ABSTRACT
According to Wicker, “Americans continue to hold the 35th president in improbably high regard-not just as a man of star quality, whose life was cut short in a moment whose origins are still debated, but as a national leader ranked in some polls with or above Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D.Roosevelt.” Even though Kennedy was in something of a political slump at the time of his death, even though his “Thousand Days” in the presidency were marked by seemingly continual crises-the Bay of Pigs, Berlin, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the confrontations between blacks and whites in the American South, the beginnings of the war in Vietnam-even though his reputation has been tarnished since his death by allegations of sexual and political improprieties, the legend endures that if the fatal shots had not been fired, a
new age would have been ushered in. The disasters of the ’60s and 70s could somehow have been avoided.
