Post-Modernism and JFK

Here's a review I wrote on Amazon a while ago oF KENNEDY AND THE PROMISE OF THE SIXTIES by W. J. Rorabaugh. I may have been one of its only readers, judging from the less than interested reception the book seemed to receive -- mine was one of only two reviews on Amazon. Still, I think it a good, short history and recommend it.

Postmodernism Begins
December 26, 2002

In KENNEDY AND THE PROMISE OF THE SIXTIES, Rorabaugh does a good job of supporting his thesis that the Kennedy administration, though short, was a critical era during which today's postmodern politics, culture, art and literature were born. In politics, it was Kennedy's reliance upon image marketing and private (his father's) money that undid the old backroom deals of the earlier political structure. Also, the civil rights movement came into new prominence in the March on Washington, the women's movement was reborn in its train, Pop Art replaced Abstract Expressionism, and Beat literature and the Folk music boomed.

Rorabaugh credits the Kennedy administration for encouraging a break with the introverted, conformist world of the 50s -- giving tacit permission to a new extrovert culture where how one felt could be more freely expressed. It was an "inside out" time, he argues, which unleashed great optimism and creativity, but chaos and uncertainty as well. He neatly traces the early 1950s rumblings of political and social dissatisfaction against the bland bourgeoisie pursuits of money-making and family raising, showing how that earlier era set the stage for the early 60s explosion of the civil rights movement, and identity politics. He shows how the pursuit of social justice combined with the pursuit of radical non-conformity were tacitly endorsed during that era as an antidote to the anti-communist panics as practiced most famously by McCarthy and Nixon.

But of course there was a darker side to the new "inside out" world Kennedy helped create: image politics were born -- a politics of money and marketing. He points out that Kennedy's platform was not a platform as much as it was a positioning against the previous administration. Kennedy merely promised he would "get the country moving again," talked provocatively of a (non-existent) missile gap. The Kennedy's used the media brilliantly and the media, especially television, used them. For the media recognized in Kennedy a perfect mythic story - Camelot - and could not get enough of Jackie, the kids, and the young president himself. In the photo spreads in LIFE, the White House tours on TV, the era of celebrity politics began.

Rorabaugh is at his best in showing how the myths of the Kennedy image machine served to shield it from criticism then and now. Starting with the Bay of Pigs disaster followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis, Rorabaugh shows how an administration hypnotized by its press-clippings never had any real policies, but reeled from one crisis to the next. Rorabaugh suggests because of the administration's embarrassment in its dealings with Castro and Khrushchev, Kennedy talked tougher and committed more money to supporting the corrupt South Vietnamese government than was necessary or appropriate, and thus laid the groundwork for the disaster in Vietnam as well.

The author also does a good job also of showing how Kennedy's love of intellectual brilliance and as his concentration on surface appearances got him into other kinds of trouble as well. For example, in bringing in from private business such bureaucratic luminaries such as McNamara and the other Whiz Kids, Kennedy set a new tone of technocratic brilliance and efficiency. Ultimately, the Whiz Kids gave bad advice to Kennedy during his two big crises with the communists, and terrible advice to Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam. Rorabaugh notes that Sam Rayburn commented at the time that he found it difficult to work with people who'd never so much as run for sheriff. The Washington of today is similarly filled with powerful unelected actors -- another vexed legacy of the Kennedy era. The difference is now perhaps that these powerful actors are more likely to be lobbyists, less likely to be government employees.

Rorabaugh, though he doesn't spend a lot of time on it, is particularly good on the cultural backdrop of the Kennedy years. Especially impressive is his brief history of the rise of Johns, Warhol, and Rauschenberg against the previous generation of Abstract Expressionists. Celebrating the surface like their president, the pop artists fully embraced the world of mass production and consumerism, celebrating it and taking it for granted in a way that the Abstract Expressionists, steeped in the strictures of the Modernists, never could.

At its best, the book serves to help demystify and put into perspective an era that seems to be recalled these days almost exclusively as hopeful and upbeat, as a kind of prelude to the storm of the "real 60s". Rorabaugh shows that while it was an era that was filled with hope, much of that hope was mere aura created by the myth makers in the White House and an all too willing media. Yes, most of the American people were ready for a new birth of social justice. Yes, the Peace Corp energized a lot of young Americans. But the high tenor of hope generated by the administration, Rorabaugh suggests, was so popular and dominant precisely because it balanced its very real and compelling opposite: the very real fear of nuclear annihilation - a fear which the Kennedy administration's ineptitude almost managed to make real.

On a personal level, I recall as an elementary school kid in the early 60s that both importance of physical fitness and mathematics were strongly emphasized for young people by the administration during those years. Kennedy told us not to ask what our country could do for us, but to ask what we could do for our country. And we wanted to do something for our country. At the same time we learned to clasp our necks (to keep the flying glass from a nuclear explosion from severing an artery) as we balled ourselves up like pill bugs under our little desks. I also recall that more than anything I wanted us to be a family that had a bomb shelter. I recall that somehow I thought that in digging a shelter I would not only help thwart the Russians, but that it would be good exercise, too.