Dictionary of Literary Influences

Kafka, Franz

of it and other Flaubert titles between 1912 and 1921. When Kafka bought Flaubert’s letters for Oskar Baum, he also gave Janouch David Copperfield, to which his novel Amerika owed much.

Kafka’s library and diaries confirm he read Dostoyevsky. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment is an inescapable model for Kafka’s indecisive protagonists. References to Dostoyevsky are frequent during the writing of The Trial, July–December 1914. In 1921 Kafka ordered a Dostoyevsky biography for Robert Klopstock. But he himself wanted to read the Bible then. Kafka is a fable-writer in the Jewish tradition. Never profoundly moved by Judaism as creed, beginning around 1910 he came to discover Yiddish theater and appreciate the force of Talmudic parables, lecturing on Yiddish in 1912 and studying Hebrew in 1917. He said to Rudolf Steiner that his work had put him in a trancelike state and jokingly claimed that his work was a new cabala.

Finally, there are 29 heavily annotated volumes of Strindberg among the surviving 200 books from Felice Bauer’s library, suggesting that she too turned to them for clues to her fiancé’s behavior.

Archives

Memorial of National Literature, Prague: correspondence. Franz Kafka Society, Prague: personal library.

Bodleian Library, Oxford: Most of the manuscript materials. Others are scattered: Vienna, Marbach, New York.

Printed Sources

Bernheimer, Charles. Flaubert and Kafka (New Haven: Yale, 1982). Binder, Hartmut. Kafka-Handbuch (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1979).

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Kafka and His Precursors.” In Selected Non-Fictions, Eliot Weinberger (ed.), (N.Y.: Viking, 1999), 363–65.

Born, Jurgen. Kafkas Bibliothek (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1990). Catalogs Kafka’s library. Brod, Max. Franz Kafka (New York: Schocken, 1963).

Dodd, W. J. Kafka and Dostoyevsky (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992).

Gravier, Maurice. “Strindberg et Kafka.” Etudes germaniques 8 (1953), 118–40. Hayman, Ronald. Kafka: A Biography (New York: Oxford, 1982).

Janouch, Gustav. Conversations with Kafka (New York: Praeger, 1953). Kafka, Franz. Diaries (New York: Vintage, 1999).

Kaus, Rainer J. Kafka und Freud (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000). Nagel, Bert. Kafka und die Weltliteratur (Munich: Winkler, 1983).

———. Kafka und Goethe (Berlin: Schmidt, 1977).

Rolleston, James. “Kafka’s Principal Works and His Recorded Private Reading.” In Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Trial (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), 105–7.

Spilka, Mark. Dickens and Kafka (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963).

Struc, Roman. “Categories of the Grotesque: Gogol and Kafka.” In Franz Kafka: His Place in World Literature (Lubbock: Texas Tech, 1971), 135–53.

Thieberger, Richard. “Franz Kafka’s Grillparzer-Reception.” In Kafka’s Contextuality, Alan Udoff (ed.), (Baltimore: Gordian, 1986), 57–82.

Roy Rosenstein

280

Kahlo, Frida

KAHLO, FRIDA (1907–1954)

Frida Kahlo was born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderon in Coyoacan, Mexico. A mestiza of European and Mexican ancestry, Kahlo was isolated from her peers at an early age as a result of childhood polio and entered the National Preparatory School in Mexico City at the delayed age of 15. In 1925 her intentions to pursue a career in medicine were banished as she sustained nearfatal injuries in a bus accident. Effectively immobilized, Kahlo began to paint from her bed, producing works that ref lected her internal anguish. In 1929 she married muralist Diego Rivera, a union which both encouraged and publicized her unique style. Her most famous work, such as What the Water Gave Me (1938) and The Two Fridas (1939), expresses the highly personal and rather sanguinary themes that would become the staples of her production. Kahlo rarely exhibited publicly and produced much of her work in isolation. She taught at La Esmeralda School of Art starting in 1942 and acquired a loyal following of students dubbed Los Fridos. Kahlo’s dependence on alcohol and prescription pain medications became contributing factors in her untimely death one year after gangrene claimed her right leg.

