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

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structures. Kennedy's mind was extremely orderly, but his techniques in office were sometimes heterodox and unexpected. They might have struck an outsider as being somewhat chaotic. He constantly bypassed the chain of command. He telephoned Assistant Secretaries or lesser military officers in order to seek information he needed. His press secretary, Pierre Salinger, once remarked that the back door of the White House always seemed more open than the front door. He understood the dynamics of meetings, and sometimes mistrusted them as a way of doing business. He thought that his presence might intimidate people. He liked to get information orally, in small groups or one-to-one, or else in memos from those people he trusted and admired—his brother Bobby and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., for example, or John Kenneth Galbraith, whose elegantly intelligent reports he always enjoyed reading. Kennedy detested long, tiresome memos from the bureaucracy. He complained that the functionaries at the State Department were incapable of getting to the point, to the essence, in their reports.

He did not keep rigid office hours. If he wanted to take a little more time in the morning to play with Caroline in the family quarters of the White House, he did so. He had a sort of seigneurial ease about the day's routines. When he went for a swim, when he had people to dinner, when he went away for weekends at Hyannis Port, the world he thought about and tried to control was always there with him. It also kept him up late on many nights.

Kennedy's tenure was littered with messy crises—in Laos, Cuba, the Congo, Latin America, Algeria, Viet Nam and Berlin—and his record in dealing with them is decidedly uneven. Revisionists like to say that Kennedy was a cold warrior who sought confrontation, but in the early '60s, the Soviets busied themselves around the world in ways that no American President could ignore.

Too quickly after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy went to Vienna for a summit with Nikita Khrushchev, who, judging Kennedy to be callow and inexperienced, ranted and bullied. Khrushchev followed the meeting by building the Berlin Wall and then, within a month, interrupting the informal moratorium on nuclear testing in the atmosphere.

Kennedy's strategy in world affairs was a mixture of gestures. The founder of the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps, those aggressively idealistic enterprises, could be by turns imperial, bold and assertive, and restrained. He learned eventually to define American interests and hold firmly to the line he had drawn, as he did in the Berlin crisis and, most notably, in the Cuban missile crisis. The Bay of Pigs had taught him caution and the exploration of options.

The missile crisis, more than any other single event of his presidency, demonstrated the way in which Kennedy matured in the office, the way in which he could master complexities of process, could orchestrate alternatives. He had learned to wait and to question. The Bay of Pigs had instructed him to rely more on his own internal deliberations and less on the hormonal instincts of his military and intelligence advisers. During those 13 days in October 1962, the world held its breath; it waited in a real sweat of nuclear panic. Never, before or since, has global annihilation seemed a more immediate possibility. Kennedy rejected the idea of direct strikes