| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David M. Lubin. Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2004. Pp. xiv, 341. $24.95. David Greenberg. Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image. New York: W. W. Norton. 2003. Pp. xxxii, 460. $26.95.
Two new books by David M. Lubin and David Greenberg examine how images have influenced public perceptions of two former U.S. presidents, and both contribute significantly to our overall understanding of how imagery affects politics. Richard M. Nixon himself recognized that because there is no assurance in the television age that good people and good programs will succeed, "concern for image must rank with concern for substance."	1
Lubin and Greenberg take different approaches to analyzing presidential imagery. Lubin, whose earlier work includes Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (1994), writes from the perspective of art history. Why, he asks, did President John F. Kennedy and the rest of the Kennedy family, who were wealthy, educated, and part of a "rarefied elite" (p. 157), achieve such popularity among ordinary Americans? The answer, he contends, lies in images of the Kennedys that derive "their power in good measure from their ability to activate latent memories of other powerful images in the histories of art and popular culture" (p. xii), imagery that in the modern information age is "endlessly replicated" (p. xiii). The title of his book, which refers to both the photographing of the Kennedys and the assassination of the president, reflects Lubin's thesis that images have multiple layers of meaning. Greenberg writes from the perspective of political history, examining the many images of Nixon, some crafted by Nixon himself, others by a variety of "cultural" constituencies. More than Lubin, he draws on print sources, but he also makes ample use of documents from popular culture, including films, cartoons, and memorials.	2
Although many historians may find Lubin's approach unorthodox, and even though some of his examples work better than others, his book gives readers a good sense of American visual culture during the early 1960s and of how the Kennedys fit into it. In considering "the impact of images on images," Lubin takes a "nonlinear approach," ranging freely "backward and forward in time nonsequentially" (p. xii). His thesis seems plausible when he juxtaposes pictures of JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy against photos of the film stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, a photograph of the young Jackie against a picture of the young Taylor in the movie National Velvet (pp. 12–13), a picture of a youthful Jack sailing against Winslow Homer's painting Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) (pp. 40, 42), and shows the perverse way in which a snapshot of Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle resembles Daniel Chester French's 1875 statue The Minute Man (pp. 228–229).	3
Several of Lubin's insights deserve further elaboration. He devotes considerable attention to Abraham Zapruder's 8mm home movie of the assassination, which he believes laid a foundation for a "new realism" in moviemaking and journalism during the 1960s (p. 31). Although the film was not seen in its entirety on television until 1975, color frames from it appeared in Life in the months following the assassination. These photos "had a more visceral impact" (p. 164) on viewers, Lubin asserts, than did black-and-white pictures. Many people had portable cameras like Zapruder's in 1963, but such cameras were only one of many communication innovations of the time, and their impact has generally been underestimated. The increasing use of color in mass media deserves more attention. Relatively little research exists on what effects color has on audiences. Color images, not just of violence but of beautiful people and places, appeared more frequently during the 1950s and after. Photographs in such publications as Life, Look, and Playboy helped to make life "highly sexualized ... for vast numbers of Americans," Lubin writes, and intensified the glamour surrounding the nation's first family (p. 50).	. . .

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