America in the 1950s was undergoing what the University of Missouri’s Steven Watts calls a “crisis of manhood,” denigrating Eisenhower-era males as softened by suburban comfort and upstaged by a generation of newly aggressive women. The antidote: John F. Kennedy.
In a discussion of his new book JFK and the Masculine Mystique: Sex and Power on the New Frontier, Watts depicts our 35th president as a man for his cultural times. Kennedy, he says, revived the American male as youthful, vigorous, and cool. That, as much as politics, was his allure, and JFK fed that aura with the company he kept – the likes of Frank Sinatra, Norman Mailer, Hugh Hefner, and Kirk Douglas.
Watts, an MU professor of history, last spoke at the Library in March 2014 on his biography of Dale Carnegie.
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