A Companion to John F. Kennedy

This is a terrific book. Everyone interested in John F. Kennedy should own it. (This seems unlikely, however, because the book sells for almost $200!) In it, the editor Marc J. Selverstone performs a bit of scholarly magic: he has tightly organized, edited, and introduced the volume, and he has gotten his authors to provide thirty different riffs on what he regards as the driving force behind the uniqueness and undiminished interest in the Kennedy administration. Derek C. Catsam, in his absorbing chapter “Civil Rights,” describes what he calls Kennedy's “posthumous landslide” in the 1960 election, in which jfk received less than 50 percent of the popular vote, yet, after his assassination, huge majorities claimed to have voted for him. A president had become, for many, a martyr; historians would have to balance fascination with what jfk did and what he might have done had he survived and been reelected

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