JFK and the Masculine Mystique

In 1982 Garry Wills published an insightful deconstruction of the mythology surrounding John F. Kennedy and his family, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power. That demythologizing impulse, of course, did not begin or end with Wills. The charismatic, martyred thirty-fifth president of the United States has inspired a mini-industry in popular and scholarly biography to scrutinize in obsessive detail every aspect of his public and private life. Steven Watts contributes to that industry, with a prosopography that seeks to explain the cultural origins and significance of the “masculine mystique” as embodied in JFK. Watts argues that Kennedy's sexualized masculine celebrity was the central element in the success of an otherwise-conventional politician who “floated in the broad mainstream of Cold War liberalism” (p. 4). To explain Kennedy's appeal to the public, Watts asserts, “requires excavation” (ibid.). The resulting argument, however, is perhaps more an assemblage or recycling of Kennedy literature than an original excavation. The book can be read as an extended gloss on Wills's work, structured as a prosopography that attempts to situate JFK in relation to other adherents to the postulated masculine mystique of his era. Thus, Kennedy's overweening sense of sexual privilege, aristocratic masculine striving, and his sense of the possibilities of “new frontiers” of male experience freed from the stultifying bonds of conformity were widely shared by other privileged men and envied or emulated by the American public (p. 6

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