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

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solemnity and mythmaking amusing, and hopelessly overdone. His intellectual style was sardonic and self-aware: wonderful lights of satire played across it. If he sometimes labored hard at being a hero, or seeming a hero (before his election in 1960, he listened intently to recordings of Winston Churchill's speeches, picking up the grand rhythms of the language), he knew the limitations of everything, including himself. His instruments were sensitive to the bogus. He might even have had some mordant crack to make about that Eternal Flame.

As the years have passed, Kennedy has been inevitably caught up in the pattern of idolatry and revisionism. All presidential reputations ride up or down upon wind currents of intellectual fashion and subsequent history, the perspective of the present constantly altering interpretations of the past.

First the murdered President became saint and martyr. But then the '60s arrived in earnest. In a study of tragedy, Critic George Steiner wrote, "The fall of great personages from high places (casus virorum illustrium) gave to medieval politics their festive and brutal character." The real '60s began on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, and they turned festive and brutal too. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out. His assassination became the prototype in a series of public murders: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy. His death prefigured all the deaths of the young in Viet Nam.

The '60s eventually turned on Kennedy. The protests and violent changes of the time jarred loose and shattered fundamental premises of American life and power. From the perspective of Viet Nam in the late '60s, some of Kennedy's rhetoric sounded incautious, jingoistic and dangerous. The Arthurian knight talked about building bomb shelters. The extravagance of all that the hagiologists claimed for him now seemed to make him a fraud. His performance on civil rights came to seem tepid and reluctant and excessively political. Stories about his vigorous sex life, including an alleged affair with the girlfriend of a Mafia don, brought into question not only his private morals but his common sense. At last, the revisionists wondered whether his presidency belonged more to the history of publicity and hype than to the history of political leadership.

Presidential reputations are always fluid. Dwight Eisenhower, for example, was regarded during the '60s as a somewhat vague golfer with a tendency to blunder into sand traps when attempting a complicated English sentence. Now he is enjoying a rehabilitation. His watch was essentially peaceful and prudent, his revisionists say.

At the end of his terms, though, Ike seemed archaic and gray. The virile young man in top hat who rode with him down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1961 had promised to "get the country moving again." That bright Inauguration Day, Kennedy brought Robert Frost to read a special poem for the occasion. The glare of sun on new-fallen snow bunded the aged poet, and so he recited another poem from memory. The poem he did not read that day contained these lines for the Kennedy era:

It makes the prophet in us all presage

The glory of a next Augustan age

Of a power leading from its strength and pride,

Of young ambition eager to