Two New Books Shed Light on the Kennedy Mystique - The New York Times

1/9/17, 9:59 AM

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BOOK REVIEW

NONFICTION

Two New Books Shed Light on the

Kennedy Mystique
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

DEC. 2, 2016

TWENTY-SIX SECONDS
A Personal History of the Zapruder Film
By Alexandra Zapruder
Illustrated. 472 pp. Twelve. $27.
JFK AND THE MASCULINE MYSTIQUE
Sex and Power on the New Frontier
By Steven Watts
Illustrated. 415 pp. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martins Press. $29.99.
Everybody has a theory about the plot to kill John F. Kennedy. Its about time
somebody looked into the conspiracy to keep him alive.
More than half a century after that fatal shooting on Nov. 22, 1963, television
specials, conferences, movies and books related to Camelot or its seamier
underside keep feeding the eternal flame of nostalgia and fascination.
Natalie Portman is the latest Hollywood star to play Jacqueline Kennedy in
Jackie, a movie that comes out this month and imagines the former first lady in
the immediate aftermath of the assassination from bloodied pink suit to widows
veil on the steps of the Capitol.

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Two New Books Shed Light on the Kennedy Mystique - The New York Times

1/9/17, 9:59 AM

Jackie follows two new books, Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of

the Zapruder Film, by Alexandra Zapruder, and JFK and the Masculine
Mystique: Sex and Power on the New Frontier, by Steven Watts.
These works are only tangentially about Kennedys presidency or his
assassination, and in that way, they are probably more instructive about our own
era than Kennedys shared history told through a self-preoccupied lens. One is a
first-person family narrative, the other a cultural essay on masculine malaise, but
both are footnotes inflated to full-length meditations.
And either one could seem almost comically small bore. The granddaughter of
Abraham Zapruder, the Dallas dressmaker who recorded the shooting in all its
horror with his 8-millimeter camera, presents a kind of Zapruder Agonistes,
delineating the personal trials of the filmmaker and his descendants.
The examination of Kennedys masculine mystique is essentially Profiles in
Swagger, a pop culture look at the manly sex appeal of Jack Kennedy as well as
contemporaries like Hugh Hefner, Ben Bradlee, Ian Fleming and Frank Sinatra.
Yet both works are surprisingly engaging, for entirely different reasons.
Zapruder is a gifted writer and storyteller who delicately unravels a minor
mystery few people know or care about, but that she makes human, complex and
quite interesting.
Watts, who has written biographies of Henry Ford, Walt Disney and Hugh
Hefner, focuses on the touch football, booze and babes side of the Cold War,
positioning Kennedy as the avatar of the assertively manly ethos of the New
Frontier. In places, Wattss book reads almost like The Wise Men, Walter
Isaacson and Evan Thomass portrait of the Cold War establishment, only the
Kennedy men are a hipper early 1960s version The Cool Guys.
Watts isnt exploring new ground or even a very novel theory as he cherrypicks material that supports his thesis. But its a measure of the Kennedy magic
that the familiar still seems exotic.
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Two New Books Shed Light on the Kennedy Mystique - The New York Times

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Possibly thanks to plentiful pop cultural allusions, even millennials recognize

the name Zapruder. But many Americans who were alive and watching live
television in 1963 have no real idea who Zapruder was or what happened to him;
they certainly wouldnt be aware that he, his children and grandchildren felt
burdened by their name and the suspicion and second-guessing that followed it
for decades.
Zapruder was a home-movie buff who almost didnt record the infamous
gunshot that blew the presidents head open; Zapruder didnt bring his camera to
his dressmaking factory that morning. After being goaded by his employees, he
went back to fetch it in time to position himself on a concrete abutment with an
unobstructed view of Elm Street where the presidential motorcade was due to pass.
Alexandra Zapruder was an infant when her grandfather died in 1970, but she
paints an intimate portrait of a humble Jewish immigrant from Russia who loved
the United States with a converts passion. She feelingly conveys the shock, horror
and grief he felt as he filmed what was supposed to be a happy home movie. And
she then painstakingly explores what exactly happened to him and his film, step by
step, frame by frame.
Basically, Zapruder gave a copy to the Secret Service but sold the in-camera
original to Life magazine for $150,000; years later, the rights returned to the
family and ownership became a subject of controversy, lawsuits and countless
conspiracy theories.
In the authors more nuanced telling, however, there was nothing mercenary
or ordinary about the transaction. Zapruder, and later his son and other heirs, were
torn about taking money and responsibility for the films distribution, but did so
with a sense of obligation to Kennedys memory that was sometimes
misunderstood and trampled by the United States government and media
organizations. (They are a sensitive bunch: Zapruder felt wounded when William
Manchester described him as stubby in Death of a President.)
The Zapruders were an ordinary American family, but they inherited
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Two New Books Shed Light on the Kennedy Mystique - The New York Times

