was he a reckless
and charming lightweight or, worse still, the first of our celebrities-in-chief? To
what extent do 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. Werent the breakthroughs actually the doing of his
successor, Lyndon B. Johnson?
Even the basic facts of Kennedys 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
have been circulating for decades and have now found new life on the Internet, in
Web sites febrile with unfiltered and at times unhinged musings.
Of course the Kennedy fixation is hardly limited 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 not by whats there but by whats 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 nations leading historians wonder
about it. There is such fascination in the country about the anniversary, but there
is no great book about Kennedy, Robert Caro lamented when I spoke to him not
long ago. The situation is all the stranger, he added, since Kennedys life and death
form one of the great American stories. Caro should know. His epic life of
Johnson (four 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 author of An Unfinished Life, probably the best single-volume
Kennedy biography, suggests that the cultish atmosphere surrounding, and perhaps
smothering, the actual man may be the reason for the deficit of good writing about
him. The mass audience has turned Kennedy into a celebrity, so historians are not
really impressed by him, Dallek told me. Historians see him more as a celebrity

who didnt accomplish very much. Dallek also pointed to a second inhibiting
factor, the commercial pressure authors feel to come up with sensational new
material. His own book, as it happens, included a good deal of fresh information on
Kennedys severe health problems and their cover-up by those closest to him. And
yet Dallek is careful not to let these revelations overwhelm the larger story.
Dallek is also good on the fairy-tale aspects of the Kennedy family history, and he
closely examines the workings of the Kennedy White House. So enthralled was he
by this last topic that he has written a follow-up, Camelots Court, which profiles
members of Kennedys famous brain trust and is being released for the 50th
anniversary. This time, however, it is Dallek who doesnt offer much fresh material.
This in turn raises another question: How much is left to say about Kennedys
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 war as
Johnson did. But the belief that he would have limited the American presence in
Vietnam is rooted as much in the romance of what might have been as in the
documented record.
Indeed, a dolorous mood of what might have been hangs over a good deal of
writing about Kennedy. Arriving in time for Nov. 22 is the loathsomely titled If
Kennedy Lived. The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: An
Alternate History, by the television commentator Jeff Greenfield, who imagines a
completed first Kennedy term and then a second. This isnt new territory for
Greenfield, who worked for Kennedys brother Robert and is the author of a
previous book of presidential what ifs called Then Everything Changed.
(Dalleks Camelots Court and Greenfields If Kennedy Lived are reviewed here.)

(Page 2 of 6)

Thurston Clarke, the author of two previous and quite serviceable books on the
Kennedys, also dwells on fanciful what might have beens in JFKs Last Hundred
Days, suggesting that the death of the presidential couples last child, Patrick,
brought the grieving parents closer together and may have signaled the end of
Kennedys compulsive womanizing. Whats more, Clarke makes a giant (and
dubious) leap about Kennedy as leader, arguing that in the final 100 days he was
becoming a great president. One example, according to Clarke, was his persuading
the conservative Republicans Charles Halleck, the House minority leader, and

Everett Dirksen, the Senate minority leader, to support a civil rights bill. Once reelected, Kennedy would have pushed the bill through Congress.
Kennedy as Arthurian hero is also a feature of what has been called pundit lit by
the historian and journalist David Greenberg. The purpose of this genre (books by
writers who themselves are famous) is, in Greenbergs words, to extend their
authors brands to make money, to be sure, and to express some set of ideas,
however vague, but mainly to keep their celebrity creators in the media spotlight.
The champion in this growing field is Bill OReilly, who has milked the Kennedy
assassination with unique efficiency.
OReillys latest contribution, Kennedys Last Days, is an illustrated recycling, for
children, of his mega-best seller Killing Kennedy. This new version, it must be
said, distinctly improves on the original, whose choppy sentences, many written in
the present tense, lose nothing when recast for younger readers. He is on a
collision course with evil, OReilly declares. No less elevated is his discussion of
Kennedys decision to visit Dallas despite warnings of roiling violence, including the
physical assault on his United Nations ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, who had given
a speech in the city in October 1963. J.F.K. has decided to visit Big D, OReilly
writes. There is no backing down. Happily, the wooden prose is offset by the many
illustrations. My favorite is a spread on the first familys pets, including puppies and
a pony.
Bad books by celebrity authors shouldnt surprise us, even when the subject is an
American president. The true mystery in Kennedys case is why, 50 years after his
death, highly accomplished writers seem unable to fix 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 similar
history in A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Published in
1965, it has the virtues of immediacy, since Schlesinger, Kennedys Harvard
contemporary, had been on the White House staff, brought in as court historian. He
witnessed many of the events he describes. But in his admiration for Kennedy, he
became a chief architect of the Camelot myth and 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. As a
primer on Kennedys decision-making, like his handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion
and the Cuban missile crisis, the book is fascinating. Whats missing is a picture of
Kennedys 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 presidents birthday at Madison Square Garden in 1962. (This is the
place to note that Reeves edited The Kennedy Years, The New York Timess own
addition to the ever-expanding Kennedy cosmos, and I wrote the foreword.)
Balancing out, or warring with, the Kennedy claque are the Kennedy haters, like
Seymour M. Hersh and Garry Wills. In The Dark Side of Camelot, Hersh wildly
posits connections between the Kennedys and the mob, while Wills, though he
offers any number of brilliant insights into Kennedy and his circle of courtiers,
fixates on the Kennedy brothers (and fathers) sexual escapades in The Kennedy
Imprisonment.
(Page 3 of 6)

The sum total of this oddly polarized literature is a kind of void. Other presidents,
good and bad, have been served well by biographers and historians. We have firstrate 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.
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 magazine commissioned Norman Mailers first major piece of
political journalism, asking him to report on the Democratic National Convention
in Los Angeles that nominated Kennedy. Mailers long virtuoso article, Superman
Comes to the Supermarket, came as close as any book or essay ever has to
capturing Kennedys essence, though that essence, Mailer candidly acknowledged,
was enigmatic. Here was a 43-year-old man whose irony and grace were keyed to
the national temper in 1960. Kennedys presence, youthful and light, was at once
soothing and disruptive, with a touch of brusqueness. He carried himself with a
cool grace which seemed indifferent to applause, his manner 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 ended the round. Finally, however, there was an
elusive detachment to everything he did. One did not have the feeling of a man
present in the room with all his weight and all his mind.
Mailer himself doesnt know whether to value this elusiveness, or to beware of it.
One could be witnessing the fortitude of a superior sensitivity or the detachment of
a man who was not quite real to himself.

And yet Kennedys unreality, in Mailers view, may have answered the particular
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 underground, because
only a hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, 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 then by the horror of Dallas.
Fifty years later we 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 Mark Lane were among the
first writers to challenge that finding, and their skepticism loosed a tide of
investigations. The 50th anniversary has washed in some new ones. Among the
more ambitious is A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy
Assassination, a work of more than 500 pages. Its author, 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. But when
Shenon finds the woman, now in her 70s, in Mexico, she denies having had a
relationship with Oswald, and Shenons encounters with her prove more mysterious
than illuminating.
Kennedys murder was bound to attract novelists, and some have approached the
subject inventively, if with strange results. Stephen Kings 11/22/63, a best seller
published in 2011, takes the form of a time-travel romp involving a high school
English teacher who finds romance in Texas while keeping tabs on Oswald. At more
than 800 pages, the novel demands a commitment that exceeds its entertainment
value.
I rather like Mailers Oswalds Tale, published in 1995. It is, like his earlier
masterpiece The Executioners Song, a work of faction, which is Mailers term
for his hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration. Mailer and his
colleague, Lawrence Schiller, spent six months in Russia examining Oswalds
K.G.B. files, and the huge quasi novel that came out of it contains a good deal of
engrossing material about Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina, as well as the odd
assortment of people the couple mixed with in Texas. Mailers narrative skills are
prodigious, but in the end he has little to tell us that wasnt already uncovered by
Priscilla Johnson McMillan in Marina and Lee, her nonfiction portrait of the
troubled couple from 1977. (Mailer properly credits McMillans book.)
(Page 4 of 6)

