The Kennedy Style. Restoration: Idea and Organization. Maison Blanche. The State Dining Room. The East Room. The Red Room. The Green Room. The Blue Room. The Ground Floor. Halls. The Private Dining Rooms. The Yellow Oval Room. Guest Rooms. The Victorian Taste. The Private Rooms. The President's Office and Cabinet Room. Epilogue: The Legacy. Appendix. Endnotes. Bibliography. Index.
JAMES A. ABBOTT is currently Curator of Decorative Arts at the Baltimore Museum of Art. ELAINE M. RICE is an independent consultant on American fine art and decorative arts in Wilmington, Delaware.
Hellman, who teaches English at Ohio State‘Lima, isn't out to strip away the mythic veneer to disclose all the failings underneath, but rather to show the evolution of those myths in the first place. He starts by looking at the influence that individual works such as David Cecil's The Young Melbourne, John Buchan's Pilgrim's Way, the movie Red River, or figures such as Byron and Hemingway had on Kennedy's imagined self. Hellman proposes that Kennedy was deeply aware of image: for example, he wrote Profiles in Courage because he knew that as a national candidate, he needed to "cue the media to move his characterization forward from the role of immature boy." The most interesting pages are those few that show how Kennedy's heroic self-image influenced his time in office. For Kennedy, says Hellman, a dilemma was best dealt with as a crisis‘U.S. Steel crisis, Civil Rights crisis and, most of all, Cuban Missile crisis‘complete with a deadline, "in which he played the role of hero in the decisive confrontation." The most vexatious issue in studies of personal myth-building is the key question of consciousness. Kennedy, in Hellman's thesis, seems to have been greatly aware of subtle influences. Of Kennedy's admiration for Montgomery Clift's character in Red River, for example Hellman notes, "Kennedy... may even have recognized a correspondence between the macho masquerade he himself performed to cover his `feminine' aspects and the homosexual actor's role." (Oct.) FYI: Hellman notes that Jackie's White House restoration, "offered a heightened version of the domestic role of the average housewife." Van Nostran Reinhold will release a lengthy illustrated analysis in Designing Camelot: The Kennedy White House Restoration by James A. Abbott and Elaine M. Rice. ($50 256p ISBN 0-442-02532-7; Oct.)
This illuminating study documents the transformation of the White House from the home of the U.S. presidents to a notable house museum occupied by successive presidents of the United States. This transformation took place between 1961 and 1963 under the guidance of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy; the premier collector of American decorative arts, Henry Francis du Pont; and the French interior designer Stephane Boudin. Room-by-room accounts detail the decoration and furnishing of White House interiors, and both private and public rooms are all addressed. This is more than an evocative account; it is based on the authors' master's theses at, respectively, the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware. A fine work of scholarship on a topic of popular interest, this is recommended for most architecture and interior design collections.‘Peter Kaufman, Boston Architectural Ctr.
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