Abstract
John F. Kennedy’s presidential tenure lasted barely more than one thousand days but the substantial body of historical scholarship on his life and times makes him one of the most written about of all America’s presidents. Of central importance in the study of Kennedy has been to evaluate whether his policies as president were well conceived and effectively implemented. In the international arena, no example of his decision making was more important than his management of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, the most dangerous episode in the history of the Cold War. The price of failure would have been superpower conflict, perhaps even nuclear war that would have cost many millions of lives and unimaginable devastation.
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Notes
Thomas Brown, JFK: History of an Image (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
John Hellmann, The Kennedy Obsession: The American Myth of JFK (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
For discussion of these works, see Hugh Brogan, Kennedy (London: Longman, 1996), 15–19, 31–6.
Among the best works on JFK’s prepresidential years are Nigel Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth (London: Arrow, 1992).
and Herbert S. Parmet, Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial, 1980). The JFK/Anita Ekberg front cover was published by Esquire in January 1963.
Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper, 1965).
Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (London: Andre Deutsch, 1965).
The most insightful biographies on John F. Kennedy include Herbert S. Parmet, Jack, and JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial, 1983).
and Robert Dallek, John F. Kennedy: An Unfinished Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003).
Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept: John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
James N. Giglio, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991).
Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982).
Thomas G. Paterson, ed., Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Thomas C. Reeves, A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy (New York: Free Press, 1991).
Seymour M. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997).
Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film (New York: Applause Books, 1992), 176.
Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1997); Sheldon M. Stern, “What JFK Really Said,” Atlantic Monthly (May 2000), digital edition.
Entry for Kenneth Patrick O’Donnell, Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan, 1995), Supplement Ten, 603–605; Roger Ebert, “Thirteen Days,” Chicago Sun-Times, January 12, 2001.
For an example of this sort of argument, see Thomas G. Paterson, “Commentary: The Defense-of-Cuba Theme and the Missile Crisis,” Diplomatic History 14 (Spring 1990): 249–56.
Mark J. White, Missiles in Cuba: Kennedy, Khrushchev, Castro and the 1962 Crisis (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), 35–6. The differentiation between JFK’s premissile crisis policies toward Cuba and the missile crisis itself has certainly been central to my own scholarship on the subject. See not only Missiles in Cuba, but also The Cuban Missile Crisis (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996).
Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Norton, 1999 reprint), 49, 97–8.
Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Macmillan, 1962).
Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 101–103.
Stewart Alsop and Charles Bartlett, “In Time of Crisis,” Saturday Evening Post, December 8, 1962, 17–20; Bartlett to President Kennedy, October 29 and 31, 1962, President’s Office Files, John E. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA; entry for November 11, 1962, President’s Appointment Book, Kennedy Library; Walter Johnson, ed., The Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), VIII, 351–2.
C. David Heymann, A Woman Named Jackie (London: Heinemann, 1989), 296–319, 648.
Judith Exner [Campbell], as told to Ovid Demaris, My Story (New York: Grove, 1977); Kitty Kelley, “The Dark Side of Camelot,” People, February 29, 1988; Liz Smith, “The Exner Files,” Vanity Fair, January 1997, 30–43; U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, interim report, S. Rept. 94–465, 94th Congress, 1st session, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975).
Dino A. Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Random House, 1991).
Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 207.
Art Simon, “Thirteen Days,” Cineaste 26 (2001): 43.
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© 2011 Iwan W. Morgan
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White, M. (2011). The Cinematic Kennedy: Thirteen Days and the Burnishing of an Image. In: Morgan, I.W. (eds) Presidents in the Movies. The Evolving American Presidency Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117112_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117112_7
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