In The Kennedy Obsession, John Hellmann takes an original approach to understanding JFK's star power, tracing a carefully designed epic of survival and conquest from its origins in Kennedy's childhood. In a family obsessed with traditional masculine virtues, an often-ill JFK found solace in stories of knights and maidens in British literature; he went on to craft his persona like those of his real-life heroes, from Lord Byron and Ernest Hemingway to Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, and to locate the origins of his own heroic myth in John Hersey's "Survival", an account of JFK's courage as a young naval officer during World War II.

Hellmann's investigation reveals that Kennedy's own books were strong projections of his aspirations, and that his father's experience as a Hollywood producer helped shape JFK's preoccupation with public image as a means of attaining political power. Hellmann shows why Kennedy, an unremarkable legislator ill-equipped for national political office, needed the "image machine" his father provided to win difficult victories as a young politician, and how he later perfected that machine while in the White House. The power of the fully developed Kennedy myth is vividly illustrated inHellmann's discussion of the Kennedy assassination in Oliver Stone's film JFK and the novels Flying in to Love by D. M. Thomas and Libra by Don DeLillo.

The Kennedy Obsession is a fascinating exploration of John E Kennedy's self-creation as the ideal American hero, embodying a legend that both mirrored and shaped the collective passage of Americans through this tumultuous century.