A Kennedy Book Review

Book review: ‘The Kennedy Half-Century’ by Larry J. Sabato



In “The Kennedy Half-Century,” political scientist Larry J. Sabato summarizes a recent poll that helps shed light on John F. Kennedy’s importance to Americans 50 years after his death. The survey, by Peter Hart and Geoff Garin, found JFK to be, by a wide margin, the most esteemed president since 1953 — a striking finding given Kennedy’s modest record of legislative achievement in office. Even more remarkable, his appeal transcends ideology: Fifty-two percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats in Hart and Garin’s poll called him one of America’s best leaders. By contrast, other strong finishers, such as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, are deeply disliked by members of the opposite party.



Kennedy’s enduring hold over Americans of all political stripes is the theme Sabato uses to unite what are, in effect, three separate books sharing a pair of covers. The first section of “The Kennedy Half-Century,” about 130 pages, is a serviceable history of JFK’s career. Designed to set the stage for Sabato’s discussion of the five decades since the assassination, this extended prologue makes no pretense of offering a new interpretation of JFK’s presidency. That’s a legitimate choice in a book like this, whose purposes lie elsewhere, but without a new angle or any fresh insight, this first section can’t justify its considerable length. For a primer on JFK’s life and career, readers would do better with any number of recent biographies, such as Robert Dallek’s “An Unfinished Life” or Richard Reeves’s “President Kennedy: Profile of Power.”


While the book’s first section is perfunctory, the second part, which deals with the assassination, is somewhat wearying and likely to interest only those hard-core buffs — I realize there are many — who wallow in outré speculation about who was behind Kennedy’s murder. For many years, this monomania was a widespread popular pastime, and for understandable reasons: the sheer horror of the violence; the sudden loss of a young, dynamic, activist president; and the shared sense that as Lyndon Johnson’s presidency wore on, the decade’s reformist energies somehow went awry, raising painful questions of what might have been. But if the political and cultural impact of the assassination remains worthy of exploration, drawn-out ruminations on the details of the deed will probably strike most readers as not worth their time.



The most promising section of Sabato’s book — its heart — is the third part, which methodically reviews how presidents from Johnson through Barack Obama have made use of JFK’s legacy for their own ends. Sabato isn’t the first historian to attempt this sort of study. His account owes a clear debt to Paul Henggeler, whose book “The Kennedy Persuasion: The Politics of Style Since JFK” had a similar approach, as well as to other scholars who have explored what historian Alan Brinkley called, in his own essay on the topic, Kennedy’s “posthumous lives.” Looming in the background of Sabato’s project, too, is William Leuchtenburg’s “In the Shadow of FDR,” a history of Roosevelt’s continuing influence on the presidents who followed him.