Robert Dallek: Pulling Back the Curtain theatlantic.com
[ This is an interview with the author of the Atlantic article the NYT story refers to, also of a book about Kennedy in the offing. I will link the Atlantic article itself when it becomes available, but that probably won't happen for a few weeks Excerpt (not the juiciest one though) : ]
There are so many books about Kennedy already out there. How do you hope to make yours distinctive?
Well, everybody asks me, Why another book on Kennedy? Usually I just quote the famous comment by the Dutch historian Peter Geyl who said that history is argument without end. We always reinterpret the past. Also, there is significant new material that has come to hand. I've had access to these medical records and to new material on Kennedy's foreign policy, particularly in Cuba. The new material will add something to the discussion, as will the way in which I interpret these materials—how I see them, how I judge them, how I integrate them into the story.
What's fascinating to me is to try and sort out why it is that John Kennedy, who served less than three years in the White House, still has such an extraordinary hold on the public's imagination. One can say it's because he was so young, and was assassinated. But you know, William McKinley was assassinated in 1901 at the start of his second term, and he was in his fifties, a relatively young man. But forty years later, nobody remembered who McKinley was or cared much about him.
My students, many of whom were born just twenty years ago now, have no direct experience with John Kennedy. Yet of all the modern American Presidents I talk about in my course on the American presidency, they come most alive when I talk about him. They know something about him. Obviously their parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles have been telling them about him. |
