John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy is presented not through a broad account of his presidency but through the objects and landscapes that joined him to maritime New England. His protection of the Outer Cape’s beaches and his collection of scrimshaw connect political stewardship to the older history of whaling; after his death, a whale tooth engraved with the presidential seal became a private memorial placed in his coffin.

Maritime New England and the Cape

The Kennedy family was closely associated with the Cape and its islands, gathering around the family compound at Hyannis. Before becoming the thirty-fifth President of the United States, Kennedy moved to designate the Outer Cape’s beaches, from Eastham to Provincetown, as National Seashore, protecting them from urbanization. The book presents this act as an extension of his attachment to maritime New England: the coast was not merely a family setting, but a landscape whose preservation mattered to him.

That attachment also shaped his interest in scrimshaw. The collection brought the history of whaling into a modern political life, linking a protected shoreline to the industry and seafaring culture that had once made whale products valuable. The connection is not simple nostalgia: the artifacts preserve traces of the work, desires, and daily experience of sailors whose world was far removed from the Oval Office.

A collection of whaling history

Scrimshaw flourished during the great voyages to the South Seas in the 1830s and 1840s. On long whaling voyages, crews had extended periods of idleness, and sailors carved whale teeth with scenes from everyday life, ships, and their imaginations. The teeth were soaked in brine, polished with sharkskin, etched with needles or knives, and inked with soot from the ships’ try-pots. Some designs were rough or erotic; others were intricate records of the whalers’ experience, made by men who might otherwise have had few ways to preserve it.

By the later twentieth century, these objects had languished in attics, neglected and undervalued. The book credits Kennedy with helping revive interest in them. His own collection reached thirty-four whale teeth, and he kept favourite pieces on his Oval Office desk. Their presence there brought artifacts of a seaborne working culture into the room where he exercised presidential power. A whale tooth was at once a carved object, a remnant of the whaling era, and a reminder of the maritime world to which Kennedy felt attached.

The presidential seal and the coffin

In 1963, the First Lady ordered a whale tooth engraved with the presidential seal as a Christmas present for her husband. Kennedy would not receive it. Shortly before his death, he hosted a private dinner at the White House for Greta Garbo and gave her a piece of scrimshaw. In a letter to Mrs Kennedy afterward, Garbo wrote that she might have believed the meeting a dream if she did not have the President’s tooth before her. The gift made the collection part of an intimate exchange, not only a public emblem of Kennedy’s historical interests.

On the night before the funeral, his widow placed the unreceived Christmas gift in his coffin. The tooth’s destination changed its meaning: an object made from the remains of a whale, engraved with the seal of an office, became a personal offering to the dead president. The book frames the gesture as a charged act of remembrance, joining the whale’s material presence to the political image of Kennedy as the “king of Camelot.” It also recalls an older association between whales and kingship: in the cited passage from Moby-Dick, Ishmael declares that whalemen supply monarchs with the oil used in coronations.

A relic against absence

The coffin scene turns scrimshaw into more than a collector’s pursuit. The tooth is a relic whose force depends on both its history and its absence: Kennedy had collected and displayed such objects, but the specially engraved one arrived too late to be received by him. His widow’s act gives the tooth a final place beside him, while the presidential seal binds the private token to the office he held.

The book extends that memorial image into a speculative Atlantic tableau: the dead president’s pale blue eyes seem poised to scan the horizon for the whales’ return. The image does not claim that the whales return or that Kennedy can do so; its force lies in the waiting. A piece of carved whale tooth carries the vanished whaling age into Kennedy’s funeral, and the imagined horizon leaves both the animals and the history they embody just beyond sight.