After 20 years, the question: How good a President?
In an essay on Napoleon, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "He was no saint—to use his word, 'no capuchin,' and he is no hero, in the high sense." Napoleon had fulfilled an earthly career, at any rate. His life went the full trajectory. One could study the line of it and know, for better and worse, what the man was, and did, and could do. He inhabited his life. He completed it. He passed through it to the end of its possibilities.
John Kennedy's bright trajectory ended in midpassage, severed in that glaring Friday noontime in Dallas. The moment 20 years ago when one learned the news became precisely fixed in the memory, the mind stopping like a clock just then. It is Kennedy's deathday, not his birthday, that we observe. History abruptly left off, and after the shock had begun to pass, the mythmaking began—the mind haunted by the hypothetical, by what might have been.
And the myth overwhelmed conventional judgment, as if some wonderful song prevented the hall from hearing the recording secretary read the minutes of the last meeting, or the minutes of a thousand days. Today, Kennedy still occupies an unusual place in the national psyche. His presence there in the memory, in the interior temple, remains powerful, disproportionate to his substantive accomplishments. He probably was not President long enough to be judged by the customary standards.
Kennedy had his obvious accomplishments. Merely by arriving at the White House, he had destroyed forever one religious issue in American politics. When Edmund Muskie ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, his Catholicism was only a minor biographical detail. Kennedy presided over a change of political generations in America, and did it with brilliant style. He brought youth and idealism and accomplishment and elan and a sometimes boorish and clannish elitism to Washington. He refreshed the town with a conviction that the world could be changed, that the improvisational intelligence could do wonderful things. Such almost ruthless optimism had its sinister side, a moral complacency and dismissive arrogance that expressed itself when the American elan went venturing into Viet Nam. But Kennedy, when he died, was also veering away from the cold war. He made an eloquently conciliatory speech at American University in June 1963, and he accomplished the limited test-ban treaty. He had many plans, for Medicare, for civil rights, for other projects.
But after Nov. 22, the record simply went blank. An anguished and fascinating process of canonization ensued. The television networks focused their gaze on the story almost continuously from Parkland Memorial Hospital to Arlington National Cemetery, as if in professional tribute to the first President who understood the medium and performed perfectly in it. In sanctifying his memory, videotape became Kennedy's Parson Weems. The reality of what the nation had lost was preserved with unprecedented, unthinkable vividness: his holographic ghost moving and talking inside every television set, that American dreamboat campaigning through the primaries among leaping and squealing adolescent girls, the snow-dazzled Inaugural ceremony, the wonderfully witty press conferences replayed endlessly, the children, the family, the one brief shining moment shown shining again and