Myth and the man

Presidents, however, are in an entirely different league. Once in the White House, the president is both the originator and object of a massive, sustained and all-powerful myth-making machine: Dwight D. Eisenhower is the steady “man from Abilene.” Ronald Reagan will lead us on horseback to a reborn America, the “shining city upon a hill.” Bill Clinton comes from Hope — and brings it with him.
It is often on the hopeful road to the White House that such legends first take shape, which makes a new exhibition of photographs by Cornell Capa at the International Center of Photography fixating, showing Democratic candidate for the presidency Sen. John F. Kennedy on the campaign trail, before election, before ascendancy and before perhaps the greatest of all presidential legends, Camelot.
It is a crucial, but now forgotten moment, because once a candidate wins the White House, the rancor and recriminations of the campaign are instantly forgotten. So is the possibility that he might not win. Those days and weeks and months are some of the most honest in any politician’s career, for on the campaign trail what every candidate is asking is the question, “Do you like me enough to elect me?”
These images of Kennedy in “JFK for President: Photographs by Cornell Capa” are painful ones, because we know with hindsight his tragically short career, and also just how bogus some of them are — this young, tanned and vigorous hero was actually a man racked with pain and illness, to the point that some historians have recently speculated that he might well have died in office, had he not been killed by an assassin’s bullet.
But it’s easy to see just how quickly Americans responded to the question of how well they liked JFK. He had instant appeal, sex appeal even in 1960, especially to the young, though by no means all of the photographs show adoring crowds.
At the exhibition, which concludes with images of Camelot in action — almost a feeling of afterthought — one viewer remembered vividly the day of Kennedy’s inauguration. She was 12 when JFK was elected.
“It snowed in Massachusetts the day of the inauguration,” she said, remembering. School was canceled, and children got to stay home and watch Kennedy take the oath of office on TV. “We were told by the nuns at school that this was a miracle.”
It was indeed in its own way a miracle, for myths are nothing without their miraculous moments — here was an Irish Catholic entering the White House, not as an attendant lord, but as the president himself.
Less than a year before inauguration day 1961, we see Kennedy as a sometimes lonely figure. He emerges from a car on to a cold gray street somewhere in Wisconsin, days before the April 5 primary. Meeting him is not an adoring crowd, but four women bundled up against what is surely a chilly day. Behind them, a man strides past, unconcerned.
These are creation moments. For many Americans, Kennedy was still barely respectable, the first generation of his family to skirt the charge of bootlegging and corruption aimed at his father, Joseph, who was unashamed in his ambition to put a son in the White House.
Capa (younger brother of Magnum Photography agency founder Robert Capa) quickly fell under the Kennedy spell, and was the photographer behind a book published after Kennedy had won, documenting images from Camelot’s first 100 days, a book that Time magazine aptly reviewed as “instant history.” It is from this book that the later images are taken when Kennedy looks and is, presidential.
Many of the earlier 1960 photographs were taken for a Life magazine article called “A Great Game and a Sight to Behold,” that looked generally at the candidates lining up in 1960 during the presidential race.
The most striking of these shots are where Kennedy’s face is actually outside of the camera’s view: Kennedy’s shadow cast by studio lights during a debate, his tall, lean profile in those clean-lined suits instantly recognizable; his handwritten speech notes seen on a podium with the camera looking not at him, but glancing over his left shoulder.
And perhaps the most powerful image of all is one taken on Sept. 9, 1960, by which time, though it was to be as close an election race as the U.S. had ever experienced, Kennedy was assured of his Democratic candidacy and was on a roll toward Election Day.
Capa took the shot at a Kennedy rally in North Hollywood, Calif. It shows Kennedy’s hands, gigantic and disembodied, reaching down into an adoring sea of faces and hands.
The September sunshine refracts with a dazzle off the hair on Kennedy’s left hand. But the viewer is drawn to the scale on which Capa has captured
Kennedy’s hands, with their elegantly tailored French cuffs, monogrammed cufflinks, reminding us of how quickly the Kennedys’ fashion sense became an iconic aspect of the White House during JFK’s administration. In several photographs, it is to Jackie Kennedy’s perfect features that the camera is drawn, while her husband the candidate gives his stump speech out of focus in the background. And here too, hindsight gives the viewer some tones of tragedy: Jackie is visibly pregnant in one shot with the child who would be John-John, the president-elect’s first-born son, born by caesarean section on Thanksgiving Day 1960.
We think of presidential image making as a product of the late 20th Century, one that perhaps started in earnest with JFK.
Most people know anecdotally at least of the story of the 1960 presidential debates, also documented in this exhibition by Capa, where the sight of the tanned and healthy-looking Kennedy captured most TV viewers’ minds and hearts, seen against the apparently pasty and shifty-looking
Richard Nixon. Radio listeners overwhelmingly gave the debate to Nixon; TV viewers largely said it was Kennedy who won. One photograph shows an almost-empty New York City bar with the glaring blue screen of the television broadcasting the fourth and last debate between Kennedy and Nixon to an oblivious drinker and a busy barman.
But the myth — as created by powerful images — of the U.S. president starts much earlier than the 1960s. As early as Abraham Lincoln, the camera and the makeover went into action. Photographer Mathew Brady took an early image of Lincoln, an image that was being doctored even before the shutter clicked. The photographer pulled up Lincoln’s collar to cover his unusually long neck and retouched his face to hide the appearance of gauntness.
What these images of JFK show are an arresting moment in the process of image making, when a fall of snow was not a miracle as those nuns in Massachusetts said, but an inconvenience, and when all is yet to be won and lost, and when politicians turn their face to the people and the camera and say, “Do you like me enough to elect me?”
Thus, it is timely to stare at a blurry final image by Capa. This one is of President John F. Kennedy striding up a set of stairs in the Palace of Versailles, two paces behind President Charles de Gaulle of France, arm linked with Jackie. Kennedy looks young, vigorous, heroic — naturally. Now we know just how much a myth that was, and what went into the creation of it: Kennedy walked only with great pain, and with massive daily doses of painkillers. Nowadays, with image-making the dominant portion of each presidential campaign, perhaps those who see these images of Kennedy in 1960 should fix their eyes on this year’s candidates and, when the inevitable question is posed, “Do you like me enough to elect me?” ask, “at what exactly am I looking?”
(“JFK for President: Photographs by Cornell Capa” is on show at the International Center for Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas (at West 43rd Street) in Manhattan through Nov. 28. Details, www.icp.org or (212) 857-0000.)