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BOOK REVIEW:
Jack: A Life Like No Other, by Geoffrey Perret, New York: Random House, $14.95

JFK Remains a Pop Culture Icon Because He Personified the '60s

By Geraldine Hawkins
May 16, 2003

Yesterday at the John F. Kennedy Library, an exhibit opened commemorating the 50th anniversary of the wedding of Jacqueline Bouvier and John F. Kennedy. The posters displayed around the city advertising the event read: "Fifty Years Later, Your Invitation is Finally Here."

The public never tires of reading about President Kennedy (or his wife), and books about them and their relatives have created, as biographers Joan and Clay Blair observed, something of a sub-industry in American publishing. The fact that the image so assiduously cultivated by Kennedy - that of a Catholic, war hero, and Harvard man - clashed spectacularly with his private life, has not made a bit of difference to those who have an emotional investment in the man or his era. Geoffrey Perret offers yet another biography of Kennedy, whom he sums up in a nutshell as "frustrated jock, perennial stud, political operator, writer manqué, drug addict and hipster, high-minded leader, dutiful son, cultural impresario, political idealist, lousy husband, doting father, ambitious president."

"JFK was guided … by his lifelong fascination with Byron," writes Perret in Jack: A Life Like No Other. "His political thought reflected a central tenet of the Romantic movement in which Byron was the brightest star: that good and evil grow from the same stem. The Romantics also believed that life is really a performance, as Byron's was and Kennedy's became. And he knew what every performer knows - you can go only so far as your audience allows."

Kennedy enjoyed chasing women so much that the only reason he ever married was because his father told him that if he planned on being president, he needed to have a family. Of the many women he knew, Jacqueline Bouvier seemed the one best suited to the career path he had chosen.

"The romance of Jack and Jackie was about them, not between them," Perret writes. "Irresistibly fascinating, both were emotional cripples. The kind of relationship they wanted was simply beyond them. … They had too little in common ever to be truly close. Their tastes were not simply different: they were almost antagonistic. He loved Westerns, preferably starring John Wayne, or historic epics such as "Spartacus," which he thought was magnificent. But when Jackie arranged for "Jules et Jim" to be shown in the White House movie theater, he became restless and fidgety and left long before the 'fin.'

"She loved French chansons and could listen for hours to Charles Trenet or Edith Piaf. JFK could not stand them. His favorite song was 'Danny Boy,' and Jackie mockingly told people that his favorite tune was 'Hail to the Chief.'"

So reads this scintillating biography, full of vivid detail and remarkable insights which reveal the subject and those surrounding him in all of their eccentricity and vulnerability.

"The loneliness Kennedy admitted to might have been mitigated had there not been an unbridgeable distance between him and Jackie," Perret writes. "The ordinary yet invaluable love between a husband and wife that makes life worthwhile for countless millions never existed between them. … Hurt by his lack of love, she accepted her lot for the promise he bore. She told Henry Brandon, a British journalist who became part of the Kennedy circle, that there were three artistic immortals she wished he had known: Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire and Sergey Diaghilev. What they had in common was that they led dissolute private lives, were homosexuals, defied the conventions of their time and left behind personal legacies."

Was any of this part of the campaign literature in 1960?

"We'll sell Jack like soap flakes," Kennedy's millionaire father said, and this is precisely what was done.

Why has Kennedy remained a cultural icon despite the fact that so much that was sold "like soap flakes" turned out to be little more than a façade? Was he really just "a nothing man, an expensively programmed waxworks," as another British journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, described him?

No. The strange fact is that compared to Clinton, Kennedy really does look like King Arthur. He was a tremendous reader who loved poetry and American and English history. His favorite book was Pilgrim's Way by John Buchan, who dwelled in that volume on the chivalrous generation of young Englishmen who died in World War I. The passage that made the deepest impression on Kennedy told of Raymond Asquith, who was killed in action in 1915 at the age of 35.

"Our role of honor is long," wrote Buchan, "but it holds no nobler figure. … He loved his youth, and his youth has become eternal. Debonair, brilliant, and brave, he is now part of that immortal England that knows not age or weariness or defeat."

"As he reads these words, Jack Kennedy feels thrilled and excited in a way that is new to him," Perret writes. "Here, at last, is a vision he can embrace as a true expression of himself - 'Debonair, brilliant, and brave.' … For the rest of his life, Jack will urge anyone he wants to understand him to read Pilgrim's Way, for the light from the star that he begins moving towards shines out from that book."

Kennedy was proud of the race and religion he inherited, was in awe of his father's accomplishments, and was vain about his looks, but he once said that what he was most proud of was that he had indeed served with distinction in the United States Navy.

And yet … what spoils Kennedy is the current of cynicism that runs as a parallel current beside his genuine patriotism.

"Profiles in Courage [the book Kennedy wrote while serving in the United States Senate and recovering from a disastrous back operation] emphasizes the connection between what a man is and what a man does. Yet his own life was hedged about with secrets and lies," Perret writes. "[The book] declares emphatically, 'Courage, conscience and integrity give meaning to life itself.' No doubt he meant it. Kennedy was not a charlatan but a paradox - the liar in love with the truth."

Well, that's one way to look at it.

As Perret surmises, probably rightly, the "secrets and lies" don't spoil this president for everyone, for John F. Kennedy, defined as he was by World War II, nevertheless was made for the 1960s, and the '60s for him.

"All presidents represent in some way the zeitgeist of their time, but he seemed to be receiving memos from his," writes Perret. "Somehow his inner life formed a seamless bond with 1960s culture. To an impossible degree for any other politician - as opposed to an artist or writer - he WAS the culture - sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, the celebrity life, the movie-star magnetism - and the culture was him.

"In the course of three years, he redefined the United States. … As we now know, Kennedy was living out nearly every male fantasy imaginable. Being emotionally damaged only adds to his appeal. JFK carried behind that million-dollar smile a fractal inner life, all broken up, with sharp edges, uneven planes and stabbing points.

"His was a privileged life no sensible person would want. There was no time or space to be truly happy or idle or committed to others; no time or energy for anything but the pursuit of a goal ordained by Dad." However, because of his precarious health, "from an early age he had known something that few rich men's sons ever learn this side of serious illness: there is no wealth but life."

Because he lived out these "male fantasies," because he seemed somehow to belong more to Las Vegas than to Washington, D.C. or to his native Boston, John F. Kennedy, for good or ill, has become a pop-culture icon, along with his mistress Marilyn Monroe, his hanger-on Frank Sinatra, and his favorite movie star John Wayne.

He was granted his wish. He is remembered as "debonair, brilliant, and brave," and he will always belong to early 1960s America, a country "that knows not age or weariness or defeat."