All this served to burnish the J.F.K. brand, along with something more ineffable, and which a friend of his, the
journalist Ben Bradlee, defined in the title of his 1964 book about Kennedy as That Special Grace. It was
there in his pragmatic good looks and athletic mien; it was there in his equally charismatic wife and children.
Think of those Slim Aarons-esque images of the president, in Wayfarers and windbreaker, sailing in his yacht, the
Honey Fitz, off Hyannis Port, or the informal shots of him playing with his children in the Oval Office, or with his
daughter Caroline seated on his lap aboard Air Force One. Think, also, of the crisp, modern lines of his
presidential attire. “He was careful to give that unstudied sense of ease in his dress that he cultivated in his
press conferences,” wrote the author and menswear historian G. Bruce Boyer, “a nice balance of seriousness and
lightness, profundity and humour, calculated intuitiveness.” Kennedy adopted what Boyer calls “a modified Ivy League
style, an Eastern Establishment business look”, with “two-button, pinstriped and dark grey worsted suits, cut in a
modified Ivy style with small, soft shoulders, shallow chest, and little waist suppression — perfect in their
simplicity”. Off-duty, “polo shirts, and boating shoes without socks, became a weekend uniform”. And to hone his
man-of-the-moment aesthetic further, Kennedy was the first president to go largely hatless. Long before Ronald
Reagan, J.F.K. became the first movie star to occupy the White House, inspiring reverence among his inner circle.
The journalist and historian Theodore White, one of that circle, wrote in his memoirs: “I still have difficulty
seeing John F. Kennedy clear. The image of him that comes back to me… is so clean and graceful — almost as if I can
still see him skip up the steps of his airplane in that half lope, and then turn, flinging out his arm in farewell
to the crowd, before disappearing inside. It was a balletic movement.”
The Kennedys also took pains to ensure that their White House was outward looking and plugged into the wider culture;
among the writers, artists and intellectuals that received invitations to Pennsylvania Avenue were the cellist Pablo
Casals, the poet Robert Frost, and the French intellectual André Malraux. Kennedy had graduated from Harvard, and
peppered his administration with that august institution’s professors. Poets and philosophers were also amply quoted
in his public speeches. This vision of J.F.K.’s tenure as a sort of best-and-brightest apogee was burnished after
his assassination, not least by Jackie Kennedy. In a famous interview with Theodore White for Life
magazine, she reminisced: “At night, before we’d go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records; and the song he loved
most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were, ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there
was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot’.” The song came from the Broadway musical
Camelot, and the lyrics were by Alan Jay Lerner, who just happened to be J.F.K.’s classmate at Harvard, but
Jackie’s nudge did the trick: the equation of the Kennedy years with a semi-mystic Arthurian romantic ideal has
persisted ever since.
There’s never been any shortage of people willing to dull the Kennedy halo. Scholars concur that he was a good
president but not a great one; a poll of historians in 1982 ranked him 13th out of the 36 presidents included in the
survey. There are the allegations of vote rigging in the 1960 election, enabling Kennedy’s father, Joseph, one of
the wealthiest and most ruthless men in America, to effectively buy his son the presidency; there’s the supposed
Mafia connections; and, of course, there’s the Olympian philandering that posed such knotty logistical challenges to
Kennedy’s secret service detail. The image of youth and vitality is itself a myth; Kennedy wore a back brace and
spent much of his life in hospitals, battling a variety of ills. Gore Vidal, who was related to Jackie Kennedy by
marriage and had a ringside seat during Kennedy’s imperial phase, was an agnostic from the start. “Kennedy looks
older than his photographs,” he wrote in a piece for The Times in 1961. “The outline is slender and
youthful, but the face is heavily lined… his eyes are very odd. They are, I think, a murky, opaque blue,
‘interested’, as Gertrude Stein once said of Hemingway’s eyes, ‘not interesting’; they give an impression of
flatness… his stubby boy fingers tend to drum nervously on tables… he is immaculately dressed, although occasional
white chest hairs curl over his collar.” Nigel Hamilton, author of JFK: Reckless Youth, went further. “Once
the voters or the women were won,” he wrote, “there was a certain vacuousness on Jack’s part, a failure to turn
conquest into anything very meaningful or profound.”
And yet. Kennedy’s perennial allure rests as much on his willingness to carpe diem as it does on any
carefully crafted image management. He followed eight years of Republican stagnation and presented himself as a
dynamic corrective. “I have premised my campaign on the single assumption that the American people are uneasy at the
present drift in our national course… and that they have the will and the strength to start the United States moving
again,” he declared in 1961. And he gave impetus to the idea of pursuing a national purpose, with his adept
stewardship of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, his launching of a drive for a civil rights bill, and his
enthusiastic backing for NASA’s space programme (“We choose to go to the moon in this decade… because that goal will
serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills”).
For all his contemporary impact, however, the reason the Kennedy legend remains so potent is the might-have-been
factor. Had he lived, would he have transformed the nation and the world? His own prime has been conflated with that
of the nation’s; he reminds many Americans — and others — of an age when it was possible to believe that politics
could address society’s moral strivings and be harnessed to its highest aspirations. The window of Dallas’s Sixth
Floor Museum now looks out on a harsher, more insular and more bellicose political landscape; with shining moments,
brief or otherwise, being pretty thin on the ground, Kennedy’s Camelot has come to rank alongside the mist-shrouded
original as a lost, and perhaps all but unrecoverable, idyll.
This article originally appeared in Issue 60 of The Rake.
