![]() So, how do these two new Kennedy titles featured today stack up to the rest? Let’s take a look. ‘Historians see him more as a celebrity who didn’t accomplish very much.’ Dallek also pointed to a second inhibiting factor, the commercial pressure authors feel to come up with sensational new material.”įascinating! (At least for me.) The presidential publishing industry is nearly as interesting as the books themselves. ‘The mass audience has turned Kennedy into a celebrity, so historians are not really impressed by him,’ Dallek told me. ![]() ![]() “ suggests that the cultish atmosphere surrounding, and perhaps smothering, the actual man may be the reason for the deficit of good writing about him. That same article points to a theory from author and historian Robert Dallek (whose An Unfinished Life is possibly the best JFK book): “There is such fascination in the country about the anniversary, but there is no great book about Kennedy.” Legendary biographer Robert Caro said as much a few years ago in a New York Times article which explored this phenomenon: Which means that great books about him are in surprisingly short supply. Though JFK has been the subject of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of published books, he remains an elusive character. ![]() ![]() There are a few presidents whose stories seem to hold our collective American imagination more than others: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and, without fail, John F. ![]()
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