ABSTRACT
John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960 by the narrowest margin ever—120,000 votes in a total of 69 million cast, so that nearly any category of Americans could claim to have put him over the top. The Kennedy way of looking at the world, in its broad outlines, grew from the same family soil. There was first the fact of being Irish in a town with an Irish mayor but a community and, to a large degree, a business world dominated by the Boston Protestants. Kennedy had announced a new standard of excellence, a new approach stressing realism and rationality. Like Harry Truman and Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Kennedy was an active-positive President. The active-positive person seems to treat his life as a connected series of experiments in commitment. As each experiment passes into the past, he shakes off regret and holds onto memory.
