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

(2 of 10)

again in counterpoint with the Book Depository and the shots, and riderless Black Jack fighting the bridle, and the widow, the little boy saluting, and the long mahogany box in the Rotunda—the protagonist and the irretrievable mystery of the piece. The death of John F. Kennedy became a participatory American tragedy, a drama both global and intensely intimate.

The event eerily fused, for a moment, the normally dissociated dimensions of public life and private life. And so Americans felt Kennedy's death in a deeply personal way: they, and he, were swept into a third dimension, the mythic. The ancient Greeks thought that gods and goddesses came down and walked among them and befriended them or betrayed them. The drama 20 years ago—bright young life and light and grace and death all compounded by the bardic camera—turned Kennedy into a kind of American god.

In any case, for a long time, some thought forever, it seemed almost impossible to look objectively at the man and his presidency, to see what he had done and left undone. Not long after the assassination, Journalist Gerald W. Johnson wrote, "Already it has happened to two of the 35 men who have held the presidency, rendering them incapable of analysis by the instruments of scholarship; and now Washington, the godlike, and Lincoln, the saintly, have been joined by Kennedy, the young chevalier."

Ronald Reagan has been in the office almost as long as Kennedy. It is fascinating, though complicated, that the youngest elected President, who occupied the White House for the shortest (elected) term since Warren Harding—and who had a problematic tenure, very much a learning process and a mixed bag of one fiasco and many missteps and some accomplishments—should be thus elevated, by the force of his presence, his vivid charm, to the company of the greatest Presidents, as if the inspirational power of personality were enough for greatness. Perhaps it is. Many Americans make the association. Yet what sways them is in some sense the strange coercive power of the martyr, Kennedy's great vitality turned inside out. He came to have a higher reputation in death than he enjoyed in life. And in a bizarre way he even accomplished more in death than in life. In the atmosphere of grief and remorse after the assassination, Lyndon Johnson pushed through Congress much of Kennedy's program, and more: Medicare, civil rights and the other bills that came to form Johnson's Great Society.

Three million visitors still come to his grave at Arlington every year. Although fewer photographs of Kennedy are enshrined in bars and barbershops and living rooms around the U.S. than there once were, they can still be found in huts all over the Third World: an image of an American President, dead for 20 years, a symbol—but of what exactly? Mostly of a kind of hope, the possibility of change, and the usually unthinkable idea that government leadership might intercede to do people some good.

Is it possible now, at a remove of 20 years, to detach Kennedy's presidency from the magic and to judge it with the cold rationality that Kennedy tried to bring to bear upon his world? Or is the myth, the sense of hope and the lift he gave thereby, a central accomplishment of his presidency? W.B. Yeats wrote, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

Kennedy would have found the