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

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against the offensive missile sites that the Soviets were installing in Cuba. Working in the extraordinary partnership that he had developed with his brother Bobby, the President imposed a naval quarantine on Cuba and allowed Khrushchev time to consider. When the Soviets sent two somewhat contradictory replies to his ultimatum, one hard and one more accommodating, Kennedy simply ignored the hard message and replied to the softer one. It worked. Khrushchev blinked, and in the memorable denouement, the Soviet ships turned and steamed away from Cuba. Says Harvard Political Scientist Richard Neustadt: "The Administration set a new standard of prudence in dealing with the Soviet Union. The standard of prudence, the hard thought given about the crisis as the Soviets would see it, thus giving our opponent as much room as possible—these were a model of presidential conduct."

But there were deep contradictions in Kennedy's foreign policy, conflicts in which an old view of the world and an emerging view competed with each other. Part of him retained the mentality of the cold war, a kind of Dulles-like brinkmanship. At the same time, a succession of crises convinced him that a new course was necessary. At American University he declared, "What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave ... not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time ... Let us re-examine our attitude toward the cold war, remembering that we are not engaged in a debate . .. We must deal with the world as it is." It was the American University speech that began the long process of detente between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Ironically, the man who brought Kennedy's policy to its fullest bloom was Richard Nixon.

And yet Kennedy would ask for nearly 1,000 new ICBMS for the American nuclear arsenal, which eventually triggered what has become the greatest arms race in history. He acquiesced in the overthrow of the Diem government in South Viet Nam in 1963. And he ordered 16,000 American troops into that country.

Would Kennedy have become involved in Viet Nam to the extent that Johnson eventually did? The answer is unknowable. Many Kennedy loyalists think not, though their opinion is not disinterested. They point out that Kennedy was eminently a pragmatist; he would have seen the morass that lay in wait. Kennedy was a superbly self-assured man. He had already proved himself in war and had no need to do so again. With his keen sense of public relations, his loyalists believe, with his knowledge of the uses of the media, he would simply have decided that Viet Nam was not worth the dreadful publicity, which is not a very principled notion to put hypothetically into Kennedy's mind, but still a plausible one.

At home, as abroad, Kennedy's performance was mixed. He was a fiscal conservative. The economy was robust during his thousand days. Economic growth averaged 5.6% annually. Unemployment came down by almost two percentage points from the nearly 8% level when he took office. Inflation held at a prelapsarian 1.2%.

The central problem was confrontation between blacks and whites. Kennedy's approach to civil rights at the beginning of his term was slow and inattentive.