Kahlo’s literary influences were diverse. She was a proponent of the ethic of Mexicanidad, the fervent wave of nationalism that accompanied the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Paintings such as My Nurse and I reflect Arielist views that Kahlo developed as a youth under the literary reforms of education minister Jose Vasconcelos. Vasconcelos opened state publishing houses to popularize literature by South American authors such as Jose Enrique Rodo, who criticized Porfirian ideology and the positivism of the dictator Diaz in favor of embracing pre-Hispanic Mexican history and culture. Kahlo’s use of a deliberately naïve style, vivid colors, and primitive subject matter clearly link her work to traditional Mexican folk art. The French surrealist movement also had a direct influence on Kahlo’s paintings. Surrealist authors incorporated irrational and fantastic elements into their writing and through the use of automatism sought to gain access to the unconscious mind to produce work patterned on Sigmund Freud’s concept of the ego. Kahlo was certainly familiar with Freud and based her painting Moses (1945) on his book Moses and Monotheism. She met and read the work of surrealism’s founder André Breton, and frequently incorporated surrealist literary techniques into her productions, artistically celebrating the chance and the accidental by connecting randomly placed spots of fallen ink to begin her preparatory sketches and drawings. Kahlo often practiced automatic drawing techniques in an effort to bypass conscious process and utilized fantastic and irrational subject matter to produce compositions that juxtaposed her conscious and unconscious self. Communist doctrine and the ideology of Marxism pervaded Kahlo’s life and work as well. The artist had a casual relationship with the activist and photographer Tina Modotti and in 1937, a brief affair with exiled leader Leon Trotsky. Kahlo’s early relationship with Rivera was strengthened by the couple’s mutual acceptance of Marxist ideology and their membership in the Young Communist League. Both Kahlo and Rivera supported leftist political causes in Mexico and abroad and frequently incorporated Communist slogans and symbols into their art.

281

Kandinsky, Vassily Vasil’yevich

Archives

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., control no. DCAW212397-A.

Printed Sources

Herrera, Hayden. Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (New York: Harper and Row, 1983). Kahlo, Frida. The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self Portrait (New York: Harry N.

Abrams Inc., 1995).

Kahlo, Frida, and Martha Zamora (eds.). The Letters of Frida Kahlo: Cartas Apasionadas (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995).

Gregory L. Schnurr

KANDINSKY, VASSILY VASIL’YEVICH (1866–1944)

Vassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow, Russia. He studied economics, ethnography, and law at the University of Moscow (1886–93) and wrote a dissertation on the legality of laborers’ wages. Although Kandinsky did not attend church regularly, Christianity in general was deeply ingrained in the artist’s conscience. He regarded the city of Moscow as the origin of his artistic ambitions. In 1896 Kandinsky left for Munich to study art. Six years later he met Gabriele Münter, who became his companion and an important figure in his artistic and intellectual development. He and Münter traveled throughout Europe, observed the paintings of Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse, and participated in art exhibitions in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Paris. In 1911 he and Franz Marc prepared for publication The Blaue Reiter Almanac, which reveals his interest in a grand synthesis of the arts. After the October Revolution of 1917, Kandinsky worked for Narkompros (the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment). Between 1917 and 1921, he painted watercolors and canvases, sketched many drawings, and taught and wrote in the Department of Visual Arts in Narkompros. Kandinsky moved to Berlin in 1922. At the Bauhaus in Weimar, Kandinsky distanced himself from Russian avantgarde art and centered his work around geometric shapes and objects. After the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, Kandinsky moved to Paris.

