John F. Kennedy appeared in The New Yorker for the first time on June 17, 1944, when he was twenty-seven. “Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, the ex-Ambassador’s son and lately a PT skipper in the Solomons, came through town the other day and told me the story of his survival in the South Pacific,” John Hersey wrote, in a story called “Survival.” Hersey told how, on a “starless black” night the year before, Kennedy’s boat, PT-109, had been rammed by a Japanese destroyer and sunk. Two of the men were killed; Kennedy and the ten survivors swam for safety among the nearby islands. (A strong swimmer, Kennedy dragged one of the injured men using a rope clenched in his teeth.) They survived for six days, hiding from Japanese soldiers all the while.
Needless to say, Kennedy appeared in the magazine numberless times after that. In 1960, Richard Rovere wrote about the televised Nixon-Kennedy debates. (He was dubious: “There is no particular virtue,” he wrote, “in having a ready answer to any question that happens to come to the mind of a reporter.”) In January, 1961, Philip Hamburger described Kennedy at the Inaugural Ball: “Tanned, confident, controlled, swift-moving, happy.” The next week, Janet Flanner reported that his Inaugural Address had been praised by every paper in Paris—“a unanimous state of mind extraordinary in France.” There were, of course, many serious things written about Kennedy: under the heading “Letter from Washington,” The New Yorker reported on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, among other events. But there are lots of incidental stories, too. Donald Malcolm, in a Comment from August 12, 1961, wrote about a man who tried to dial an animal hospital and instead was connected to Kennedy’s nuclear hotline.
It shouldn’t be surprising to find, reading back through the archive, that The New Yorker wrote about Kennedy as it would any President—but it is, at least a little. The New Yorker is a weekly magazine, and so Kennedy was criticized, evaluated, laughed at, or praised one week at a time. It was only after his death that the magazine began, in earnest, to stand back and look at him as a whole. Kennedy was assassinated fifty years ago this Friday, on November 22, 1963. In the November 30, 1963, issue, Richard Rovere tried to describe the ways in which Kennedy had changed both Washington and America. Kennedy, Rovere wrote, had “a curiosity as broad as Montaigne’s” and “a critical intelligence and a critical temper.” Rovere added that “his zest for simply watching the show was as great as H. L. Mencken’s.” Kennedy was also, Rovere thought, “the first modern President who gave one a sense of caring—and of believing that a President ought to care—about the whole quality and tone of American life”:
It sounded like a vague approach to the Presidency, Rovere wrote, but it wasn’t. “The energies he released, the people and ideas he encouraged, the style he brought to the Presidency”—all these would have real consequences—among them “a generation of public servants who will be serving Presidents (and perhaps being Presidents) into the next century.”
Faced with Kennedy’s death, Rovere’s admirable impulse was optimism. But mourning had an equal pull. “The death of a President enters the house and becomes a death in the family,” the magazine’s Comment began, in that same issue. “No other public death produces so personal an alteration in one’s world.” A few weeks later, on December 21st, John Updike walked down Fifth Avenue, in search of “the invisible difference” between that Christmas and all others. The flags, he noticed, were at half-mast—“All up and down the Avenue, the half-mast flags were gray from rubbing against sooty facades.” Outside of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, “looking at the crowds, we realized what the difference is this year. People are not determined to be jolly; they do not feel obligated to smile.” The “sudden death of our young President,” Updike wrote, was reflected in immobile faces around the city; it had taught them that “a human face may refuse, or fail, to smile and still be human.”
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With time, accounts of the assassination itself have become more detailed. Last year, in an article called “The Transition,” Robert Caro told the story from the perspective of Lyndon Johnson, who was several car-lengths behind the President in the Dallas motorcade.
Johnson, Caro writes, trapped beneath Youngblood, couldn’t see, but he could feel the car speeding up, and hear the frantic voices on the radio. He realized what had happened and lay there, quiet and calm. For all his moody irritability in normal circumstances, Johnson’s reaction to mortal danger was stillness. When he learned that Kennedy had died, Caro writes, “there was a stillness about him, an immobility, a composure that hadn’t been seen very much during the previous three years.”
Since his Presidency, the Kennedy phenomenon might actually have grown in complexity, with new and unexpected stories springing up every few years. In his 1997 piece, “Coached by Camelot,” Gore Vidal wrote about the vast spin machine he’d encountered around the President—“a monster that even now continues to metastasize in academe and the media.” And in 2008, Larissa MacFarquhar profiled Caroline Kennedy, in a story called “Ms. Kennedy Regrets.” “Caroline Kennedy has a magic about her that is very useful in politics, and politicians in her family and her party have always used it,” MacFarquhar wrote. “For most people old enough to remember her as a child in the White House, and to have been affected by her father’s assassination, she provokes a mixture of benign emotions—nostalgia, respect, excitement, loyalty, pity, love.”
Kennedy’s assassination and his Presidency have left behind two very different legacies. Earlier this year, in an essay called “Closer Than That,” Adam Gopnik described the first: Kennedy’s assassination, he wrote, marked the advent of a durable conspiratorial sensibility, animated by “the sense that we know so much and grasp so little,” and by “the postmodern suspicion that the more we see, the less we know.” It taught us that everyone really is connected, in a perhaps unsavory way: “the small-time crook in his garret and the big-time social leader in his mansion are intimately linked.” The other legacy was captured in Diana Trilling’s 1997 essay, “A Visit to Camelot.” In 1962, the Trillings were invited to the White House for a dinner honoring that year’s Nobel laureates. Jacqueline Kennedy, Trilling wrote, was “a hundred times more beautiful than any photograph had ever indicated”; the President “was handsome and exuded energy—I could feel it even at my distance from him.” Later, the First Lady talked to Lionel Trilling about D. H. Lawrence. (Which was better, “The Rainbow” or “Women in Love”?) The President talked to Robert Frost. The White House, it turned out, was a cultured, brilliant, intimate, easy place. “I felt as if anything could happen,” Trilling wrote. “The party was just beginning.”
Photograph by Frank Hurley/NY Daily News Archive/Getty.
