Skip to main content

Overrated & Underrated

March 2023
1min read

At long last the deep thinkers are beginning to catch up with the reality of John Kennedy. Until now they’ve swallowed the media hype on Saint Jack with all the gusto of the boys at McCloskey’s Bar swilling beer.

Your survey on inflated reputations found eight intellectuals naming Kennedy, double the amount for Reagan, and more than double those for Wilson and Truman (three each).

But the late bloomers still didn’t mention the real stinking stuff: the theft of the election itself via the Democratic party machines in Chicago and Texas; the goon squads intimidating voters in both the primaries and the general election; the Pulitzer Prize for a book he didn’t write; the relationship with the Mafia via Judith Campbell; the turning of the White House into a wayside brothel.

All that will have to await a future generation of historians with tougher stomachs than the present bunch.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "November 1988"

Authored by: Peter Andrews

Every presidential election is exciting when it happens. Then the passing of time usually makes the outcome seem less than crucial. But after more than a century and a quarter, the election of 1860 retains its terrible urgency.

Authored by: Patrick Allitt

He was a capitalist. He was an urban reformer. He was a country boy. He was “Comrade Jesus,” a hardworking socialist. He was the world’s first ad man. For a century and a half, novelists have been trying to recapture the “real” Jesus.

Authored by: Richard B. Trask

A routine chore for JFK’s official photographer became the most important assignment of his career. Much of his moving pictorial record appears here for the first time.

Authored by: The Editors

Advertising from the Antique and
Classic Eras

Authored by: The Editors

An American Adventure

Authored by: The Editors

Courtship in Twentieth-Century
America

Authored by: Gerald Carson

All through the 1920s eager young emigrants left the towns and farms of America and headed for New York City. One of them recalls the magnetism of the life that pulled him there.

Authored by: The Editors

Where do you stay? What will it cost? How do you get a drink?
Where to eat? What will that cost ? What’s playing? Is it a talkie? How many people live here, anyway? What kind of place is this? All the answers are here.

Authored by: Marvin Gelfand

The great buildings of the 1920s are standing all over Manhattan, preserving in masonry the swank and swagger of an exuberant era.

Featured Articles

The world’s most prominent actress risked her career by standing up to one of Hollywood’s mega-studios, proving that behind the beauty was also a very savvy businesswoman. 

Rarely has the full story been told about how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.