Kandinsky’s Russian heritage, especially the Russian Orthodox Church and Moscow, was an important and lasting influence on the mature artist. Although Kandinsky’s early work was heavily indebted to the decorative art of Jugendstil, his small oil sketches, influenced by the work of Russian symbolists, began to abandon representational art and move into the direction of the abstract. After 1908, Kandinsky’s work depicted abstract geometric forms and objects in a compressed space. Drawing on theosophy and anthroposophy and especially the theoretical writings of Rudolf Steiner and Madame Blavatsky, Kandinsky developed the concept of the external representation of inner conscience in his most important book, On the Spiritual in Art (1911). Kandinsky was well-read in Russian classical literature. In his personal library (now in Paris), French, English, and German literature and philosophy are also well represented. Most important to Kandinsky’s intellectual development and to his transition to abstract art were the Russian symbolists such as the poets Alexander Blok, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, Andrei Bely, and the religious philosopher Vladimir Soloviev. He was especially interested in spiritual and mystical philosophy. Sufism, the mystic, heretic branch of Islam, also played an important role in his conception of the spiritual in art. Russian avant-garde art,

282

Karamanlis, Konstantinos

represented by such artists as Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, and Kazimir Malevich, affected his artistic development. When Kandinsky moved from Berlin to Dessau in 1925, Paul Klee’s art was reflected in Kandinsky’s later paintings.

Archives

Museé National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France: Kandinsky’s personal library contains Russian, German, French, and English literature and philosophy.

Archives of the Gabrielle Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation (which will be turned over to the Städtische Galerie), Munich, Germany: Münter’s library, where Kandinsky’s books can be found.

Printed Sources

Hanl-Koch, J. Kandinsky (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993).

Lindsay, K. C., and Vergo, P. (eds.). Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 2 vols. (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1982). Excellent English translation of Kandinsky’s published writings.

Long, Rose-Carol Washton. Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).

Weiss, P. Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

———. Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

Eugene M. Avrutin

KARAMANLIS, KONSTANTINOS (1907–1998)

Konstantinos Karamanlis was born at Proti (former Kiupkioi), an east Macedonian village which was at that time part of the Ottoman Empire. His childhood years were marked by the struggle between Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbians over the annexation of the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The experience of struggle, of the realization and defense of “national interests,” came to form Karamanalis’s scheme of perception and thinking. Throughout his political life he referred continually to “national interests” as an independent and guiding principle of his action. Karamanlis studied law at Athens (1925–29), where he became closely acquainted with the conflict between the Liberals and the Royalist Conservatives over the new form that Greek society should take following the collapse of irredentist nationalism (1922). He joined the Conservatives, who opposed the modernization and liberalization of the country, and was voted a representative of his home province in the parliamentary elections of 1935 and 1936. Immediately after the Second World War, Karamanlis again entered the political life of the country as a functionary of the Conservative Party. Conservatives established a regime that allowed the coexistence of democratic institutions (parties, elections, parliament), authoritarian measures (state syndicates, deportations, persecution of heterodox views), and informal powers (the army). From 1946 to 1955 Karamanlis was a member of parliament and held different posts as a minister of the Conservative governments. In 1955 he succeeded in assembling the whole conservative camp under his new party, winning the elections and becoming prime minister (1956–63). To legitimize his authoritarian measures, he insistently alleged communist plans for the violent seizure of power and the alienation of parts of Greece on the northern neighbor states. In his view, his party’s interest in keeping power was

283

Karamanlis, Konstantinos

equivalent to the “national interest.” In 1963 he came into conflict with the informal powers and was forced to resign. He immigrated to Paris, where he lived until 1974. After the occupation of Northern Cyprus by the Turkish army (1974), Karamanlis was recalled by the Greek military to help avoid war with Turkey and to manage the country’s transition to a democratic regime. With his new party, “New Democracy,” Karamanlis won the elections. His appointment as prime minister (1974–80) gave him the chance to establish the institutions of the Third Greek Republic in accordance with the ideas of a semi-liberal, elitist democracy (“radical liberalism” was the name of his program). He rejected the ideas of both the nationalists and the populists, who called for a Greece culturally and politically independent of the West. He proclaimed Greece to be an integral part of western Europe and achieved its membership in the European Community. His ideas about democracy were based primarily on an equal competition of two strong parties and his continued distrust of the ability of the citizenry to act with political wisdom.

