Volume 3, Number 12 · January 28, 1965
The Apotheosis of John F. Kennedy
By Malcolm Muggeridge
Young John Kennedy
by Gene Schoor
Harcourt, Brace & World, 253 pp., $3.95
The Kennedy Wit
edited by Bill Adler
Citadel, 83 pp., $3.00
Of Poetry and Power
edited by Erwin A. Gilkes, edited by Paul Schwaber
Basic Books, 155 pp., $5.95
The Kennedy Years
by the editors of the New York Times and Viking Press
Viking, 327 pp., $16.50
Kennedy Without Tears: The Man Beneath the Wit
by Tom Wicker
Morrow, 61 pp., $2.50
The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy
by Richard J. Whalen
New American Library, 480 pp., $6.95
A Day in the Life of President Kennedy
by Jim Bishop
Random House, 108 pp., $3.95
I have just pushed aside, I confess with mounting distaste, a pile of Kennedyana on which I had been browsing. Graveyard, or memorial, prose is among the least edifying and least pleasing forms of human composition. There is a prevailing flavor of syrupy insincerity, an affectation of wholehearted truthfulness, amounting to the worst kind of deception, which sickens as it surfeits. I can only say with all possible respect that if the late President really was as he is here presented—so dedicated a public servant, so faithful a husband and devoted a father, so witty, learned, and profound an orator, writer, and thinker, so genial a friend, prayerful a Christian, and enlightened a statesman—he is better off in Heaven, where, according to an electoral oration in Ohio by Vice-President-elect Hubert Humphrey, we may now confidently assume him to be.
Review, 2931 words
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