The Kennedy obsession : the American myth of JFK / John Hellmann.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Prologue: A Bedside Visit -- Ch. 1. How Kennedy Awoke: Jack's Reading and Why England Slept -- Ch. 2. John Hersey's "Survival": A Literary Experiment and Its Political Adaptation -- Ch. 3. The Old Man and the Boy: Papa Hemingway and Profiles in Courage -- Ch. 4. The Hollywood Screen and Kennedy's Televised Showdown with Truman -- Ch. 5. The Erotics of a Presidency -- Ch. 6. An Assassination and Its Fictions.

Not the history of a man's life but the biography of his idea, The Kennedy Obsession traces the creation of Kennedy's image as an inspired - and inspiring - fiction.

The Kennedy Obsession reveals the painstaking transformation of private life into public persona, of a man into perhaps the major American myth of our time. The product of a distinctly American culture and the producer of an idealized vision for the future, Kennedy led the way into a new frontier, embodying a legend that both mirrored and shaped the collective passage of Americans through this tumultuous century.