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Like Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy attended church regularly while president and used religious rhetoric extensively in his speeches, especially in discussing his campaign for world peace. Eisenhower, however, provided strong governmental support for the Judeo-Christian tradition, whereas Kennedy maintained a much stricter separation between church and state. The Democrat’s vitality, idealism, powerful rhetoric, and charisma inspired many younger Americans to social activism. Kennedy’s faith is difficult to analyze. As the nation’s only Catholic president, whose religious affiliation was a major issue in the 1960 election, he is central to an examination of religion and the presidency. Moreover, his assassination and funeral evoked a torrent of religious language, analysis, and emotion and reinforced the importance of civil religion in American society. On the other hand, his faith had much less influence on his thinking and policies than that of the other presidents analyzed in this book. In addition, beneath his exuberant, commanding public persona were private vices that contradicted his Catholic faith. Given Kennedy’s pragmatic style of governing, perspective toward Catholicism, and lack of a coherent philosophy, there does not seem to be much relationship between his policies and his faith. Nevertheless, he did present moral rationales for his stances on numerous issues, including education, juvenile delinquency, women’s rights, world hunger, poverty, and the Alliance for Progress. To assess Kennedy’s approach, three issues are examined: the Peace Corps, civil rights, and the limited test ban treaty. The most intense religious controversy during Kennedy’s tenure was provoked by the 1962 Supreme Court case that ruled that school-sponsored prayers as part of a regularly scheduled devotional exercise violated the Constitution.

Postwar American novelists Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, and James Ellroy have all been haunted by the Kennedy assassination and each has found in the event an emblematic story for the nation. This chapter begins with a brief overview of other assassination fictional writings. It then looks at the way that DeLillo, Mailer, and Ellroy have grappled with the death of JFK.

The story of the Kennedy assassination is inseparable from the mass production and consumption of illusory images in postwar American politics and culture, not least because the Camelot White House pioneered the careful cultivation of a media image in which style seemed to replace substance. Numerous iconic images of the assassination and its aftermath have engrained themselves into the contemporary American imagination, from the Zapruder footage to John Kennedy Jr's salute of his father's coffin at the funeral, and from Oswald's death ‘live’ on television to bootlegged copies of Kennedy's autopsy photos. In addition to the snapshots and home movie clips captured by amateur and professional photographers on the day, the iconography of the assassination has fascinated numerous avant-garde artists, most notably Andy Warhol. Having looked at these accidental and avant-garde representations, this chapter discusses the repeated shootings of the assassination in Hollywood films, in particular Blow-Up (1966), The Parallax View (1974), Blow Out (1981), and JFK (1991), all of which are notable for their sophisticated visual and cinematic techniques.

This introductory chapter recounts the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963 and the events that followed it. The assassination has been imagined and represented in many different genres including journalism, memoir, history, biography, government reports, sociological inquiries, popular conspiracy exposés, literary and pulp fiction, museums and monuments, Hollywood film, and avant-garde art. There is a fundamental divide between those who believe that Oswald acted alone, and those who are convinced that there was some kind of conspiracy or cover-up. The chapter considers why writers, film makers, and artists are repeatedly drawn to representing the Kennedy assassination.

Chapter Five follows the halting, inspiring, and ultimately heartbreaking campaign of Robert F. Kennedy. Especially among poor minorities, he had a particular magnetism – at once shy, boyish, and tough. As part of his own evolution, he found himself most comfortable in black inner cities, on Indian reservations, or among striking Chicano workers. Yet the former Attorney General also preached “law-and-order,” winning cheers from white working class audiences. His assassination in the immediate aftermath of his California primary victory stained an already-marred year, with deep effects on the electorate’s moods and the candidates’ fortunes.

This chapter considers the place of espionage and its consequences in the work of Don De Lillo. The discussion opens with a consideration of naïveté and danger in CIA intervention overseas as depicted in The Names. James Axton, an American in Greece, is perhaps the last to discover that he is working at one remove for the CIA, a role that may have placed his life, and those of others, at risk. If The Names suggests that American intelligence poses substantial risks for America and Americans, Libra brings that message home to the heart of the state itself in a fictionalized account of the Kennedy assassination. Here, the President's launching of covert operations against Cuba eventually turns back against him when a coalition led by disgruntled former CIA agents mount an attempt on the President's life, co-opting the inscrutable figure of Lee Harvey Oswald as a seeming lone radical. In this chapter’s final section, the discussion returns again to the subject of extralegal action by the state in a reading of Point Omega’s meditations on extraordinary rendition and torture, in a text centred on absences and death set against the backdrop of the Iraq war.

Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed by James Earl Ray—an escaped convict who supported Klan efforts—as he stood on Lorraine Motel's balcony on April 4, 1968. King tried to help several people, and all of these people felt that King's death left a significant impact on their lives. Liberal hopes for racial healing went on a decline after the said event and after presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy was also assassinated. Blacks and whites were further polarized as a result of the riots that followed the assassinations. Richard Nixon's new administration, however, did not foster good relations with the civil rights groups, and they found themselves at ends with NAACP leaders who accused them of pandering. King's death particularly left a mark for the civil rights movement in terms of the fact that the media no longer had a charismatic figurehead to focus on. As such, it became difficult to initiate action protests that would draw national attention.

This chapter argues that De Palma's first critically and commercially successful film, Greetings (1968), shows the continuing influence of Jean-Luc Godard on De Palma. It also stands as one of the few films about the 1960s counterculture actually shot by members of that culture at the time. Among the topical issues explored by the film are the Vietnam War draft, computer dating, the Kennedy assassination, and pornographic movies. Made for $43,000 by a non-union crew of friends, relatives, and students from New York University, Greetings was De Palma's “contemporary statement of what was going on in my life and the lives around me at that period.”

This chapter explores multi-perspectivism in Snake Eyes (1998), in which Atlantic City police detective Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage) undertakes an investigation, interrogating witnesses and studying video footage from many surveillance cameras to determine whether there might have been a conspiracy behind the assassination of the U.S. Secretary of Defense. Here we also have another film rooted in De Palma's obsession with the John F. Kennedy assassination and the far-reaching inquiry to which it gave rise. However, by tracking De Palma's treatment of this topic over the course of several films, he has since moved from cynical realism to a more idealistic fantasy regarding the hero's success at solving the crime and making it public.

This chapter describes how the assassination of John F. Kennedy sapped the energy of the Democratic Coalition. Disagreements within the multiracial alliance over goals and strategy and the pressure of its participants’ ongoing, unconscious white supremacy would produce interracial acrimony and suspicion that gradually displaced the hard-won mutual trust of the previous years and decades. Still, despite its gradual coming apart, the Democratic Coalition and its members would win their right to a remarkable degree. Their massive voter registration campaign in 1964 would break down the doors of the Democratic Party and would forever transform Texas politics.

This chapter examines how canonical political texts from the American Revolution and the Civil War provide interpretive resources for consolation discourse. “Civil scriptures” such as the Declaration of Independence, George Washington’s 1789 inaugural, and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and second inaugural offered symbolic frameworks for coming to terms with national suffering that continue to reverberate in the aftermath of contemporary crises. The chapter first describes how these texts addressed the meaning of suffering and forged a place for it in larger national narratives. It then examines more recent moments when the civil scriptures have figured centrally in political speechmaking—the John F. Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion, and the Oklahoma City bombing—and underscores how these open-ended texts have been deployed in distinct and even contradictory interpretations of national crises.