Kennedy in Books: The Consensus Begins Emerging

Our view of John Kennedy has changed a great deal in a year. Already a few writers are making the first self-conscious attempts at "getting beneath the image" and trying to examine Kennedy with some perspective. As the legend has begun to grow, a few men have begun to probe beneath it.

A few samples of the writing of last November, writing done within days of the assassination, have been collected in two volumes: A Tribute to John Kennedy, edited by Pierre Salinger and Sander Vanocur, takes care of the prose. Of Poetry and Power includes 79 poems occasioned by the assassination, and was put together by two enterprising scholars who wrote to poets to ask if they, by chance, had been moved to write something by Kennedy's death.

It is disappointing to read once again, in the Salinger-Vanocur book, the newspaper and magazine articles that once seemed so brilliantly written and to find that many of them were not really that good. In those days anything that grabbed us by the emotions seemed to be extraordinary writing, and it was not difficult to grab us by the emotions at that time. Or perhaps we were merely more generous a year ago.

Of the articles that still seem good, Benjamin Bradlee's essay "That Special Grace" has been published by itself as a book. It is perhaps the best of several reminiscences by men who knew Kennedy both as reporters and as friends. Of the "straight reporting" written just after the assassination, the two pieces by Mary McGrory of the Washington Star seem much the best in the Salinger-Vanocur collection.

Both poetry and prose refuse to criticize. Those who wrote at that time knew that John Kennedy had faults, but they seem to have decided to let posterity uncover them. The poets are free in criticizing the society that produced Lee Oswald and the society that watched Kennedy's death. "Prim doormen bland and perfectly usual/Such memorial!" writes Lorenzo Thomas.

The black & white glare blink in the Inky air force night as the Helikopter rose straight up in the telephoto frame carying President Johnson toward the newsphoto White House....

Allen Ginsberg wrote. But Kennedy himself was free from criticism.

He has not remained so. The first attempt at a portrait of the Kennedy years and a few essays written months after the assassination have begun to do the analysis we postponed last November.

Actually, there is little analysis in Hugh Sidey's John F. Kennedy, President, but it remains the best reportorial account of Kennedy's Presidency. Sidey wrote the book as a portrait of Kennedy's first two years in office, ending it with the 1962 Congressional elections. After the assassination he dashed off a last chapter on "The Last Year."

Had Kennedy been running for President this year, we all would have read this book, for it describes very well the successes and failures of his term. It is a good account of what McGeorge Bundy said to Dean Rusk at the time of the Cuban crisis. But one misses the master hand, combing through the yards of incident and anecdote to separate the significant from the pointless; it is not a book that is terribly useful now. And Sidey's last chapter is far below the level of the earlier ones; the book closes: "He used to gaze beyond the waves from his boat and would stare from a plane window towards infinity. Now he is there."

Sidey is not purposefully undertaking a re-evaluation of Kennedy. Some later essayists did, foremost among them Tom Wicker, whose "Kennedy Without Tears" first appeared in Esquire this summer and is now a book. Wicker attacks the basis of the Kennedy legend at some length, and tries to set up a different Kennedy: a man who was not forever moving forward, but a skeptic, full of humor at his own foibles and others".

James Reston is another writer who felt that Kennedy was longer on promise than on performance, and his lengthy essay in last Sunday's New York Times expounds this view. Res- ton also includes a few illuminating personal touches:

I once asked him in a long private talk at Hyannis Port what he wanted to have achieved by the time he rode down Pennsylvania Avenue with his successor. He looked at me as if I were a dreaming child. I tried again: did he not feel the need of some goal to help guide his day-to-day decisions and priorities? Again, a ghastly pause. It was only when I turned the question to immediate, tangible problems that he seized the point and rolled off a torrent of statistics about the difficulty of organizing nations at different levels of economic development.

The re-evaluation, then, is already underway. We are probing towards a consensus, trying to make Kennedy's faults stand out as distinctly as his virtues do now.

But until now no book has summed it up, no book that has been written tells about John Kennedy. One can await the volumes by Professor Schlesinger and Mr. Sorenson. There will doubtless be others. But until then we will have to make do with other things.

Perhaps if one wants to remember Kennedy the best thing to do is to open The Burden and the Glory, a collection of the speeches of the last two years edited by Allan Nevins. It is surprising how one remembers the phrases that pounded at you out of the television and the printed page:

"Simultaneous and identical actions of United States Steel and other leading steel corporations increasing prices by some $6 a ton constitute a wholly unjustifiable and irresponsible defiance of the public interest...."

"This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military build-up on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakeable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation that imprisoned island...."

"There is a rhythm to a personal and national and international life, and it flows and ebbs...if you ask me whether this was the 'winter of our discontent,' I would say no. If you would ask me whether we were doing quite as well this winter as we were doing in the fall, I would say no."

Of course, the language of the speeches often is not his own, and it is often dull language: wave after waves of facts on conservation and industrial growth.

Perhaps the best book on John Kennedy is one written before he died. It is not James MacGregor Burns's John Kennedy: A Political Profile--a distinguished campaign biography, but still essentially a campaign biography, but--a book not even totally concerned with Kennedy, Theodore H. White's The Making of the President, 1960.

The book is a closeup of Kennedy as he faced what was to be the supreme effort of his life. White followed him through his triumphant campaign tours and through his less triumphant ones:

At noon he stood at the head of the street in the one-street village of Phillips and looked down its length and saw no one; he entered its hardboard factory and spoke to the workers on the line, who grunted and let him pass; he visited the local newspaper, which was totally indifferent to the fact that a Presidential candidate was pausing with them; he circulated the cafes on Phillips' main street, courteously interrupting the men and women slurping coffee and eating sandwiches, saying, "My name is John Kennedy, I'm running for President in the primary;" and they went on eating. He left the town shortly after noon and the town was as oblivious of his presence as of a cold wind passing through.

From Phillips, Wisconsin, in March, 1960, to Boston on November 6, 1960, White follows Kennedy, culling the anecdotes and pointing to the distinctive ones. It is a book written accurately, for White weighs against the attacks on Kennedy not only the candidate's counterclaims, but his experiences. After a campaign with Kennedy White wrote with emotion, but not the kind of emotion one feels now. Perhaps only when we re-attain this accuracy will we be able to see John Kennedy as we saw him then. More probably, we will never see him as "accurately" again