The presidency of John F. Kennedy spanned less than three years, yet the Kennedy era continues to live on powerfully in the American imagination almost fifty years after his January 1961 inauguration. Kennedy was the first president to fully exploit television; as such, mass media and American popular culture have helped to keep Kennedy and his era alive for succeeding generations of Americans. Kennedy’s assassination, which the vast majority of the American public experienced via television, also continues to reverberate. This course examines mass media – network television, journalism, advertising, cinema – both during the Kennedy years and after to explore the impact, ideas, ideals, and iconography of this presidency.

The first part of the course examines mass media in the early 1960s around questions of political campaigning in the new media era; shifts and changes in both entertainment and news programming in television under the influence of “the New Frontier;” mass media’s response to the revolution in race with the impact of the civil rights movement; media response to the nascent challenge of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution; sixties-era advertising; and Hollywood cinema’s negotiation with the Cold War. We will then spend a few weeks examining one of the greatest American traumas of the 20th century: John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas as he rode with wife Jackie in an open limousine. How did television, as the dominant mass medium turned to by citizens, cover the crisis? How did Americans respond? How was the assassination mediated by television, by amateur video, by news photography, by visual culture? We will then examine the culture of conspiracy that arose in the wake of the assassination. How does the assassination fit with what historian Richard Hofstadter famously described as “the paranoid style in American politics?” We will focus particularly on the manifestation of conspiracy culture in Hollywood cinema, most notably with filmmaker Oliver Stone’s hugely successfully and massively controversial conspiracy drama, JFK. We will then turn to the politics of nostalgia and remembering. Finally, we will explore why American culture to this day continues to manifest a longing for “Camelot” and the presumed “innocence” and “idealism” of the Kennedy era. We will use the highly regarded cable TV series Mad Men to explore some of the ways Americans are encouraged to remember this period. We end the course with student-generated examples of America’s continuing fascination with the Kennedy presidency and era as we enter its 50th anniversary.