Karamanlis was not part of the educated elite of the country. Unlike many other important politicians of his generation (as, for example, P. Anayiotis Kanellopoulos), he was not educated in the large universities of western Europe. During debates between intellectuals, politicians, and men of letters about themes of policy, national culture, literature, and morality, he never articulated his own views. Karamanlis did not write articles or essays and never documented his concepts of conservatism. He was a man of political practice par excellence, and so there are only available his speeches and interviews. During the period before World War II, the conservative Karamanlis, like other Conservative politicians, was influenced by historians such as Konstantinos Paparighopoulos and by nationalist authors such as Ion Dragoumis. Another great influence at that time came from intellectuals who wrote for the political-literary journal Idea, such as Spyros Melas. After the Second World War Karamanlis was acquainted with the philosopher, literary critic, and politician K. Tsatsos (in the 1930s Tsatsos founded a school which referred to the ideas of Plato and demanded the establishment of an aristocratic democracy). Karamanlis at once adopted the ideas of Tsatsos, who had an overwhelming influence upon him for the next decades. During his stay in Paris, Karamanlis read the works of famous historians, of political philosophy, and political sciences. Part of his reading matter was ancient Greek philosophy— mainly the works of Plato and Aristotle—and historiography—principally Thucydides and Plutarch. But at the same time he was interested in other political authors, such as Cicero, and philosophers such as Henri Bergson, which shows his great interest in the western European history of ideas. After his return to Greece he often referred to Plato and especially to Aristotle when discussing political maneuvers. He recruited Socrates for his idea of the European reunion. The speeches of Karamanlis show that he stood also under the influence of reports about “psychology of the masses” and “national characters.” His favorite newspapers were the Greek Kathimerini and Le Monde.

Archives

Karamanlis—Archive, Karamanlis Foundation, Athens.

Transcripts of the Greek Parliament, 1946–63, 1974–80.

Printed Sources

Genevoix, Maurice. The Greece of Karamanlis (London: Doric Publications, 1972).

284

Kazantzakis, Nikos

Karamanlis, Konstantinos. Konstantinos Karamanlis: Archeio – Gegonota kai Keimena, 12 vols. K. Svolopoulos (ed.), (Athens: Ekdotiki Athinon, 1992–97).

———.Oi Logoi tou K. Karamanlis (Athens: n.p., 1974–81).

———.O Karamanlis tis metapolitefsis: oi megales paremvaseis 1974–1992, E. Kartakis (ed.), (Athens: Roes, 1993).

Tsatsos, Konstantinos. O agnostos Karamanlis: mia prosopographia (Athens: Ekdotiki Athinon, 1984).

Tzermias, Pavlos. Konstantinos Karamanlis: Versuch einer Würdigung (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 1992).

Woodhouse, C. M. Karamanlis: The Restorer of Greek Democracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

Theodoros Lagaris

KAZANTZAKIS, NIKOS (1883–1957)

Nikos Kazantzakis was born in Iraklion, Crete, during a period of intense civil strife. He was educated at the University of Athens, where he received a law degree in 1906; concurrently, he began publishing plays and essays. In 1907 he moved to Paris to study philosophy under Henri Bergson, completing a dissertation on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche in 1909. For the next 30 years he alternated residence in Greece and several European countries as he worked to earn a living as a writer. He also traveled extensively in Spain, the Soviet Union, and Japan, later writing several books about his experiences and observations in these countries. In 1911, he married Galatea Alexiou, but divorced her in 1926; before his divorce he had begun a relationship with Eleni Samiou, whom he eventually married. For nearly three decades he supported himself by writing travelogues, textbooks, and encyclopedia articles as he worked on The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1938) and various novels and plays. During World War II he was confined to Aegina during the German occupation of Greece. Though some of his fiction and poetry was published before the war, the bulk of his literary work became available to an international audience during the following decade. His postwar reputation rested largely on the publication of novels that celebrate the struggle of the individual to achieve personal salvation. In 1946, Kazantzakis served as an official for UNESCO, but spent the last decade of his life engaged with publishers and translators and traveling. On a trip to China in 1957, he contracted influenza; he died in a sanatorium in Freiburg, Germany, in October 1957.

