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Kennedy and Achilles: A Classical Approach to Political Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Michael Nelson
Michael Nelson*
Affiliation:
Rhodes College
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Extract

Has any president been harder for historians and political scientists to get a handle on than John F. Kennedy? As Fred Greenstein (1992) has noted, “In spite of the voluminous literature on Kennedy himself, the events of his presidency, his associates, image, and assassination, … his reputation remains in dispute.” Not only does “the thirty-fifth president await a satisfactory biographer,” Greenstein observes, but scholars do not seem to be getting any closer: “Recent efforts to assess him fall short even of the ‘court biographies’ of Schlesinger and Sorensen.” Was Kennedy friend or foe of the civil rights movement? A Cold Warrior or a champion of peace? Was his personal character healthily “active-positive” or pathologically reckless? Did he grow in office or remain as he began?

Kennedy's hold on Americans' political consciousness, which seems undiminished a third of a century after his assassination, poses a related puzzle for presidential scholars. Dozens of books about Kennedy and his family have appeared on recent bestseller lists. Examining the Kennedy assassination is still a growth industry. Around one-third of Americans say they think that Kennedy belongs on Mt. Rushmore, more than anyone else from U.S. history, and he regularly heads the list of greatest presidents in public opinion polls. At the much-ballyhooed April 1996 auction of Kennedy memorabilia, his possessions were bid up like relics of the True Cross—a set of the late president's golf woods fetched $772,500.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , September 1996 , pp. 505 - 510
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1996

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Footnotes

1.

For the care with which they read and commented on earlier drafts of this essay, I am grateful to Charles Euchner, Fred Greenstein, Thomas Langston, John Lyman Mason, Bruce Miroff, Richard Pious, Susan Ford Wiltshire, and especially Livia Tenzer and Stephen Wirls.

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