J.F.K. After 20 years, the question: How good a President?

(10 of 10)

period during which the man in the Oval Office must get his bearings and put his Administration in place for the work he hopes to accomplish. That would not have given Kennedy—elected in a squeaker, with no clear mandate and no working majority in Congress—much time to prove himself.

American political moods run in cycles. Periods of activity and reform, of idealism and change, alternate with more quiescent, complacent, even cynical times. Schlesinger believes that the activist cycle comes around every 30 years or so. Thus the era of Teddy Roosevelt at the turn of the century, then the New Deal beginning in 1933, then Kennedy in 1961. By Schlesinger's hopeful calculation, the U.S. will be ripe for another time of idealism and political innovation toward the end of this decade.

The wave of negative revisionism about Kennedy may now be receding. But the myth of John Kennedy will undoubtedly outlive the substance of what he achieved. History will remember not so much what he did as what he was, a memory kept in some vault of the national imagination. In the end, the American appreciation of Kennedy may come to be not political but aesthetic, and vaguely religious. —By Lance Morrow.

Reported by Hays Corey/Washington and John F. Stacks/New York, with other bureaus