“Jack” Lewis, at the time of his death on that same autumn day in 1963, surely was seen by many as the least interesting, most backward-looking, most dated figure of the three, even a kind of surviving “dinosaur,” as he once described himself: a late Victorian as the swinging Sixties moved into high gear and the gates of Eden seemed to be opening. But the last 15 years of his life in California, under the influence of his Francophone Belgian first wife (who died in 1955), make for a strangely ambiguous chapter, not least owing to drug use, promiscuity, and participation in a quite decadent southern-California world well but sadly described by David King Dunaway in Huxley in Hollywood (1989).Ĭ. Historical judgment has given us more positive views of Truman and Eisenhower than might have been expected, but Kennedy now seems more appropriately lodged in the neighborhood of his great, disgraced antagonist Richard Nixon.Īldous Huxley was one of the most sheerly intelligent of 20th-century English-language writers, the author of the profound, hauntingly relevant, satirical-philosophical dystopian novel Brave New World (1932) and several other powerful works of fiction and nonfiction, including the religious-philosophical anthology The Perennial Philosophy (1945). In November 2006 the Kennedy-hometown Boston Globe was shocked that, when ten eminent American historians were asked by The Atlantic (originally also a hometown liberal institution) who were the 100 most influential Americans of all time, their list did not include Kennedy.

Kennedy (1991) was a devastating portrait of the president’s moral and political deficiencies. Reeves’s A Question of Character: A Life of John F. The young, handsome, glamorous Kennedy, brutally slain by a left-winger at a time of rising liberal optimism, has remained a media icon to the point of credulous idolatry, but his reputation among the reflective does not stand high. The fortunes of the three figures’ reputations over the last half-century make for an interesting comparison.

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