Most critics seem to think the outstanding example of Kennedy assassination

fiction is Libra, Don DeLillos postmodern novel, published in 1988. The narrative
is indeed taut and bracing. But the challenge DeLillo set for himself, to provide
readers with a way of thinking about the assassination without being constrained
by half-facts or overwhelmed by possibilities, by the tide of speculation that widens
with the years, exceeds even 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 only about
Kennedys death but also about his life. And if there 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 addition to the current literature. (He has
since dropped the project.) While the book was gossipy, especially on the subject of
the young Kennedys sexual adventures, Hamilton also provided a vivid and lively
account of Kennedys successful 1946 campaign 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 as Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. and Doris Goodwin to write protest letters to the press, Hamilton
wrote in 2011 in The Huffington Post. I was warned that no Kennedy-era official or
friend would be 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 good books. The
Kennedys especially Jackie and Bobby were notoriously hard on authors
whose books they didnt like. And they enlisted Schlesinger, Theodore Sorensen and
other intimates to act as a kind of history police, not only 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 meeting 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 access to their fathers papers to David
Nasaw, the author 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 first ladys interviews about 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 book includes
at least one memorable moment, when the president hilariously loses his temper
over unflattering press about the $5,000 cost of Mrs. Kennedys hospital maternity
suite Are they crazy up there? Now you know what thats gonna do? Any
congressman is going to get up and say, Christ, if they can throw $5,000 away on
this, lets cut em another billion dollars. You just sank the Air Force budget!
The most disturbing case of the familys attempts to control history came early on,
and it involved William Manchester, the historian chosen 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 about 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
just months before the assassination.) Manchester was given sole access to almost
all the presidents men as well as to his widow and virtually every principal figure.
(Lyndon Johnson submitted answers in writing through his staff.) It seemed the
ideal arrangement until Manchester presented a manuscript to the Kennedys.
(Page 5 of 6)

In a gripping piece from his 1976 collection of essays, Controversy, Manchester

described what happened next. First there were the many insertions and deletions
made by various Kennedy minions, who applied so much pressure that Manchester
became a nervous wreck. An especially low point came when Robert Kennedy
hunted Manchester down in a New York hotel room and banged on the door,
demanding to be let in to argue for still more changes. Next, Jackie Kennedy, who
had not bothered to read the manuscript, accepted the view of her factotums that
many of its details, like the fact that she carried cigarettes in her purse, were too
personal. Further angered by the $665,000 Manchester had received from Look
magazine for serial rights, Mrs. Kennedy went to court 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.
Nevertheless, the Kennedy family, which controlled publication rights to The
Death of a President, allowed it to go out of print, and for a number of years copies
could be found only online or at rummage sales. The good news, maybe the best, of

the 50th anniversary is that Little, Brown has now reissued paperback and e-book
editions.
Its good news because, remarkably, and against all odds, Manchester (who died in
2004) wrote an extraordinary book. There are obvious defects. Predictably, he
blares the trumpets of Camelot, and he has a weakness for melodrama. Its hard to
believe, even at the time of Kennedys 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 between noon and midafternoon in Washington of a single day in
1945. But these excesses dont really matter, thanks to Manchesters vivid
reporting, masterly narrative and authentically poetic touches.
It is in small, quiet scenes that Manchesters chronicle accumulates its greatest
force. When it is time for Dave Powers, the slain presidents aide and sidekick, to
pick out the clothes Kennedy will wear to his grave, he selects from eight suits and
four pairs of shoes brought out by Kennedys valet, George Thomas. Powers settles
on a blue-gray suit, black shoes and a blue tie with a slight pattern of light dots.
An embroidered JFK on the white silk shirt is hidden from view. The valet
remembered that Kennedys dislike of flamboyant monograms had extended to
handkerchiefs, Manchester writes. The president had carefully folded them so
that the initials would not show, and Thomas did it for him now, slipping the
handkerchief into his coat pocket.
Of all that has been written and that will 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 suit Jackie
Kennedy wore on Nov. 22, 1963, which had since been stowed in a Georgetown
attic:
Unknown to her, the clothes Mrs. Kennedy wore into the bright midday glare of
Dallas lie in an attic not far from 3017 N Street. In Bethesda that night those closest
to her had vowed that from the moment she shed them she should never see them
again. She hasnt. Yet they are still there, in one of two long brown paper cartons
thrust between roof rafters. The first is marked September 12, 1953, the date of
her marriage; it contains her wedding gown. The block-printed label on the other is
Worn by Jackie, November 22, 1963. Inside, neatly arranged, 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 date 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 merely stylish garments which had passed out of fashion and which,
because they were associated with some pleasant occasion, had not been discarded.
(Page 6 of 6)

If the trespasser looked closer, however, he would be momentarily baffled. The

memento of a happy time would be cleaned before storing. Obviously this costume
has not been. There are ugly splotches along the front and hem of the skirt. The
handbags leather and the inside of each shoe are caked dark red. And the stockings
are quite odd. Once the same substance streaked them in mad scribbly patterns, but
time and the sheerness of the fabric have 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 Manchesters two five-hour interviews with Jackie
Kennedy, who seems to have 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 too little about this president,
now gone 50 years, who remains as elusive in death as he was in life.
Jill Abramson is the executive editor of The Times.
A version of this article appears in print on October 27, 2013, on page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the
headline: The Elusive President.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/books/review/the-elusive-president.html?_r=0