David Greenberg: It’s A Man’s World
David Greenberg, a contributing editor, is a professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University and the author of Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image, among other works.
A BOOK SUCH as Chris Matthews’s biography of President Kennedy would not ordinarily seem like best-seller material. Unlike Robert Dallek’s recent big study of JFK, An Unfinished Life, it is not the product of extensive research. Nor does it cater, like bottom-feeding, gossip-mongering books such as Seymour Hersh’s Dark Side of Camelot, to a vulgar taste for trash by luridly promising titillating disclosures. And, much to its credit, Jack Kennedy shies away from the fashionable Kennedy-bashing in which conservatives and academics alike now indulge, although it has no real new insight into Kennedy to offer instead.
In fact, this book doesn’t really try to illuminate the past at all. It doesn’t try to say anything interesting about politics or the presidency, or manage to explain the special hold that this able and accomplished but hardly monumental leader still exerts over the American public. The bulk of the book comes straight from other well-known, widely read biographies—by Dallek, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Herbert Parmet, among others—and from the memoirs of Kennedy aides, including Ted Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Dave Powers and Kenneth O’Donnell. Most strangely of all, just 78 pages of Jack Kennedy deal with the man’s presidency. It’s as if the author, having rambled on until he noticed that his prolixity would produce a book too long to sell at Costco, wrapped it up hastily, rehearsing a few standard set pieces of the early 1960s—the civil rights struggle, the Peace Corps, the thaw in the Cold War—and tacking on a conclusion.
The reason that a book so devoid of historical or literary merit can become a best-seller is, of course, that its ostensible author is a famous television personality. As I write this, Jack Kennedy is one of three books of “presidential history” on the New York Times best-seller list, jostling for position with Bill O’Reilly’s treatise on Abraham Lincoln and Glenn Beck’s opus about George Washington. (Perhaps the publishing houses’ spring lists will bring more in this vein—Regis Philbin on Dwight Eisenhower? Rachel Maddow on Jimmy Carter? Elizabeth Hasselbeck on Ronald Reagan?) These books exist to extend their authors’ brands—to make money, to be sure, and to express some set of ideas, however vague, but mainly to keep their celebrity creators in the media spotlight....