Description
Book SynopsisJohn F. Kennedy was not only a president, but also a symbol for America's most cherished ideas. Not the history of a man's life but the biography of his idea, The Kennedy Obsession traces the creation of Kennedy's image as an inspired-and inspiring-fiction.
Trade ReviewHellmann understands that reading involves more than the consumption of ideas--it is a theater of the mind, in which the reader imaginatively tests a range of roles, voices, identities. Hellmann shows how Kennedy's own early reading (in combination with family lore) provided him with the language of myth, his sense of identity and role. He then analyzes the complex ways in which this private myth-making interacted with the process of social myth-making (in mass media and politics) to shape 'The Kennedy Obsession.' -- Richard Slotkin American University
Table of ContentsPrologue: A Bedside Visit 1: How Kennedy Awoke: Jack's Reading and Why England Slept 2: John Hersey's "Survival": A Literary Experiment and Its Political Adaptation 3: The Old Man and the Boy: Papa Hemingway and Profiles in Courage 4: The Hollywood Screen and Kennedy's Televised Showdown with Truman 5: The Erotics of a Presidency 6: An Assassination and Its Fictions
