A KODAK IN CAMELOT
A review of Pierre-Henri Verlhac and Yann-Brice Dherbier, JOHN
FITZGERALD KENNEDY, a Life in Pictures, Phaidon, 2003
This is a picture book of the life of the American president from cradle
to grave and it is implicit throughout that the photographs it contains
are to be trusted yet we know the political photograph is prone to much
manipulation. This extends from setting “backdrops and photo-opportunities”,
when Michael Deaver choreographed Ronald Reagan and Queen Elizabeth
on horseback at Windsor, to temperature control and furniture when Roger
Ailes staged events for Candidate Nixon in 1968, “Make sure you’ve
got that handkerchief soaked in witch-hazel…I can’t do that
sincerity bit with the camera if he’s sweating.” In the
Reagan/Mondale debates of 1984, Mondale’s staff placed reflective
white paper on the podium to better light the jowls of their man.
Perhaps a state of alert is particularly pressing and depressing in
this year of a President’s re-election. “But photographers,
picture editors and even administration officials say that no other
administration has moved as forcefully as the Bush White House to limit
the access of outside news photographers to the president. There are
two reasons, they say: the administration's desire for secrecy, and
new technology, like the ability to send digital photos by e-mail, that
makes immediate dissemination of images possible.” Elisabeth Bumiller,
“Glimpses of a Leader, Through Chosen Eyes Only”, New York
Times, Saturday 12 July 2003.
Turning then to Verlhac and Dherbier we ask what exactly is the point
of this book ? Forty years have passed since the assassination of this
President. Given the pressing need for the presentation and analysis
of political images – their use and abuse, do we just accept this
slab of a book as a decoration for the Coffee Table, relying upon its
general civilising qualities in the periphery of our vision? Can a book
of pictures, this book of pictures, be more than a hagiography and further
extend the understanding of the Ruler by the Ruled?
The Photo-gallery of American Presidents has, since its first sitter,
James K. Polk in 1849, been a rich Feast of the Absurd – Gurning
(Teddy Roosevelt) ; Pratfalls (Gerald Ford) ; Projectile vomiting (Bush
the Father); Watermelon Fingering (Nixon) ; the plastic turkey (Bush
the Son); Jogging to destruction (Carter) and Coitus to destruction
(Harding).
Turning to Verlhac and Dherbier we may well ask “where’s
the beef?” It is a disadvantage that no work by the President’s
personal photographer Jacques Lowe is represented. How much more heartfelt,
graceful and literate is Lowe’s own Kennedy – a Time Remembered
of 1983. Lowe’s entire negatives and prints (over 40,000) were
incinerated in the World Trade Centre attack four months after Lowe’s
own death.
It is just one damn smile after another, even when the company includes
such rascals as Honey Fitz (JFK’s Grandfather) and Ambassador
Joe (JFK’s Father). Its selection of images stops short (well
short) of Zapruder in Dallas, the indignities of the mortician’s
wax, and gives us instead plenty of the soft soap. Action Jack plays
touch football, plays Family Man, plays Sailor Boy. The reader turns
through the receptions, trips, moments of staged leisure. Still Jack
smiles bravely on through dogged encounters at the White House with
world-class loons and notorious hoods.
The picture flow of this book slides on from reception to addresses,
from meeting the young Clinton to summers at Hyannis Port, an ominous
dreamy languor before the storm. But the storm never comes in Verlhac
and Dherbier as we encounter something euphemistically called “his
last trip to Texas” and then stop dead at a black page with the
date (reversed out) “November 22,1963”. The last shot before
this Black page is a rather tactless image of the back of the President’s
head seen from behind a White House Chair. After the Black page, there
is no representation of the events of the Assassination, moving to a
picture of Jackie’s departure and the lying in state, ending with
a picture of the president’s daughter carrying his photograph
in 1960, a last hint of sentiment but also a reminder that Kennedys
were born to survive, procreate and lead.
The book’s claims, implicit and explicit, are ill-founded and
shallow. What was Phaidon, a company dedicated to the highest qualities
of book production and content, doing sanctioning such sloppiness of
text? “The entire world remembers his words” at the Inauguration,
while on the facing page, “The entire world held its breath…”
at the Cuban Missile Crisis. By page 13 “The entire world was
in shock” at the assassination of the President.
The authors’ accounts of Kennedy’s daily workload, at the
desk from 07.00 to 23.00 (a claim repeated for every president except
for Ronald Reagan in the mass circulation magazines) are surely hilarious,
given accounts then and after of the President’s regular excursions
into horseplay, pain, swimming and congress. Rarely does a President
confess, as Reagan did, “It’s true hard work never killed
anybody, but I figure why take the chance?”
