I got a song to sing, all over this land

40,000 books have been written about President Kennedy, according to this week's NY Times Sunday Book Review...

"With roughly 40,000 books about John F. Kennedy published to date, and hundreds planned on the 50th anniversary of his assassination next month, why is it we still know so little about the man and the president?"

That question is "hyperbole" -- if we read any of the 40,000 (ouch! -- too heavy!) books, we do not "know so little" about "the man" and "the president."  We know Something.

You can't know everything about any person.  And we don't need to.  (...Only God knows Everything....)

Some of the stuff written about Kennedy seems "way off" -- some is too much trying to build him up into a super-hero; and some of it is trying to batter him down.  Neither one of those approaches qualifies as a legitimate, serious style in history or biography.  A lot of fluff and pure junk is written about anyone who is known to the public - "famous" -- a word I'm beginning to really dislike.  Along with the word "celebrity."  It's like you have to wade through rivers of garbage to find one "stone" of truth and enlightenment.  A real conversation that the person had.  A true moment.

In the Washington Post:  "A roundup of new books on John F. Kennedy" ....
David Greenberg reviews The Kennedy Half-Century, by Larry J. Sabato:
----------------[excerpts]------------- Political scientist Larry J. Sabato summarizes a recent poll that helps shed light on John F. Kennedy's importance to Americans 50 years after his death.  The survey, by Peter Hart and Geoff Garin, found JFK to be, by a wide margin, the most esteemed president since 1953 -- a striking finding given Kennedy's modest record of legislative achievement in office. 

Even more remarkable, his appeal transcends ideology:  Fifty-two percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats in Hart and Garin's poll called him one of America's best leaders.

By contrast, other strong finishers, such as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, are deeply disliked by members of the opposite party. ...

The most promising section of Sabato's book -- its heart -- is the third part, which methodically

 reviews how presidents from Johnson through Barack Obama have made use of JFK's legacy for their own ends....

The most original part of Sabato's book may be its contention that

Republicans now wrap themselves in Kennedy's legacy almost as much as Democrats do. 

And it's true:  alongside the poll numbers showing Republicans' admiration for JFK, Sabato provides evidence of how assiduously Reagan and his aides sought to appropriate the Kennedy luster.  Under Reagan, the Republican National Committee even compiled a Kennedy "quote file" that administration officials could use to argue for conservative policies....

Sabato chalks up the lasting Kennedy mystique to a combination of "powerful optics" and "genuine inspiration."  Those explanations are sound, as far as they go, but not sufficient.  To dig deeper, Sabato might have spent more time, ironically, on the assassination -- not on the arcana of the grassy knoll and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, but on

the reasons Kennedy's bright presidency

and cruelly curtailed life

became, after

November 1963,

a focal point for all that went wrong in the late 1960s -- Vietnam, riots, a loss of trust in government -- and a repository for the dreams of what might have been.

-------------------- [end excerpts, David Greenberg's Washington Post book review, Oct. 25, 2013]

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