The Kennedy Mystique Explained in Ten Words by John Powers

The Kennedy

Mystique Explained in Ten Words

by John Powers

VOGUE CULTURE - Film & TV

Say what you will about American culture, one thing is sure: We really know how to overdo it. Although nearly two weeks still remain until the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, we’re already being inundated by TV shows (nearly 25 by my count) offering their particular take on the subject, everything from PBS’s stolidly centrist, four-hour biography, JFK, to TLC’s Letters to Jackie, in which celebrities read letters of condolence sent to the grieving First Lady (they should give away free boxes of Kleenex with that one). And of course, there’s the obligatory docudrama. In National Geographic Channel’s Killing Kennedy, Rob Lowe joins the roll call of actors—including Martin Sheen, Greg Kinnear, Patrick Dempsey, Cliff Robertson, Bruce Greenwood, and William Devane—who have struggled to play JFK, a president whose charisma they can’t match and whose inner life was a closely guarded fortress.

Before you sit down to watch any or (heaven help you) all of these shows, here are ten words that help explain why, half a century on, we’re still obsessed with those shots that happened on that dreadful afternoon in Dallas.

1. Branding

The first truly modern presidential candidate, Kennedy blazed new trails in marketing himself—in 1960, Norman Mailer even wrote a famous piece about him called, revealingly, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” As president, JFK and Jackie were acknowledged masters of image-shaping PR events (tours of the White House, photo ops with the family) that have since become obligatory for all presidents. Even after her husband’s death, Jackie Kennedy Onassis kept the flame by shaping his iconography. In what may be the finest piece of political brand-management in American history, it was Jackie who came up with—and promoted—the notion that his presidency was “Camelot.”

2. Stardom

Steeped in a love of showbiz—he dug movie people, hung out with the Rat Pack—JFK was our first pop president, actually holding a birthday gala at Madison Square Garden, where he was serenaded by Marilyn Monroe. He was also our first true TV president. Not ony did he come across well on the small screen (most famously in his debate with sweaty Richard Nixon), but his brisk, witty, detached style was perfect for a medium that Marshall McLuhan famously termed “cool.” Even his assassination became a grand, tragic pop spectacular, forever changing TV news, making stars of reporters like Dan Rather, uniting an entire country who all watched the same thing on television—and henceforth expected to see the news happen before its eyes.

 3. Youth

Although the Eisenhower fifties are known for dreary conformity, they saw the birth of the youth culture that has dominated America ever since. It’s no coincidence that, in 1960, four years after Elvis Presley hit it big, 43-year-old John Kennedy became the youngest man ever elected president. Younger at his death than even Obama was when he first took office, JFK remains frozen in time as a figure of youthful vigor (or “vigah,” as he famously pronounced it) and much-argued-about promise—surely he wouldn’t have escalated the Vietnam War, right? Curiously, it was another injection of youth that first began to lighten the national mood after his assassination. A little more than two months after his funeral, America was invaded by the Beatles. And we did want them to hold our hand.

 4. Idealism

Kennedy’s words were always more idealistic than his actual deeds, which tended toward the cautiously pragmatic. No matter. Even as he was disappointingly timid about, say, the civil rights movement, he possessed an aura that made people think him a champion of freedom and hope. And he had the valuable knack of inspiring others to be bolder and nobler than he himself was. His presidency spawned a wave of idealism whose ripples could be felt for decades—and not only in the U.S. You can scoff at his legislative achievements, but not at the galvanizing power of his image. There’s a reason why you still find his picture in the homes of the poor and the outcast.

5. Women

One of Kennedy’s obvious political assets was his enormous sex appeal—no woman ever fantasized about hopping into the sack with Richard Nixon. In private, though, his sex life was a bit unsavory, even by the standard of the James Bond novels he loved. The son of a shameless philanderer, he had a vision of women that was retrograde, often thuggish, and profoundly instrumental—he claimed to have headaches if he didn’t have sex every day. Even after his marriage (poor Jackie!), he was rumored to have run through women by the score, an array of supposed conquests that includes: White House aides and potential Red spies, gangster’s molls and Hollywood starlets (not to mention, of course, Marilyn). It’s a delightful historical footnote that, when they were searching for an actor to play his younger self in a 1963 movie about his WWII experiences, JFK suggested—Warren Beatty.

6. Glamour

Young, attractive, and chic, Jack and Jackie seemed like a more evolved species of American than the dowdy likes of Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon. The Kennedy style meshed perfectly with the aspirations of a middle-class country that had grown increasingly prosperous in the fifteen years since WWII. While he became the very icon of dashing manhood—men dreamed of owning such nicely tailored suits—her taste for Givenchy and Cassini (not to mention those pillbox hats and strings of faux pearls) was even more modern. She transformed millions of women’s relationship to fashion. Suddenly, it stopped seeming elitist and became something attainable and fun. Just look at the outfits and hairdos on the early seasons of Mad Men.

 7. Innocence

America has supposedly lost its innocence so many times that I often think we should change our national anthem to “Like a Virgin.” Still, some of these losses loom larger and more painful than others. The horror of the Kennedy assassination wasn’t simply that a handsome, vividly energetic president was murdered by a pathetic-seeming loser, but the sudden fear that everything solid in the early-1960s American life might actually be a trapdoor, and that beneath it, chaos reigned. You couldn’t build enough Cadillacs or nuclear weapons to stop that.

8. Conspiracy

From the beginning, most of the American public has refused to believe the official story that the assassination was the work of one man, Lee Harvey Oswald. There simply had to be more to the enormity than that—some dark conspiracy coming to a head in that grassy knoll. Such paranoiac thoughts were, of course, hardly new to the American psyche (which had recently endured McCarthyism). Indeed, in 1962 Hollywood had released The Manchurian Candidate, the greatest of all conspiracy thrillers; a few months after that, Thomas Pynchon had published his brilliant debut novel, V., which was about the paranoid desire to find secret patterns hidden beneath surface events. Still, the Kennedy assassination marked a transformative moment in our culture. It pushed conspiracy theory from the margins into the mainstream and it’s been there ever since.

9. Royalty

Raised with a sense of entitlement the size of the family estate—young Jack didn’t even notice the Great Depression until he read about it—he lived as if born a prince. On the one hand, he was so cocooned by wealth that, when he wanted something (and he wanted many things), he didn’t bother with money: He simply put it on his father’s tab. On the other, he was trapped within social expectations that must have felt suffocating—his bullying old man basically ordered him to become president. He did just that, and, in the process, filled some weird primal need. Although Americans take pride in being democratic—no aristocracy here!—millions of us still have a vestigial longing for royalty, a desire to follow people whose lives seem larger, grander, and sometimes more tragic than our own. If John Kennedy had served two terms, perhaps his royal glow would’ve worn off. But he was cut down in his prime, endowing him and his whole family a mystique that you never found with, say, the Bushes.

10. Mythology

During a splendidly written commencement address at Yale in 1962, President Kennedy told his audience, “The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.” He couldn’t have known it at the time, but he might have been describing his own place in history. By now, our whole idea of John F. Kennedy has entered a realm in which serious biographies exist side by side with trashy miniseries, sorrowful boomer nostalgia collides with gossip about his trysts, attempts to sanctify his presidency are matched by attempts to tear it down, and the sense of tragedy that haunts his name has its mirror image in the existence of bands named Dead Kennedys and Family Guy gags about a JFK PEZ dispenser getting its head shot off by a sniper. These days, JFK is as much a fictional creation as an actual historical figure.

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