The literary influences on Kazantzakis are manifold, but certainly among the most important is Homer, whose epics inspired Kazantzakis’s Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. The plotting of his more popular novels displays a confluence of ideas from mainstream European fiction, existentialist philosophy, and Eastern ideology such as Buddhism and Taoism. While he cannot be identified as a slavish follower of any literary master, two important figures shaped Kazantzakis’s understanding of humankind’s quest for salvation and spiritual fulfillment and provided the impetus for virtually all of his writing.

The first of these is Bergson, the French philosopher who espoused the concept of the élan vital, a life force that exists from generation to generation and inspires individuals to love life and seek fulfillment from their experiences. As Kazantzakis’s tutor in Paris, Bergson had direct and frequent contact with the writer for nearly two years. Not surprisingly, a number of Kazantzakis’s characters exhibit this élan vital, most notably Alexis Zorba in Zorba the Greek (1946), Captain Mihalis in Freedom or Death (1953), and Odysseus.

285

Kennan, George Frost

The second and perhaps greater influence on Kazantzakis’s work is the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the subject of Kazantsakis’s doctoral dissertation. Nietzsche’s concept that humans must create meaning in their own lives inspired in Kazantzakis the drive to create existentialist heroes who struggle to make their lives meaningful. Zorba, Captain Mihalis, and Odysseus carry out this quest, as do two other important figures that Kazantzakis appropriates from the Christian tradition: St. Francis of Assisi (in Saint Francis [1956]) and Jesus Christ himself (in The Last Temptation of Christ [1955]), both of whom strive to live moral lives in this world, not knowing if there is a life after death in which their struggles will be rewarded.

Archives

Historical Museum of Crete, Heraklion, Crete: miscellaneous manuscripts and personal items. Nikos Kazantzakis Museum, Myrtia, Crete: personal items, manuscripts, letters, first edi-

tions, documentation of dramatic productions, secondary source materials.

Printed Sources

Bien, Peter. Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). An intellectual biography focusing on the first three decades of Kazantzakis’s professional career; discusses many of the shaping influences that affected his worldview.

Dombrowski, Daniel A. Kazantzakis and God (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). Analysis of Kazantzakis’s spirituality; gives special attention to the influence of Bergson and Nietzsche.

Kazantzakis, Helen. Nikos Kazantzakis: A Biography Based on His Letters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968). Reveals many of the influences that shaped his thought and helped focus his critical and creative genius.

Lea, James F. Kazantzakis: The Politics of Salvation (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1979). Examines the political dimensions of Kazantzakis’s writings, emphasizing the debt he owes to both Western and Eastern philosophers for the ideas that shape his prose and poetry.

Levitt, Morton. The Cretan Glance: The World and Art of Nikos Kazantzakis (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1980). Critical reading of Kazantzakis’s fiction, emphasizing the existential basis of his work.

Middleton, Darren. Novel Theolog y (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2000). Traces the parallels between Alfred North Whitehead’s process theology and Kazantzakis’s fiction.

Middleton, Darren, and Peter Bien (eds.). God’s Struggler: Religion in the Writings of Nikos Kazantzakis (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996). Collection of essays exploring the religious dimensions of Kazantzakis’s writings.

Laurence W. Mazzeno

KENNAN, GEORGE FROST (1904– )

George Frost Kennan was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of Kossuth “Kent” Kennan, a prosperous lawyer of Scotch-Irish descent, then aged 52, and his German-American wife, Florence James, who died two months later. In his career, Kennan consciously emulated an older cousin and namesake, whom he met once in his childhood, who had explored Russia and exposed czarist political prison conditions. Kennan attended St. John’s Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin, which instilled learning, patriotism, and discipline, before entering Princeton University in 1921, where he was academically undistinguished. In 1926 Kennan joined the United States Foreign Service, receiving intensive spe-

