JFK, incidentally, introduced Bond to America, though not in the manner
urban legend would have it. As part of a magazine profile, in which he was depicted as a
speed-reader (1200 wpm), Jack was asked for a list of the last ten
books he had read. Nine of them were on economic and political subjects, as befit a sitting
POTUS, but somewhere on the list was a thriller he'd picked up in a
London airport:
From Russia with Love. Since everything he did was news, fashionable people picked up on this, and soon bookstores were deluged by requests to send to the
UK for this book, leading to a reprint by Signet, while the story snowballed into JFK being a rabid fan, patterning himself after his hero and requesting stories from a British
Scheherazade. (On the other hand, "
Profiles in Courage" gets a favorable mention in the Bond canon, though not in that book.) Sadly,
Ian Fleming died soon after the book was reprinted in America, thus trapping his most enduring character in
amber in the less-than-hip
Fifties.
Read without reference to the movies, Bond is not a sophisticated cosmopolitan, but a small-minded bigot prone to such remarks as "Koreans are rather lower than apes in the mammalian hierarchy". His celebrated tastes in food (which, written for a British audience still hobbled by strict rationing of such staples as butter, eggs, and meat, were part of the pornography) are described (by him) as "simple...I like old-fashioned egg dishes, and peasant cooking wherever I am": of course, this meant that Fleming could namedrop such (for the time) exotica as pesto sauce, eggs Benedict, and Kobe beef. His tastes in reading were similarly casual: mysteries, thrillers, and the like, along with books on golf and now and then, survival. He often depreciated scholarly types, and would certainly not liked Alan Turing, outside of a certain bare usefulness. (Given a psychedelic in the books, he remained stolidly on the ground, a true sign of iron-headed dullness.) In other words, operative, rather than controller, material. For the movies, however, even his martini got reformulated from a triple shot of vodka, one of gin, and one half measure Kina Lillet, to a more managable vodka/vermouth version (by an American liquor distiller, no less). Confronted with a spinning hat with razor blades in the brim, he was unaware that it could be caught from underneath (like a Frisbee), and it's hard to ascertain whether he'd do well against a moderately well-trained martial arts freak.
But still, a great character.