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It is sometimes difficult to know whether Kennedy was a visionary or simply a rhetorician. He did have a high sense of adventure, which he combined with patriotism in the launching of his plan to put a man on the moon and thereby repay the Soviets for the technological humiliations of Sputnik. He did imagine a better America, a fairer place, a more excellent place. He even believed that it was part of his task as President to lift American culture. He and his wife Jacqueline brought Pablo Casals and Igor Stravinsky and Bach and Mozart to the White House. His own taste may have run more toward Sinatra or Broadway musicals, but Kennedy believed that it was his duty to endorse the excellent in all things, to be a leader in matters of civilization. That was a novel notion in American politics, novel at least since the days of Thomas Jefferson.
A judgment on Kennedy's presidential performance inevitably ends in a perplexity of conditional clauses. If he had lived and been elected to a second term, Kennedy would have become, at age 50 or so, a world leader, with unprecedented moral authority. Perhaps. One of Kennedy's strongest qualities was his capacity to learn from experience, to grow. His first six months in office were nearly a disaster. But by 1963 he was far maturer, riper, smarter, still passionate, but seasoned. It is interesting to wonder what his second Inaugural Address would have sounded like. It would almost surely not have reverberated with the grandiloquent bluster that one heard in the first.
It is possible, in any case, that the manner of Kennedy's leaving the office, his assassination, much more profoundly affected the course of America than anything he did while he was in the White House. There was a kind of dual effect: his death enacted his legislative program and at the same time seemed to let loose monsters, to unhinge the nation in some deep way that sent it reeling down a road toward riots and war and assassinations and Watergate.
One Kennedy revisionist, Garry Wills, argues that the extraordinary glamour and heightened expectations that Kennedy brought to the office have crippled all of his successors. They cannot compete with such a powerful myth. It is equally possible, of course, that Kennedy's successors simply do not measure up. Kennedy's was a mind with all of its windows open and a clear light passing through it. That has not been true of anyone who has sat in the place since.
Robert K. Murray of Pennsylvania State University has surveyed 1,000 Ph.D. historians as part of a study on how such authorities assess American Presidents. The 1,000 rated Kennedy 13th, in the middle of the "above average" category. Those considered great: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson. Near great: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Jackson, Harry Truman. Above average: John Adams, Lyndon Johnson, James K. Polk, John Kennedy, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Grover Cleveland.
The fact is that Kennedy was in the White House so short a time that he almost cannot be judged against other Presidents. The first twelve or 18 months of any presidency are a learning