Under Construction @ Keele 2017 Under Construction @ Keele Vol. III (3) | Page 46

instrumental in shaping the positive attitudes about Kennedy. 4 However, there is little
consensus among historians about which decisions made by the late president had
the most appeal to the American public and how they were presented in these
memoirs. This article will provide a concise definition of Kennedy’s legacy and
examine how the works of two of Kennedy’s close advisors – Kennedy by Theodore
Sorensen and A Thousand Days by Arthur Schlesinger – discuss what many
Americans consider to be Kennedy’s three greatest successes as president. 5 This
will provide clarity about defining Kennedy’s legacy that has so far not been evident
in much of the scholarship and emphasise the importance of these two popular
biographies about Kennedy.
Kennedy’s legacy can be defined as so:
1. Resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis.
2. Proposing civil rights legislation.
3. Desegregating the universities of Mississippi and Alabama.
These were the top three responses provided in Larry Sabato’s 2013 academic
survey studying Kennedy's legacy. 6 It is important to use such a poll because many
prominent scholars have proposed a variety of definitions for Kennedy’s legacy.
Robert Dallek believed it should be Kennedy’s more diplomatic foreign policy with
the Soviet Union and his championing of causes that came into fruition after his
death, such as Medicare. 7 Noam Chomsky instead believed it was the contentious
argument that Kennedy would have ended the Vietnam War if he had lived. 8 As
Cimpean argued, ‘any self-validating illusion of grandeur’ became part of the
Kennedy mythology. 9 Thus, the poll brings clarity to the ongoing debate about what
defines Kennedy’s legacy. By using the classic memoirs Kennedy and A Thousand
Days, one can see how the positive analysis of Kennedy's leadership provided by
Ibid., 93-97; Raluca Lucia Cimpean, The JFK Image: Profiles in Docudrama (Lanham & London:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 48-53.
5
Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965); Arthur J. Schlesinger, A
Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (London: Andre Deutsch, 1965).
6
Larry J. Sabato, The Kennedy Half Century (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 412.
7
Robert Dallek, John F. Kennedy: An Unfinished Life [Reprint Edition] (New York: Penguin Books,
2001), 708, 710.
8
Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot: JFK, Vietnam, and US Political Culture [Reprint Edition]
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), vii.
9
Cimpean, The JFK Image, 43.
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