286

Kennan, George Frost

cialized Russian training at Berlin University and Riga and spending five years in the American embassy in Moscow when the United States resumed relations with Russia in 1933. After spells in Prague, Berlin, Lisbon, and London, Kennan returned to Moscow as minister-counselor in 1944. In his influential February 1946 “Long Telegram,” he argued the internal dynamics of Russian communism made genuine Soviet-Western understanding unattainable. Recalled to Washington, from 1947 to 1950 Kennan was the first director of the State Department’s policy planning staff, exercising his greatest immediate impact upon American foreign policy. In a famous 1947 article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published anonymously in Foreign Affairs, Kennan enunciated the “containment” doctrine, which became the basis of United States cold war strategy toward the Soviet Union. By 1949, however, his opposition to the creation of NATO and pressures to enhance United States military spending divided him from Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and Kennan took a one-year sabbatical at Princeton. In 1952 Kennan was briefly ambassador to the Soviet Union, but his outspoken criticism of Stalin’s regime quickly brought his expulsion.

In 1953 the new Republican administration dispensed with Kennan’s diplomatic services, and he began a lengthy career as a historian and influential political commentator whose prolific, well-publicized, and iconoclastic writings, often questioning prevailing orthodoxies among the foreign policy elite, habitually obtained at least a respectful hearing. In 1958 Kennan controversially urged the unification and neutralization of both Germanies. In the early 1960s he spent three years as ambassador to Yugoslavia. Primarily Eurocentric, in 1969 Kennan turned decisively against the American war in Vietnam, which he had earlier considered a questionable overcommitment of resources to a strategically insignificant area, diverting American attention from European concerns. Kennan nonetheless disliked radical critics of the war, particularly student protesters, whose violence, intolerance, and incivility he thought symptomatic of broader American malaises. Kennan subsequently advocated that the United States reduce its overseas commitments and eschew first use of nuclear weapons. More broadly, he suggested that wider concerns, particularly the environment, resources, population growth, and arms control, were the most critical international issues confronting the United States.

From childhood, Kennan, a solitary boy with a distant, elderly father, always read voraciously, especially in European and American literature and history. Linguistically adept, in 1912 he became fluent in German after six months’ family residence in Kassel, while learning Latin and French at school. Romantic admiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise impelled him to apply to Princeton. Often anti-democratic, Kennan greatly admired earlier, more elitist periods of European and American history and was particularly influenced by two massive classics, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. After leaving Princeton, Kennan immersed himself in German culture for several months, reading Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West and Goethe’s Faust in the original. As a trainee diplomat Kennan did likewise with Russian at Riga and Berlin University, acquiring his encyclopedic knowledge of Russian literature and history. His rather intimidating breadth of learning characterized all Kennan’s writings, diplomatic and scholarly, as did the elegant prose style he consciously cultivated. Both greatly enhanced his ability to present a bureaucratic case and to attract and convince a broader general audience.

287

Kennedy, John Fitzgerald

Archives

Mudd Manuscripts Library, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.: repository for Kennan’s personal papers.

National Archives II, College Park, Md.: holds Department of State records relating to Kennan’s diplomatic service.

Printed Sources

Hixson, Walter L. George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

Kennan, George F. Memoirs, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967–72).

Mayers, David. George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Miscamble, Walter D. George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

Stephanson, Anders. Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

Priscilla Roberts

KENNEDY, JOHN FITZGERALD (1917–1963)

John F. Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, the second son of Joseph P. Kennedy, a prominent Irish Catholic businessman, speculator, and politically active Democrat, and his wife Rose Fitzgerald, the daughter of a popular former mayor of Boston who, like his grandson and namesake, was a passionate reader. Despite briefly experiencing some religious doubts in his twenties, Kennedy, his skeptical turn of mind notwithstanding, almost automatically embraced his family’s traditional political and Catholic faiths. After spells at the Edward Devotion School and the exclusive Dexter School in Boston and the Riverdale, New York, Country Day School, in 1930 Kennedy’s parents enrolled him in preparatory school, first the Catholic Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut, and one year later the elite Episcopalian Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, from which he graduated in 1935. Besides spending brief periods at the London School of Economics, Princeton University, and Stanford Business School, Kennedy majored in politics at Harvard University. After highly decorated wartime combat service, in 1946 Kennedy won election to Congress, representing the Massachusetts eleventh congressional district, and then, in 1954, as junior Senator for Massachusetts. Elected president in 1960, Kennedy was known for his wit, charm, and stirring rhetoric. Embracing cold war orthodoxy, as president Kennedy mounted a botched invasion of Cuba and widened American involvement in the developing Vietnam War, but skillfully defused the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis and after some hesitation embraced the growing civil rights movement. Nationally and internationally his assassination in November 1963 brought an outpouring of grief.

