The Kennedy Obsession: The American Myth of JFK by John Hellmann

From the Publisher

John F. Kennedy was not only a president, but also a symbol for America's most cherished ideas. In The Kennedy Obsession, John Hellmann takes a thoroughly original approach to understanding Kennedy's star power and his carefully crafted public image. Tracing Kennedy's self-creation as diligent scholar, bashful hero, and sensitive rebel-cued by cultural figures such as Lord Byron, Ernest Hemingway, and Cary Grant-and the images of Kennedy in the aftermath of his assassination, Hellmann reveals the painstaking transformation of private life into public persona, of a man into perhaps the major American myth of our time.

Reviews in American History

In defining Kennedy's 'power' as 'the power of story-telling and self-dramatization,' hellmann enriches our understanding of the Kennedy saga as a popular phenomenon.

Richard Slotkin

Hellmann understands that reading involves more than the consumption of ideas—it is a theater of the mind, in which the reader imaginatively tests a range of roles, voices, identities. Hellmann shows how Kennedy´s own early reading (in combination with family lore provided him with the language of myth, his sense of identity and role. He then analyzes the complex ways in which this private myth-making interacted with the process of social myth-making (in mass media and politics to shape "The Kennedy Obsession."

Gary Owens

It deserves to be read by anyone with an interest in the political culture of the Kennedy era and our own.

John Carlos Rowe

An admirably focused and clear study . . . Among the huge number of encyclopedic studies of JFK, The Kennedy Obsession will stand out as readable, focused, and relevant to our understanding of American culture in the 1950s and 1960s.

Thomas A. Kazee

Hellmann argues provocatively that this American heroic epic was not an incidental by-product of Kennedy´s eventful and dramatic life.

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents