Book Review: The Afterlife of John Fitzgerald Kennedy

The Afterlife of John Fitzgerald Kennedy: A Biographyby Michael J. HoganCambridge University Press, 2017The book-chat world would be lost without its anniversaries. Dozens swarm around the books of every season, and some of course feel more legitimate than others. The paper-thin anniversary attaching to President John F. Kennedy is that 2017 would have marked his 100^th birthday, had he only not been assassinated in Dealey Plaza in 1963. Considering how many cigars Kennedy smoked every single day of his life, his ever reaching age 100 is the most flagrant wishful thinking, but the persistence of the wishful thinking in JFK's case is a phenomenon in its own right: nobody gives a hoot about any of James Garfield's anniversaries.It's this persistence of fascination that has come to define Kennedy, and it's the subject of historian Michael Hogan's thought-provoking new book The Afterlife of John Fitzgerald Kennedy: A Biography. In Hogan's view, and he's surely right, that afterlife has for 54 years had a life of its own, and according to Hogan, its life began when the living man died:

The assassination thus began the process of transporting Kennedy from history to memory. It set the stage for a long struggle over how he would be memorialized, who would own or control his memory, and how his legacy would be defined. In many ways a struggle over what would be remembered and what would be forgotten, it highlights the persistent tension between history, memory, and heritage that runs throughout the story of Kennedy's afterlife.

Predictably in a book about the shaping and preservation of Kennedy's memory in the decades after his death, the star in these pages is the Presidential widow, Jacqueline Kennedy. She's on virtually every page, in virtually every room, managing every conceivable decision about her husband's legacy, from the famous funeral procession to the biographies and histories that began to appear to the establishment and mission of monuments, memorials, and most of all the Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston. In all of this, as Hogan writes, “Jacqueline Kennedy became the chief guardian of her husband's memory. She devoted herself to what had become, in her mind, his inviolable image and to embedding that image in the approved version of his life and presidency.”That devotion on Jacqueline Kennedy's part locked into place instantaneously. It was an immediate outgrowth of shock – she had already mastered the theatricality of the tragedy when the President's body was still warm in Parkland Hospital in Dallas. And although it took on a procedural and even bureaucratic aspect as the years went on, it retained the sharp edges and pitiless practicality of shock: administrators were threatened, writers were pressured, censorship was wielded like a flail.Hogan's book – quite good in its own way although to a much greater extent than its author might admit still an outgrowth of that minatory devotion – narrates these efforts on the part of the widow the slain president's faithful retainers with a dispatch that at times feels frustratingly partisan. This is an excellent step in furthering our understanding of what history is doing with the memory of John Kennedy, but it's clear that many more such steps are necessary. As Thomas Mallon's rambling, self-indulgent piece on Hogan's book in the pages of the New Yorker hints, it may be that these kinds of books will only be truly possible once the very last person who actually remembers President Kennedy has died and the whole thing – life, afterlife, and grieving widow – can be handed over to historians who are no more worried about bothering the Kennedy family than they are about upsetting Lucretia Garfield.