Twenty-five years ago, I asked Charles Bartlett, a syndicated columnist, to tell me about his old and close friend, John F. Kennedy. Bartlett's answer: "No one ever knew John Kennedy, not all of him."
Now, 50 years after Kennedy's assassination, that answer still seems relevant.
Kennedy was a compartmentalized man with much to hide, comfortable with secrets and lies. He organized his White House as a wagon wheel, with himself as what he called "the vital center," the hub. All of his relations along the spokes were bilateral. "It was instinctive at first," he said. "I had different identities, and this was a useful way of expressing each without compromising the others."
Debate about those identities, and about what kind of president Kennedy really was, has dominated the discussion in advance of the anniversary of his death. Professors and pundits tend to downgrade Kennedy's legacy, seeing him as an ordinary, even ineffective leader. But the American people — or at least three-quarters of them, according to polling done this month by the Gallup organization — rate him as the greatest of modern presidents.
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