cover image KENNEDY AND THE PROMISE OF THE SIXTIES

KENNEDY AND THE PROMISE OF THE SIXTIES

William J. Rorabaugh, . . Cambridge Univ., $29 (342pp) ISBN 978-0-521-81617-5

University of Washington history professor Rorabaugh (Berkeley at War, etc.) argues persuasively that John F. Kennedy personified a narrow slice of American history that was both brazenly optimistic and wantonly self-deceiving. Rorabaugh paints Kennedy as a mirror of his age and Camelot as a highly romanticized fiction of a golden moment that never was. "Golden it wasn't," writes the author, "promising it was." Rorabaugh sees Kennedy's tenure as a unique "in-between time" coming just after the more conservative, cautious and complacent 1950s and just before the "more frenzied, often raucous, and even violent" late '60s. (In 1962, Rorabaugh notes, the conservative Young Americans for Freedom boasted a national campus membership of over 20,000, while the New Left Students for a Democratic Society carried a roster of just 500. These proportions would be reversed within six years.) And he shows how many of the optimistic seeds sewn by Kennedy—who believed, among other things, that he could confidently defend all free-world borders against Communism—were quickly strangled by weeds of cynicism and doubt as the '60s progressed. In the final analysis, Rorabaugh sees Kennedy's America as a place of clearly delineated rights and wrongs, good and evil, the defining lines of which began to dissolve not long after (though certainly not because of) Kennedy's death. Upon closing this fresh analysis of an era, one is left wondering whether JFK would have even recognized the United States where his brother Bobby campaigned for a second Camelot, and where he himself became a martyr in 1968. (Sept.)