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John Kennedy had fewer than three years in the White House, and he is going to be a puzzling President for the historians. Some of his cold war oratory has an almost embarrassing ring today, but the rhetorical militance didn't carry over to policy when the Soviets first challenged him by throwing up the infamous Berlin Wall. In his handling of the Cuba missile threat, however, he was both firm and prudent; his performance remains a model in crisis management. He escalated the U.S. presence in Viet Nam from the 900 military advisers he inherited from Ike to 16,000, though some of his loyalists later argued that he was preparing to cut back on the commitment. (Had we somehow "won" in Viet Nam, Kennedy would get credit for farsightedness in putting all those advisers out there.) His foreign policy record is so mixed, and the domestic policy record so scanty, that appraisals of his presidency become in good part speculation on what he would have done had he lived. In popular esteem, his legend has perhaps lost a bit of the luster of the first few years after his assassination. Camelot has not worn too well.
Yet, as late as 1976, Gallup found Kennedy ranked among our three greatest Presidents by an astounding 52% of those polled—ahead of Lincoln, named by 49%, and Franklin Roosevelt, 45%. Harry Truman outran George Washington, 37 to 25. Gallup polls in 1946 and 1956 had placed F.D.R. just ahead of Lincoln and far ahead of Washington.
Among professional historians, however, polled by Professor Arthur Schlesinger Sr. in 1948 and again in 1962, Washington was securely lodged among the "great," just behind Lincoln. F.D.R., Wilson and Jefferson also made the list both times.
Lyndon Johnson is not looking any healthier in history than he was in the public opinion polls of 1967-68. There are some stirrings in the country of a revisionist attitude toward the war in Viet Nam—President Reagan is willing to say out loud that we should not be ashamed of fighting there—but the corollary of that view, for Reagan and others, is that we should have gone all out to win. L.B.J. loses both ways, with the hard-liners for the defeat, with everybody else for getting into Viet Nam in such a big way. The other landmark of the L.B.J. Administration was his Great Society legislation. These programs are now being cut back by the Reagan Administration, amid a congressional and popular consensus that they had gone out of control. Most of them will continue to get substantial funding, but they are no longer invested with the hope and idealism of the 1960s. Finally, L.B.J. had his personal vulnerabilities, and the historians are not likely to ignore them. The forthcoming three-volume biography by Robert Caro, to judge by the first excerpts in the Atlantic, is going to picture a wheeler-dealer with a mania for secrecy and deviousness.