Making JFK Matter: Popular Memory and the Thirty‐fifth President. By Paul H.Santa Cruz. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2015. 332 pp.

Abstract

Making JFK Matter: Popular and Thirty-fifth President. By Paul H. Santa Cruz. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2015. 332 pp. The contestation of public continues to be a subject of theoretical interest and debate. Paul H. Santa Cruz's Making JFK Matter, however, is not place to look for theory development in studies of collective or public memory. While author acknowledges that his thinking on these matters has been influenced by Pierre Nora's notion of lieu de memoire (i.e., of p. 15), there is no serious attempt in book to outline that particular theoretical frame in detail nor, for that matter, any other theory-based explanation. Instead, Santa Cruz is particularly interested in what he terms popular memory (p. 13) as it relates to President John F. (or JFK). In Introduction, he defines it as the general, or prevailing, conceptions American people have of President Kennedy (p. 13). Three primary case studies, related in Chapters 1-3, serve as staging ground for parsing out this notion. The first involves city of Dallas's efforts to memorialize slain president. The other two case studies focus on uses of public as rhetorically inscribed by President Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy, each of whom, Santa Cruz argues, had their own political agendas when invoking JFK's memory. In Chapter 4, Santa Cruz highlights what he labels Other Sites of Memory (p. 185), a potpourri of activities and establishments that include Jackie Kennedy's careful planning of president's funeral and her references to Camelot; Oliver Stone's JFK, a film portrayal that reinforced conspiracy themes associated with assassination; and John F. Library and Museum, a site for creating, contesting, and extending public in multiple forms. In this section, Santa Cruz's analysis might have been strengthened had he drawn theory from disciplines other than history. For example, Craig Dickinson, Carol Blair, and Brian L. Ott's edited volume, Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), offers a collection of essays that might have been quite useful in parsing out specific aspects of complex subjects tackled in this section. Nevertheless, chapter--much like three preceding it--offers a serviceable analysis and a fair-minded evaluation. While writing in these chapters is a bit repetitive at times, Santa Cruz gives us much to cogitate over and identifies some intriguing threads. In Chapter 5, book confronts contradictions between historians' judgments of JFK's presidential legacy and how public regards president. At this point, discussion turns on difference between style and substance--or, as others have put it, between promise and performance. Here historians and public memory, of course, part ways. …