MixedThe Wall Street JournalMr. Watts’s recounting of this hysteria forms a scaffolding for a book about a midcentury regeneration of masculinity. Alongside JFK, bringing word of manhood’s restoration, Mr. Watts sees various apostles: Frank Sinatra, Norman Mailer, Ian Fleming, Hugh Hefner, a couple of astronauts, a couple of movie actors, a couple of generals, a group the author calls 'The Kennedy Circle' ... Mr. Watts has ignored this history, choosing to cast the ’50s crisis as a unique event, like the building of the Berlin Wall (a Kennedy crisis). He passes over the fact that, despite rallying American men, Kennedy beat Richard Nixon, 'the shifty, sweating, weak symbol of masculine decline,' by less than 120,000 votes while carrying only 22 states. So much for the crisis among Americans who eight years later put Nixon in the White House. More than half the book is portraits of apostles ... Mr. Watts makes some brutally broad cultural generalizations, but he has a fine sensitivity to cultural nuance, and his chapters on the meaning and impact of Kennedy are very good. Less successful is his attempt to build an epic out of a momentary neurosis, a forgotten ’50s attitude about a crisis of masculinity, whatever it was, is now and ever shall be, men without end.
