About this item
From very early on in his career, John F. Kennedys allure was more akin to a movie star than a presidential candidate. 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. 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. Kennedy appeared to revive the modern American man as youthful and vigorous, masculine and athletic, and a sexual conquistador. 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. JFK and the Masculine Mystique is not just another standard biography of the youthful president. By examining Kennedy in the context of certain books, movies, social critiques, music, and cultural discussions that framed his ascendancy, Watts shows us the excitement and sense of possibility, the optimism and aspirations, that accompanied the dawn of a new age in America.
About the Author
Steven Watts is a historian and writer who has charted the sweeping evolution of American culture in a number of highly-praised books. His series of biographies of major figures - Henry Ford, Dale Carnegie, Walt Disney, Hugh Hefner - has explored the shaping of a modern value-system devoted to consumerism, self-fulfillment, leisure, and personality. Two earlier books on the Early Republic era examined the shift from an older society of republican virtue to a 19th-century Victorian era devoted to self-control, individual character, and the self-made man. Now his newest book, "John F. Kennedy and the Masculine Mystique: Sex and Power on the New Frontier" (St. Martin's, 2016) offers a compelling new reading of the 35th president as a cultural figure in modern America.
Watts' books have been translated into German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Polish, and Romanian. They have been reviewed in nearly every major newspaper and magazine in the United States, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Review of Books, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, Denver Post, USA Today, New Republic, Nation, Commentary, Atlantic, Harper's, Economist, National Review, Reason, and many others. They were also reviewed in scholarly journals such as the Journal of American History and American Quarterly.
Watts' books have led to involvement in a number of media projects, including several films for PBS, the History Channel, and documentary venues in Germany and Brazil. He also has appeared in a variety of programs on CBS, NBC, CNBC, NPR, Fox, Fox News, C-Span, Bloomberg News, MSNBC, BBC, and Irish National Radio.
