Marilyn & Jack & Bobby

MARILYN & BOBBY & JACK

I cannot understand why Anthony Summers’s book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe (Macmillan, 1985; NAL paperback, with important postscript added, 1986 —this is the edition I am quoting from) has not had a greater impact upon the informed political sensibility. And this in turn raises questions about the forming of our public perceptions —that is, about why some material is admitted into our sense of a famous man while some other information, no matter how persuasive, is excluded. Perhaps, in this case, the legends of John and Robert Kennedy, shaped by that wintry inauguration in January 1961, by the proclaimed “New Frontier,” by notions of “Camelot,” and by the assassinations, is so compelling as to resist modification. We prefer those images to disturbing realities. And as far as the Kennedy myth is concerned, Anthony Summers’s book is disturbing indeed.

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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MARILYN & BOBBY & JACK

I cannot understand why Anthony Summers’s book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe (Macmillan, 1985; NAL paperback, with important postscript added, 1986 —this is the edition I am quoting from) has not had a greater impact upon the informed political sensibility. And this in turn raises questions about the forming of our public perceptions —that is, about why some material is admitted into our sense of a famous man while some other information, no matter how persuasive, is excluded. Perhaps, in this case, the legends of John and Robert Kennedy, shaped by that wintry inauguration in January 1961, by the proclaimed “New Frontier,” by notions of “Camelot,” and by the assassinations, is so compelling as to resist modification. We prefer those images to disturbing realities. And as far as the Kennedy myth is concerned, Anthony Summers’s book is disturbing indeed.