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
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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.