The retellings of Kennedy’s story are by now known more than the story itself. Photograph by Hank Walker / Getty

On November 8, 1960, I voted for Richard Nixon. I had turned nine the week before. According to my fourth-grade report card, from that September, I stood four feet one and a quarter inches tall and weighed fifty-five pounds: small enough to be permitted entry into the curtained voting booth in the Stewart Manor School, on Long Island, where my father let me pull the lever for Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge. It was a reach: during Nelson Rockefeller’s long Albany reign, the Republican ticket occupied the top row on New York State’s mechanical ballot.

John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism cut little ice with many of the Irish ex-New Dealers who lived on our street. Their liking of Ike proved to be more than a fling, and by 1960 they were beginning to feel permanently at home in the Republican Party. Affection for my wry, sweet-tempered father, meanwhile, left me immune to much of J.F.K.’s chivalric glamour. My father always called him Ke-NAH-dy, a pronunciation meant to sound haut Wasp, which from his point of view this rich, educated New Englander might as well have been. But he also viewed Kennedy with an easygoing detachment, rather as Kennedy tended to view himself; he laughed along with the affectionate Vaughn Meader impersonations and the Mad magazine spoofs of J.F.K. that I added to his reading of the New York World-Telegram, a middlebrow broadsheet unaware that, along with men’s hats and women’s cotton gloves, it was on the brink of death.

I recall how Phyllis Mindell, the twenty-three-year-old teacher who had notated my height and weight, assigned our class to watch the first Kennedy-Nixon debate. As Kennedy’s inaugural arrived, Mrs. Mindell gave us a letter-writing exercise: we could send our congratulations to the incoming President, or offer the outgoing one our thanks. I loyally chose Eisenhower, and duly received an acknowledgment postmarked February 6, 1961, from Washington. The card inside was headed “Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.” Eisenhower’s bold printed signature (not dissimilar to John F. Kennedy’s) sat where a stamp should have been—my introduction to the franking privilege—and as I look at the envelope more than five decades on I’m arrested by its little bits of archaism. There is no Zip Code, and the addressee, “Master Thomas Mallon,” might as well be Penrod Schofield.

The following June, in her last set of report-card comments, Mrs. Mindell observed that “Tommy has expressed great interest in being a politician someday.” The excitement of the election had clearly lingered.

Kennedy would have been a hundred years old on May 29th. His centenary brings with it new books, the most notable of which is probably “The Road to Camelot” (Simon & Schuster), a wearyingly titled but provocative reconstruction of his “five-year campaign” for the White House. The authors, Thomas Oliphant and Curtis Wilkie, both veterans of the Boston Globe, locate the effort’s origin in a “cardiac double-header” from the summer of 1955, when President Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, then Senate Majority Leader, suffered serious heart attacks. Joseph P. Kennedy, confident of Johnson’s recovery but not of Ike’s, suggested to L.B.J. that he consider a race for President in ’56, with Kennedy’s son, the junior senator from Massachusetts, as a running mate.

Johnson wasn’t amenable to the idea, but J.F.K.’s Vice-Presidential prospects were nearly fulfilled when Adlai Stevenson, trying to jump-start his second doomed campaign against Eisenhower, told delegates at the Democratic Convention to make their own choice for the bottom of the ticket. Out in Chicago, Jack Kennedy made a fast, strenuous grab at the nomination, and posted a respectable loss to the Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver. Months before, Kennedy’s young aide Theodore Sorensen had run an extensive set of numbers showing how a Catholic on the Democratic ticket could stem recent defections to the Republican Party by groups like those newly suburbanized Irish Catholics on Dover Parkway in Stewart Manor. Sorensen’s report held that Al Smith’s crushing defeat in 1928 had resulted from his stance against Prohibition, not his religion; Smith would have done worse still had he not been Catholic.

Kennedy spent the fall of ’56 campaigning for Stevenson but picked his own venues, ones that could redound to his benefit four years later. A decision to try for the Presidency in 1960 was made weeks after Stevenson’s defeat, at Thanksgiving dinner in Hyannis Port. Joe Kennedy had already pledged “whatever it takes” from his own fortune. Oliphant and Wilkie suggest that the actual rationale for Kennedy’s candidacy lay in his understanding of “celebrity,” as well as a confession he made to a group at Washington’s Metropolitan Club: “It’s not that I have some burning thing to take to the nation. It’s just, ‘Why not me?’ ”

This is the Kennedy now frozen in Isabel McIlvain’s statue outside the Massachusetts State House: a youthful figure, regal and a little aloof, whose high, straight-ahead gaze isn’t so much visionary as unapproachable. According to “The Road to Camelot,” Kennedy was regarded by some Senate colleagues as “an indifferent Democrat with occasionally independent tendencies,” and he needed to do more than the usual amount of broken-field running to please the Democratic Party’s sturdy but mad coalition of segregation and social justice. Between 1956 and 1958, looking southward, he hinted at disagreement with Eisenhower’s decision to send troops to Little Rock; offered campaign help to George C. Wallace, a candidate for the Alabama governorship; and put a Confederate legislator into “Profiles in Courage.”

Still, he had more work to do with the Party’s left than with its right. Kennedy took a forthright stance against French colonialism in Algeria, previewing his Peace Corps-style competition with the Soviets in the newly independent Third World. The columnist Joseph Alsop thought that Kennedy had potential to become “a Stevenson with balls,” though the Senator’s principal intraparty antagonist, Eleanor Roosevelt, still longed for Stevenson himself. Unforgiving of Kennedy’s softness toward Senator Joseph McCarthy, Mrs. Roosevelt is believed to have been the first to recommend that J.F.K. show “less profile and more courage.” The former First Lady was “brutally brusque” to him during the ’56 Convention. When she finally endorsed him, well into the 1960 campaign, she conceded in conversation that Stevenson might not have made such a good President after all. “I almost peed in my pants,” Kennedy told a crony who had heard the admission.

Oliphant and Wilkie occasionally get tough with their young subject—the coverup of his health problems, his “feckless” behavior with his wife—though they exhibit a lingering Boston tendency to sentimentalize the Kennedys. “Profiles in Courage” is described as a “genuine collaboration” between Kennedy and Sorensen, an odd description for a book officially attributed to the single author who took a Pulitzer Prize for it. Political dirty tricks that would be otherwise deemed reprehensible are just colorful displays of feistiness when executed on Jack’s behalf. Of one Kennedy operative, who, in “an attempt at reverse psychology,” likely mailed thousands of crude anti-Catholic pamphlets to Catholic voters, we’re given the amused judgment of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.: “He took cheerful delight in causing trouble and in reorganizing the truth.”

“It takes a while to kick in, but this should do nothing.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

“The Road to Camelot” is replete with antique names and strategies, and not all readers will want to follow it into the weeds of bygone political science. Nonetheless, the best and most robust part of the book is an early chapter that has Kennedy, at a brawl of a meeting in Boston’s Hotel Bradford, establishing dominance over the Massachusetts Democratic Party by ousting the state chairman and putting in his own man. Jack was willing to countenance and supply whatever it took: trickery, muscle, even the shaking of hands.