© Columbia University Press
The Kennedy Obsession: The American Myth of JFK
Paper, 224 pages, 18 photos
ISBN: 978-0-231-10799-0
$28.00
/ £19.50
September, 1997
Cloth, 224 pages, 18 photos
ISBN: 978-0-231-10798-3
$90.00
/ £62.00
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.