ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses the braided relationships between the presidency, cinema, and television during the Kennedy era and its immediate aftermath. The conventional understanding that John F. Kennedy was the first television president and that such a claim holds meaningful consequences for the nature of the presidency then and since, requires reinterpretation. Two sets of examples stake out different aspects of the "new frontiers": The first grounded the new administration's ideology of television within a long-standing belief in the media-critical powers of cinema. The second relied on the administration's inveterate crisis-mongering to project a host of alternative scenarios that would build toward moments of raw temporal succession, culminating in an executive decision. The chapter attempts to locate the shared origin and points of fracture in the Kennedy complex in a modernist ideology of the clean line, or, in this context, the clean cut.