Study of this book and its ilk will lead us to the formulae and iconography
of the Visual Vocabulary of Spin, the Cult of the Image, the picture
language that exists without substance and which today passes for political
thought. Know this book and we will know how it came to be conjured,
this repertoire of persuasive images, the significant gesture, the telling
accessory, the aw shucks smile, the heavenward gaze, the pointing finger,
and even, dare I say it, the Spouse as Best Supporting Actress. Kennedy
was different from Truman, Roosevelt and Eisenhower in that he was,
in his photographs, concerned with being seen rather than being - permanently
on view in Camelot, finely tuned to the needs of the picture magazines,
working out, smiling and smiling over the pain of his disintegrating
back.
Know this book and you’ll see the Great Actor working the crowds,
pressing the flesh. Kennedy was not as good a performer as Reagan, but
he was good. Reagan was born to the role. Know this book and you will
know Clinton and his capacity to charm the Nations and hug the grieving.
Know this book and you will be prepared for Brother Blair, the Lord
of Marzipan and Teflon (Bambi and Stalin as he artfully mused once),
his cheesy grin directed up and out, shoulders back, shooting cuffs
and narrowing eyes. Watch him working the podium, pointing for Cherie’s
eyes to follow, it is all here set forth in the pioneer work of Jack
and Jackie. They all learnt it from Jack. And Jack comes to us in these
photographs.
The most satisfying images of Kennedy are perhaps those created in prose.
In his novel about the President’s assassination, Libra
(1989), Don DeLillo writes “After the handshakes and salutes,
Jack Kennedy walked away from his security, sidestepping puddles, and
went to the fence. He reached a hand into the ranks and they surged
forward, looking at each other to match reactions. He moved along the
fence, handsome and tanned, smiling famously into the wall of open mouths.
He looked like himself, like photographs, a helmsman squinting in the
sea-glare, white teeth shining... The white smile brightened. He wanted
everyone to know he was not afraid.” DeLillo takes us into the
picture in a way that no serving President would allow. We know that
“Kennedy carefully controlled the production of photographs to
ensure that he was always presented as the character he had chosen to
play. No photographs were allowed showing him eating, smoking cigars,
playing golf, or kissing his wife.” So, again, what we see in
the three hundred pages offered by Phaidon is a Manual of the Politician’s
Smile.
There was a time when Manny Shinwell, a Labour veteran, saw no future
in Neil Kinnock as a prospective Prime Minister because “he smiles
too much”. Manny never lived to see Brother Blair who has defined
the new intensity and shape of the Modern Smile held aloft on the Perfect
Groomed figure. In times where our Leaders are made up before each TV
performance, it is difficult to remember the times when the Ugly Mugs
stalked the Land; when all the men in power were knobbly and careless
of their haircuts and seldom wore toupées, and when President
Hoover never smiled.
The electorate should realise that Political wisdom does not naturally
converge with the good looks of politicians and an absence of facial
hair. The proficient Prime Minister Diefenbaker of Canada was so ugly,
it was cruelly claimed, that he caused any child under ten to run screaming
for cover, usually at official receptions. Senator Henry ‘Scoop”
Jackson was so unappealing it was said that he only had to appear on
television for the living room fire to be instantly extinguished.
Against this Rogue’s Gallery, many of whom were devoted, distinguished
and creditable political forces, we are being asked to set a Gallery
of the Coiffed Angels. How do they come to colonise our imagination
now with such visual force? When we attribute policies to the leader
that seeks his place in history, perhaps this is what we now mean –
to associate a figure with a montage of Visual Devices that fend off,
inhibit or even atomise the more incisive political scrutiny of his
policy.
This task is vital for us, the Ruled, to identify and understand the
Cunning Ways of the Westminster and Washington Boys, the Bent Rulers,
the Gladhanders, and Carpetbaggers. In the process, I argue, we can
blame the very medium of Photography itself for its complicity in the
conspiracy to make us pliant, to make us mild.
No enough is enough. Photography is too important a witness to let its
practitioners fix Jack in a rictus, and brush on the rouge. Look again
at this great slab of a book. Once our vision of Camelot on the Potomac
contained only the President’s strengths but now, in a century
he never lived to see, we encounter his physical and mental frailties,
his serial infidelities, his incurable vanities and insecurities. Like
Nixon and Roosevelt, this man who controlled our destinies took medication
sufficient to cloud his judgment and threaten entire nations. Could
this book have another purpose ? Does it help to unlock anything of
our present predicament ?
Yes, there’s hope; the book is finally about the power and the
glory, the mechanics and protocol of Spin and indeed the utter untrustworthiness
of the medium of photography in communicating supposed truths to us.
Let a President have the last word on this matter. It is a useful warning
to keep our wits about us.
“I’ve seen all those photographs that have been printed
in various articles of someone slouched looking out the Oval Office
windows and then beside it the quote about [the presidency] being
the loneliest [job] and so forth. I have to tell you, I enjoyed it.
I didn’t feel that way about it.” President Ronald Reagan,
May 1989.
Dr.Chris Mullen
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