The Glassy Knoll Identity, Identification, and Desire in Kennedy Narratives

I still have difficulty seeing John F. Kennedy clear.

He is a hero. And yet he is a void.

A few years after its initial impact had been felt, Norman Mailer suggested that his pre-election, pro-Kennedy anthem, “Superman comes to the Supermarket,” could have been called “Filling the Holes in No Man's Land” (Presidential Papers 25). He noted that “American politics is rarely interesting for its men, its ideas, or the style of its movements. It is usually more fascinating in its gaps, its absences, its uninvaded territories” (25). Mailer's assessment of the mapped territory, of what was known, was bleak and biting. Instead of clearly defined dialectics and debates about vital principles, America had been swallowed by “the spirit of the supermarket, that homogenous extension of stainless surfaces and psychoanalyzed people … liv[ing] in the rootless pleasure world of an adult child” (32). Politics needed an “existential act” to penetrate and rip through all that flat, bland sameness—some rough reconsideration of what had been taken for granted, a rude or even obscene assault on harmony which could return us to that “subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation” (38). In 1960, and despite his “doubts, … disquiets, and … certain distastes for Kennedy's dullness of mind” (27), Mailer saw in JFK a “potentiality to excite,” a sexual and visceral disavowal of the Eisenhower emptiness—so, as he writes in his collection of essays from the Kennedy years, he set about to get the man elected, to support the seductions of “personality” politics:

It was a hero America needed, a hero central to his time, a man whose personality might suggest contradictions and mysteries, which could reach into the alienated circuits of the underground, because only a hero can capture the secret imagination of his nation; a hero embodies the fantasy and so