The fiftieth anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination presents us with a flood of books and television documentaries retelling a story that has become so familiar that it almost seems like a nursery rhyme—a very torqued and twisted nursery rhyme. But this prodigality of media seems less a definitive act than an efflorescence of despair at the prospect of really understanding this familiar stranger whose death and transfiguration are always so much with us. Kennedy contains multitudes, but at the same time has a self-canceling opacity. Rather than having been brought into sharper focus by all the research and writing, as, say, Teddy Roosevelt has been, he has faded further from view. His evanescence was the subtext of the recent omnibus review of Kennedy books by Jill Abramson in The New York Times Book Review: Johnny, We Hardly Knew You. Even that was too optimistic—Johnny, We Don’t Really Know You At All might have been more accurate.

Or, if we think about the implications of the recent Mimi Alford book, Once Upon a Secret, we might opt for Johnny, We Definitely Don’t Want to Know You. Alford’s story is a particularly disheartening trek along the dark side of Camelot—the story of a naïve nineteen-year-old intern deflowered by Jack in