JFK: The Author and the Text

Abstract

The 25th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy brought yet more evidence of his continuing force in American culture. In addition to the numerous television specials that appeared in 1988, nearly 30 new or reissued books joined more than 100 volumes of Kennedy literature already in print. Perhaps even more telling were the efforts of several 1988 presidential aspirants to align their textual constructions in the media with Kennedy's image. The full power of the Kennedy image ultimately revealed itself when Lloyd Bentsen, responding to a factually correct comparison Dan Quayle made between his own congressional experience and Kennedy's, pronounced, Senator, you're Jack Kennedy. Bentsen used this sally with devastating effect despite the revelations, gossip, and revisionist analyses which had told the public for nearly two decades that Jack Kennedy himself was no Jack Kennedy. The relation between the man and the myth, between the facts of Kennedy's personal and political life and the fiction of his public image, can be comprehended only by putting aside literal-minded, positivist notions of perception and representation. No actual person can be fully present to the perception of the reader/viewer. Any representation of a person in public discourse necessarily involves selection, repression, and addition. That necessity is doubled in the act of reception as readers/ viewers depend upon familiar texts to decipher the new representation before them. In the late 1940s Randall Jarrell observed that celebrities had become our fictional (qtd. in Raeburn 10). His statement suggests the transformation of living people into constructed representations and the centrality of these representations in the fantasy life of a society in which the cultural work of the novel and even the film is superseded by people constructed as characters in the media. Kennedy must be reProfiles in Courage (Commemorative Edition) By John F. Kennedy Harper and Row, 1988