SLSL Intro "John Kennedy's Role Model"

[Dave Monroe]

"John Kennedy's role model James Bond was about to
make his name by kicking third-world people around,
another extension of the boy's adventure tales a lot
of us grew up reading." (SL, "Intro," p. 11)

>From John McClure, Late Imperial Romance (NY: Verso,
1994), Ch. 2, "Mid-Century Romances," pp. 30-55 ...

"... in the early sixties, Kennedy, drawing in the
most sacred of America's romances, called on the
nation to do battle on 'new frontiers.'
   "Martin Green's discussion of the adventure story
as a form of romance and an 'energizing myth of
empire' [Green, xi] can help us understand the form
and function of Kennedy's speeches, for Kennedy
couches his political proposals--for foreign aid and
foreign intervention, democritization drives and
counter-insurgency--in the familiar terms of adventure
fiction, drawing on the traditions of the boy's
adventure story, chivalric romance, and the frontier
tale, America's native form of imperial romance.  In
his campaign speeches he tells Americans ... that they
are getting soft and bored, and he offers them exactly
what British adventure fiction offered its audience in
the last century: 'a swashbuckling politics and a
world in which neither epic heroism nor chivalry is
dead.  Both are to be rediscovered in crusading and
conquering abroad' [Brantlinger, 36].  He does so, he
frankly acknowledges, in order to mobilize America for
such adventures.  What he offers, then, is not so much
a repudiation of liberation itself--the frontier story
is, after all, precisely a romance of liberation from
the confines of a too well-defined world.  It is
instead a counter-image of liberation, classically
imperial, in which freedom is won not by collectively
challenging a system experienced as oppressive but by
riding it out, individually or as a group, into new
realms where one can become, suddenly, and not so much
its victim as its privileged agent: a pioneer.
   "I do not mean to imply that Kennedy's rhetoric is
cynically manipulative.  For Kennedy himself seems to
have felt the need for the satisfactions of adventure.
 One of his favorite authors was John Buchan, 'the
Kipling ... of postwar England' (Green, 323).  Kennedy
read many of Buchan's popular novels of imperial
adventure, and took his definition of politics from
Pilgrim's Way, Buchan's autobiography.  Arthur
Schlesinger writes that Kennedy 'considered
politics--in another phrase he cherished from
Pilgrim's Way--"the greatest and most honorable
adventure"' [Schlesinger, 100].  Entranced by stories
of England's imperial glory, construing political
action itself in terms of the imperial genre of
adventure, Kennedy becomes at once the
producer/publisher of globally disseminated imperial
romances (his speeches) and the would-be hero in the
real-life production of these romances.... the sixties
is a period in which politics become sparticularly
imbued with romance ...." (pp. 41-2)

Cf. ...

   "I was also able to steal, or let us say 'derive,'
in more subtle ways.  I had grown up reading a lot of
spy fiction, novels of intrigue, notably those of John
Buchan...." (SL, "Intro," p. 18)

And back to McClure ...

   "In construing his romance, Kennedy invokes the
American version of that anxiety of belatedness which
found such frequent expression among British writers
around the turn of the century...." (p. 42)

"... Kennedy places himself and his fellow Americans
in a poistion of unenviable belatedness, exclusion,
and diminishment.  The pioneers had horizons to
pursue, battles to fight, enemies to conquer: the
continent provided them with the raw materials of
adventure romance.  Their descendents, undermined by
modernism ... and materialism ... seem to be condemned
... to banal dreams, quotidian pursuits.
   "But this, Kennedy insists, is not the case .... 
By returning to and expanding the trope of the
frontier, Kennedy is able to offer his contemporaries
the opportunities to see themslevs ... as heroic
participants in the ongoing national romance ...." (p.
43)

"But his speeches betray other anxieties of
belatedness as well.  In their very appeals to the
aristomilitary values of imperial adventure fiction,
they betray a nostalgia for the colonial period just
ending, and an attachment to the fiction that
glorified it." (p. 44)

"And it is rarely just ordinary, everyday adventure:
in speech after speech Kennedy insists on the
all-but-apocalyptic nature of the crisis at hand.... 
Indeed, Latin America and the lands of the South
become, in Kennedy's construction, a kind of
Armageddon plain on which the forces of freedom and
those of tyranny are gathering to fight their final
battle....  Once again ... the non-Western world is to
be the site of Western adventures, the battlefield on
which Westerners tired of domestic routines can find
urgency, adventure, and glory.  Once again, in other
words, it will be made to provide the raw materials of
romance." (pp. 44-5)

Citing ...

Brantlinger, Patrick.  Rule of Darkness:
   British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914.
   Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1988.

Green, Martin.  Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of
   Empire.  New York: Basic Books, 1979.

Schlesinger, Arthur M.  A Thousand Days.
   Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

As well as, e.g., ...

http://www.cs.umb.edu/jfklibrary/j052561.htm

http://www.cs.umb.edu/jfklibrary/jfk_alliance_for_progress.html

http://www.cs.umb.edu/jfklibrary/j071560.htm

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/docs/sou/kennedy1.htm

http://www.cs.umb.edu/jfklibrary/jfk_newspaper_editors.html

And see as well ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=72588&sort=date

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