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something special that defined them forever. Its hard to feel too much pity the
Zapruders ended up with a lot of money but they suffered pangs of guilt and
uncertainty that are totally understandable.
Male inadequacy is the lan vital of JFK and the Masculine Mystique. Watts
posits that Kennedys unique stature, then and even now, stems from what he
describes as his leadership in a cultural crusade to regenerate masculinity. In the
1950s, men felt weakened and demoralized by the women who grew empowered
while they were away fighting World War!II. He cites many articles from the
period, including a 1958 essay in Esquire that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote called
The Crisis of American Masculinity.
Those expressions of alarm now seem quaintly amusing, given how far the
male species has evolved or devolved in the era of metrosexuals and
transgender rights. But postwar castration anxiety wasnt unique to the 1950s.
Whenever fighting ends, be it the Battle of Actium or the Battle of Amiens, men
start to worriedly measure their machismo. That was true both before and after
World War I, and some felt anxiety even at the height of the slaughter. (In March
1917, three months after the Battle of Verdun, the American ambassador to Britain
argued that the United States should enter the war, to break up our feminized
education and revive our real manhood.) Kennedy became the antidote to the
male identity crisis of his time by embodying, according to Watts, physical vigor,
decisive action, personal heroism, individual initiative, tough-mindedness and
abundant sex appeal.
But manly panache alone does not quite do justice to Kennedy or men like
Frank Sinatra, Edward Lansdale or Alan Shepard. Ben Bradlee, in this telling, was
a rakish Kennedy confidant who tempered his Newsweek coverage of the president
to preserve their bond. Bradlee was certainly a courtier in Camelot, but that era
didnt define him. He became more interesting a decade later when he was at The
Washington Post leading the coverage of Watergate.
Similarly, Watts gives great importance to the masculine messaging embedded
in the movie Spartacus. The film is more notable today because Kirk Douglas,
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Two New Books Shed Light on the Kennedy Mystique - The New York Times

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who co-produced and starred in it, put the blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo in the
credits under his real name.
When Kennedy sneaked out of the White House in February 1961 to see
Spartacus at a theater, that endorsement signaled the end of the blacklist. Watts
prefers to focus on the revival of virility, arguing that Kennedy saw in the movie a
Hollywood vision of manly insurrection and stylish revolt that mirrored his own
endeavors. (On the other hand, Kennedy screened Roman Holiday in the middle
of the Cuban missile crisis. A runaway fantasy?)
Both books are good reading, but the mere fact of their publication points to a
clandestine mythmaking machine so potent that Kennedy could live up to his own
legend only by dying young.
If he had survived to seek re-election, challengers would no doubt have said
something like Lloyd Bentsens words to Dan Quayle in their 1988 debate, Jack
Kennedy, you are no Jack Kennedy.
Correction: December 18, 2016
A review on Dec. 4 about JFK and the Masculine Mystique: Sex and Power on the New
Frontier, by Steven Watts, misspelled the surname of an official who worked in the
Defense Department during the Kennedy administration and who, like Kennedy and
other figures of the era, has been associated with manly panache. He was Edward
Lansdale, not Lonsdale.
Alessandra Stanley is a domestic correspondent for business at The Times.
A version of this review appears in print on December 4, 2016, on Page BR70 of the Sunday Book Review
with the headline: The Enduring Kennedys.

2017 The New York Times Company

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