Commonplace Book #222

The most interesting think about the cult of the New Frontier was what it revealed about the changing conception not only of culture but of intellectual life in general. The downgrading of Kennedy’s political skill and the upgrading of his vigor and restlessness of mind was intended to show not simply that Kennedy had surrounded himself with intellectuals but that he was an intellectual…As a reflection of the intellectuals’ own self-image, the portrait of Kennedy as an intellectual provides a full measure of the degree to which the idea of the intellectual life had become bound up with images of worldly success and prestige. What the intellectuals admired in Kennedy was his youth, his good looks, his cultivation, his cosmopolitanism, his savoir faire, his taste, his respect for “excellence,” his wealth itself–what all of his admirers, in short, presumably admired; but the intellectuals not only admired these things, they associated them with intellect.

Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America (1965), 313.