John F. Kennedy and the artful collaboration of film and politics

[Below is an excerpted review from an article] Review-Article on Recent Books on American Film and Politics By Rhonda Hammer and Douglas Kellner, UCLA (rhammer@ucla.edu and kellner@ucla.edu) Melissa Wye Geraci’s monograph John F. Kennedy and the Artful Collaboration of Film and Politics provides an in-depth analysis of JFK’s media politics and how he was one of the first to see the importance of the construction of image in contemporary 6 politics as an important tool in a political campaign. Wye Geraci was trained in political science and had a background in the entertainment industry, and then became a film and television professor in Virginia, New Mexico, and, currently, at Loyola University, New Orleans. She investigates the origins of the 1960 Kennedy campaign film The New Frontier by examining primary documents that reveal how Joseph P. Kennedy, active in film production as well as business, taught his family the importance of the media and bought them a film camera that his children learned to use. Other documents in the Kennedy research library reveal reflections by various of the Kennedy brothers on the use of propaganda and media by German fascism as well as allied democratic forces in World War II, and thus how media could be used for political purposes, positive or negative. Wye Geraci reveals how throughout his career, John F. Kennedy produced artifacts and spectacle that constructed a positive image and reflected since his student days on the power of media. One of the Kennedy groups’ salient insights involves how images used in political campaigns must be connected to specific issues. For instance, the Kennedy team believed that talking about themes like intolerance was not enough, that instead Kennedy should be seen speaking “inside the Mormon tabernacle or traveling with nationally known Jews to New York” (72-73). Or if he was promoting military policy, he should be seen with a figure like General Maxwell Taylor. In Kennedy staff member Fred Dutton’s summary: “Actually the scheduling should weave unto it several ‘acting-out’ situations every week –- appearances and speeches are just not enough. All of this, of course, is part of the larger need to be tangible and understandable with the great majority of people who live their lives without much regard for word communication of abstract ideas, when [sic] in contrast is the great preoccupation of politicians” (73). Wye Geracci also provides analyses of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 bio-documentary, Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign film, and Bill Clinton’s 1992 The Man From Hope, as well as providing a discussion of the use of media in Robert Kennedy’s 1968 run for the presidency. She makes the interesting point that the success of the presidential bio-doc helped spawn a new Hollywood fiction genre of the political campaign film, starting with The Candidate (1972) and makes some interesting comments about how Bulworth (1998) draws on its motifs and Warren Beatty’s campaigning for the Kennedys. In addition, the bio-doc and what Wye Geracci calls the “info-documentary” can be contrasted with infoart mythology, such as one sees in the many films about the Kennedy family, and with films like Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) that erode distinctions between narrative fiction and documentary. While Wye Geracci’s analysis of campaign-films is ground-breaking, as is her study of the Kennedy’s understanding and use of media, she does not discuss in any detail FDR’s use of radio, JFK’s mastery of television, or how media spectacle became a form of politics from Hitler through JFK and Reagan and to the present. Thus, in a media era, the use of film in politics needs to be studied in conjunction with deployment of other media ranging from the radio to the press and Internet.