In mid-November, 1963, according to all major best-seller lists, the most popular nonfiction publication in America was a book that portrayed fack Kennedy as “immature,” “arrogant,” “snobbish,” “glib,” “slick,” “calculating,” “hard as nails,” “mealymouthed,” “opportunistic,” “Machiavellian,” “intellectually shallow,” “spiritually rootless,” “morally pusillanimous,” “passionless,” “vain,” “shifty-eyed,” and, for every good reason, nicknamed “Tack the Knife.” The book, of course, was J.F.K.: The Man and the Myth, by Victor Lasky. By the end of the same month there burned above the grave of the very same man an eternal flame, more often reserved in the protocol of his religion for saints of the first order. Whatever their religious or political persuasion, few Americans were protesting this instant canonization. JTi the horror, grief, and guilt that overwhelmed the nation following the assassination, the minor Kennedy myth that Lasky had contended against—the fine-liberal-fellow image—had expanded uncountable times, been transformed and purified, burst all mortal bonds, and soared toward the realm of the supernatural. As after the death of Lincoln nearly a hundred years earlier, the common thought of Americans was “How are the fallen mighty!” and John F. Kennedy was on his way to becoming the legendary national hero of his century.

“It is difficult now to comprehend the wave of hero-worship which swept over the country after Lincoln’s assassination,” Roy P. Basler wrote a generation ago in The Lincoln Legend. “Lincoln was suddenly lifted into the sky as the folk-hero, the deliverer, and the martyr who had come to save his people and to die for them … the folk mind was enraptured with the stories of how Lincoln had suffered, prayed, dreamed, and loved mankind and conquered his enemies. How he had doubted, despaired, cunningly schemed, and contrived to effect his ends, no one wanted to hear.” Thousands of Americans were soon seriously arguing that Lincoln was of divine origin. (Alter all, in his own words he was the son of an “angel mother”; his father-of-record was a poor carpenter; and he was shot on Good Friday.) This conclusion would have astonished Lincoln only a little more than, in the view of Arthur Krock and some of John Kennedy’s other friends, the lighting of the eternal flame would have embarrassed Kennedy nearly a century later. But neither man was by this time making history. It was being made for him.

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