History for the day

Peter Baker has an article in The New York Times about a special moment in political history:

After all the ceremonies for MLK, now there’s JFK.
“There’s an ongoing historical resonance,” said Shelby Coffey, the vice chairman of the Newseum in Washington. “It’s a large part of the collective memory, even for people who are much younger.”
For anyone interested in another momentous era in American history, attention is turning to John F. Kennedy’s Camelot with as much intensity as the commemorations last week for the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Fifty years later, the assassination of America’s thirty-fifth president will once again captivate the nation, or so hope museum curators, book publishers, filmmakers, documentary producers, magazine editors, and conspiracy theorists. Not content to wait until November, the marketplace is already brimming with all things Kennedy, the start of a “deluge,” as the producer of one coming documentary put it.
Newsstands are making space for photo-heavy commemorative issues with essays by the likes of former President Bill Clinton. Bookstores are crowded with new volumes re-examining the single-gunman theory and Kennedy’s “vampire romance” with Marilyn Monroe (complete with exceedingly graphic sex scenes). Movie theaters and television sets will recreate the glory and the tragedy, with actors like Rob Lowe playing the martyred president.
At the Newseum in Washington, more than three hundred thousand people have already trooped through exhibits displaying the first United Press International bulletin on the assassination, the revolver carried by one of the President’s Secret Service agents, and a collection of intimate photographs. After watching an original sixteen-minute documentary titled A Thousand Days, visitors leave sticky notes with thoughts and memories. “There’s an ongoing historical resonance,” said Shelby Coffey, the museum’s vice chairman. “It’s a large part of the collective memory, even for people who are much younger.”
Even amid the year’s other mile markers, including the sesquicentennial anniversaries of the Battle of Gettysburg and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Kennedy’s death occupies a distinctive place in the American story, harking back to an often romanticized era. “It’s amazing that Kennedy should still have this extraordinary hold on the public’s imagination, fifty years after,” said Robert Dallek, a historian, whose book Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House is being released in October of 2013. “He’s the one president, along with Reagan, who gave people hope. It’s hope, it’s optimism, it’s the feeling that he could have made this a different world.”
It is also heartbreak and mystery, the beautiful widow and their young children, the whispered tales of secret assignations, the never-dispelled suspicion that there was more to his death than officially acknowledged.
Although three-quarters of Americans are too young to really remember his presidency, Kennedy has become a tabula rasa on which they can paint their own portraits.
The rosy view of Kennedy, while not always shared by historians and shaded by revelations of recent years, has made him the most popular modern president. In a 2010 survey by Gallup, 85 percent of Americans approved of him, higher than any president who has followed.
“Most politicians, presidents included, after they die they’re forgotten,” said the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, whose best-selling book, Killing Kennedy, is being made into a movie. “But not Kennedy. Kennedy is special. They still have a presence; the family is still a presence in politics. It’s still very relevant.”
The Atlantic titled its commemorative issue JFK: In His Time and Ours. Along with an excerpt from Dallek’s book, it features an introduction by former President Clinton, an article by the historian Alan Brinkley, and a fictional story by Thomas Mallon, imagining what would have happened if Lee Harvey Oswald had lost his nerve. Jeff Greenfield has a similar theme in his new book, If Kennedy Lived, an alternate history to be published in October of 2013.
So many authors have seized on the moment that an Amazon.com search turned up about a hundred and forty Kennedy-related books being released or rereleased this year. Skyhorse Publishing alone has eight new offerings, along with seventeen reprints and a set of Kennedy-themed cards.
Caroline Kennedy, the president’s daughter, wrote a foreword for a new book of her grandmother Rose Kennedy’s pictures. Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent who leapt onto the President’s limousine after shots rang out, has a new memoir, written with Lisa McCubbin. John T. Shaw looks at Kennedy’s Senate career, Christopher Andersen revisits his marriage, Thurston Clarke his last one hundred days, and Ira Stoll argues that he was really a conservative. And of course conspiracy theories will get a thorough airing, by the likes of Jesse Ventura and Richard Belzer.
In a less sensational vein, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston plans a ceremony on 22 November, displaying the flag that covered his coffin, the saddle from the riderless horse in the funeral procession, and letters of condolence to Jacqueline Kennedy.
The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas is remodeling its visitors center, adding artifacts, and scheduling discussions. In Dealey Plaza, outside the museum, the local government plans the first official event that Dallas as a city has held in Kennedy’s memory, featuring the historian David McCullough. Demand for the five thousand tickets was so strong that they were distributed by lottery, underscoring the evolution for a city stigmatized by the assassination.
“I think Dallas was deeply ashamed, and people who were around are speaking for the first time,” said Nicola Longford, the executive director of the Sixth Floor Museum. The anniversary, she said, is “an opportunity to remind the whole community what happened and how Dallas has moved on”.
Those outside Dallas will still find it hard to miss the moment. Next month, Tom Hanks will release Parkland, named for the hospital where Kennedy died, starring Zac Efron, Billy Bob Thornton, Paul Giamatti, and Marcia Gay Harden. ReelzChannel will broadcast a second-gunman documentary called JFK: The Smoking Gun. And Stephen Gyllenhaal is making The Kennedy Detail, about the president’s Secret Service agents, to be released next year, based on the book by Gerald S. Blaine and McCubbin.
Howard T. Owens, the president of the National Geographic Channels and executive producer of O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy, starring Lowe as the president and Ginnifer Goodwin as Jackie Kennedy, said new films can feel revelatory. “There are a ton of facts and information that stand out and startle you about the killing,” he said.
Susan Bellows, the producer and director of JFK, a four-hour documentary to be broadcast on PBS, said that recent scholarship by historians like Dallek had made it timely to look beyond the image making of the era. “We hadn’t become cynical yet about what was behind that,” she said. “We took it all at face value.” Still, Bellows had not anticipated the surge of books and movies to come. “There’s certainly a theory that all you have to do is put ‘Kennedy’ or ‘JFK’ in the title and people will flock to it and buy it,” she said. “I find it hard to believe it, but there must be evidence that it’s worth it.”
The media flurry might have impressed Kennedy, the first president to master television. But it raises an interesting question: how would Kennedy have done in the cable-Internet-Twitter environment?
O’Reilly is dubious. “JFK was slow spoken, very deliberate, didn’t like confrontation,” he said. On the other hand, he said: “Bobby Kennedy could have his own show on Fox. He was feisty, in your face. He’s a guy I would hire.”

Rico says that RFK with a Fox show is a scary thought...