JFK and the Masculine Mystique is not just another standard biography of the youthful president. His cultural crusade involved other prominent figures, including Frank Sinatra, Norman Mailer, Ian Fleming, Hugh Hefner, Ben Bradlee, Kirk Douglas, and Tony Curtis, who collectively symbolized masculine regeneration.

Kennedy appeared to revive the modern American man as youthful and vigorous, masculine and athletic, and a sexual conquistador. He benefited from a crisis of manhood that had welled up in postwar America when men had become ensnared by bureaucracy, softened by suburban comfort, and emasculated by a generation of newly-aggressive women. Why were Americans so attracted to Kennedy in the late 1950s and early 1960s-his glamorous image, good looks, cool style, tough-minded rhetoric, and sex appeal? As Steve Watts argues, JFK was tailor made for the cultural atmosphere of his time. Kennedy’s allure was more akin to a movie star than a presidential candidate. This book explains how he thus followed an inherited family dream.įrom very early on in his career, John F. In Lincoln's boyhood the planter was a figure he ridiculed while in his young manhood the planter evolved into a role model whom Lincoln revered and associated with Jefferson's overdue ideal that 'all men are created equal.' Thus galvanized 'by blood' to educate himself, to stand for election and to oppose slavery, Lincoln quit farming at age 22. All that I am or ever hope to be I get from my mother-God bless her.' This vital two-generation relationship was nonetheless problematic. However, Lincoln, forever linked to the cause of freedom and equality in America, spoke candidly of the planter to his law partner, Billy Herndon, who recalled his words, 'My mother inherited his qualities and I hers. The relationship between Abraham Lincoln and his two most influential ancestors-his mother and 'the Virginia planter,' a slaveholder, a shadowy grandfather he likely never met-is rarely mentioned in Lincoln biographies or in history texts.

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