This volume in Cambridge University Press's series on key figures in U.S. history and culture leans heavily toward a lit-crit take on the 35th president of the United States—which is not surprising, since more than half the contributors are literature professors. Historians of U.S. foreign relations or the Cold War in general will not find essays on the Berlin Wall, South Vietnam, or the Cuban missile crisis that incorporate the latest archival findings or recent scholarship to make us think anew about the Kennedy administration. Chapters that one might think would be assigned to a historian, such as “JFK and the Global Anticolonial Movement,” turn out to be written by an English professor, resulting in an essay short on history and long on analysis of presidential rhetoric.
Even the chapter notes and the guide to further sources appearing at the end of the book do a poor job of directing...