Under Construction @ Keele 2017 Under Construction @ Keele Vol. III (3) | Page 45

A Great Leader:
The Use of Popular Biography in Defining the Legacy of President John F. Kennedy
Samuel Taylor | MRes in History
Many Americans still consider John F. Kennedy to be one of their greatest
presidents, although he served fewer than three years in office. The large
number of memoirs by his aides, published in the years immediately after his
assassination, have largely contributed to this perception. There is little
consensus, however, among scholars as to what exactly defines Kennedy’s
legacy. This article will discuss the three achievements identified as
Kennedy’s greatest contributions as president in an academic survey
conducted by Larry Sabato in 2013, and show how the popular and widely-
read Kennedy biographies written by his former advisers, Theodore Sorensen
and Arthur Schlesinger, discussed these events and contributed to the
memory of Kennedy as a near-perfect president. This will bring clarity to the
contentious debates surrounding Kennedy’s legacy in the centennial of his
birth and show how the memoirs were influential in shaping it.
Keywords | Kennedy • Sorensen • Schlesinger • legacy • Sabato • biography
Shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on 22 nd November 1963,
Jackie Kennedy struggled to comprehend how ‘a silly little Communist’ named Lee
Harvey Oswald might have deprived her husband’s ‘death of any meaning’. 1 Her
despair represented the shock of the tragedy: Kennedy had not been president for
three years and the violent end to his life came before he could construct a
substantial legacy, like, for instance the still intact policies from the presidencies of
Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.
Despite this absence of a legacy, Kennedy was instantly remembered as one
of America's greatest presidents. In a survey taken shortly after his funeral, 50% of
Americans remembered him as ‘one of the two or three best presidents’ in the
country’s history. 2 Within two years of his death, approximately 90 books had been
published about Kennedy. Many of these were written by his former aides, who
presented his administration as one that achieved near-perfection. 3 Scholars Mark
White and Raluca Lucia Cimpean argued that some of these memoirs were
William Manche