Unlike most of his largely nonintellectual family, from early childhood Kennedy, who until the mid-1950s repeatedly endured lengthy bouts of ill health, read voraciously; as president his speedreading skills and near-photographic recall became famous. His mother believed her habit of reading childhood classics to him helped during early illnesses, including the works of Walter Scott and Rudyard Kipling (Kennedy 1974, 94, 111–112; Hellmann 1997, 12–14; Parmet 1980, 17–18). Aca-

288

Kennedy, John Fitzgerald

demically Kennedy was a mediocre student until his senior year at Harvard, when he painstakingly researched a thesis attempting to explain Britain’s tardiness in opposing Hitler, subsequently published as Why England Slept (1940), which implicitly challenged his father’s notoriously isolationist views.

History remained a lifelong passion; Kennedy’s knowledge of United States presidential and political history and biography and of Britain’s past were alike encyclopedic. He particularly admired and read all the voluminous works of one political idol, Britain’s wartime prime minister Winston Churchill. The mature Kennedy rarely read novels, but admitted to enjoying Ian Fleming’s James Bond thrillers (Schlesinger, 104–6). To brief himself on specific issues, from his late twenties onward Kennedy regularly devoured formidable stacks of reading matter. William Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s bestseller, The Ugly American (1958), which questioned the effectiveness of United States diplomatic practices in the third world, apparently influenced Kennedy in establishing the Peace Corps and espousing counterinsurgency doctrines (Hellmann 1997, 141). Although Kennedy already knew Shakespeare well and quoted Dante during his first political campaign, following his 1953 marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier, his wife’s love of poetry and literature probably brought more literary allusions into his speeches. Kennedy’s favorite books included John Buchan’s memoir, Pilgrim’s Way, and David Cecil’s biography of Lord Melbourne. Buchan’s description of his friends, the group of idealistic and talented young men Lord Milner assembled in South Africa who subsequently enjoyed distinguished careers, possibly inspired Kennedy’s attempts to instill similar camaraderie within his own administration’s inner circles. Kennedy’s personal role models apparently included Buchan’s brilliant friend Raymond Asquith, killed in World War I; the aristocratic Lord Melbourne, a retiring and bookish second son who became a Whig prime minister; and Lord Byron, the clubfooted poet-rake who seduced Melbourne’s wife and died fighting for Greek independence (Hamilton 1992, 544–45, 549–50; Hellmann 1997, 27–35; Kennedy 1995, xxxv–xxxvii, 119; Schlesinger 1965, 87, 100). Kennedy’s embrace of a romantic, even doomed, personal image informed his rhetoric, his 1955 book Profiles in Courage, and his love of Alan Seeger’s poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” perhaps reflecting his belief that persistent health problems limited his life expectancy. Kennedy’s commitment to in-depth research, his detached, analytical Harvard thesis, and the pragmatic policies he adopted demonstrated his paradoxically skeptical, rational, and realistic political outlook (Schlesinger 1965, 98, 109–10).

Archives

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, Mass.: depositary for all the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Papers and those of many family members and political and personal associates.

Printed Sources

Hamilton, Ian. JFK: Reckless Youth (London: Random, 1992).

Hellmann, John. The Kennedy Obsession: The American Myth of JFK (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

Kennedy, John F. Prelude to Leadership: The European Diary of John F. Kennedy: Summer 1945,

Deirdre Henderson (ed.), (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing Inc., 1995). Kennedy, Rose Fitzgerald. Times to Remember (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974). Parmet, Herbert S. Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial Press, 1980).

289