Life

“His personal quality,” wrote Norman Mailer in a portrait of the candidate — the novelist’s first piece of political journalism — in in November 1960, “had a subtle, not quite describable intensity, a suggestion of dry pent heat…. His appearance changed with his mood, strikingly so, and this made him always more interesting than what he was saying. He would seem at one moment older than his age, forty-eight or fifty, a tall, slim, sunburned professor with a pleasant weathered face, not even particularly handsome; five minutes later, talking to a press conference on his lawn … he would look again like a movie star, his coloring vivid, his manner rich, his gestures strong and quick, alive with that concentration of vitality a successful actor always seems to radiate.”