The Kennedy Obsession - by John Hellmann (Paperback)

About the Book

John 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.

Book Synopsis

John F. Kennedy was not only a president, but also a symbol for America's most cherished ideas. In The Kennedy Obsession, John Hellmann takes a thoroughly original approach to understanding Kennedy's star power and his carefully crafted public image. Tracing Kennedy's self-creation as diligent scholar, bashful hero, and sensitive rebel-cued by cultural figures such as Lord Byron, Ernest Hemingway, and Cary Grant-and the images of Kennedy in the aftermath of his assassination, Hellmann reveals the painstaking transformation of private life into public persona, of a man into perhaps the major American myth of our time

Review Quotes

Hellmann 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"

About the Author

John Hellmann is professor of English at the Ohio State University at Lima and the author of American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam and Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction.