Now, nearly 15 years since that dreadful day in Dallas, the "fleeting wisp of glory" that was known as Camelot-on-the-Potomac has vanished into the mists of memory. And the legend that was John F. Kennedy is not holding up too well in the glare of reality. In the view of Thomas G. Paterson, this is particularly true of Kennedy's foreign policy. In fact, Mr. Paterson concludes, after a penetrating and provocative examination of that policy, the New Frontiersman was "not only a maker of history but a victim of it." A professor of history at the University of Connecticut, Mr. Paterson received his B. A. degree from the University of New Hampshire and his M. A. and Ph. D. degrees from the University of California. He is a specialist in diplomatic history and particularly in the history of the Cold War. He is the author of Soviet-American Confrontation: Postwar Reconstruction and the Origins of the Cold War and editor of American Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. An earlier version of his VQR article was given as a lecture at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The University of Connecticut Research Foundation provided funds for travel to the John F. Kennedy Library, where Mr. Paterson did much of his research for the essay.

Peter Taylor is one of the nation s fore-most practitioners of the short story. Yet, as Jonathan Yardley contended in his 1977 Washington Post review of Mr. Taylor's latest book, In the Miro District, this short story writer is vastly unappreciated by much of the reading public. Jane Barnes Casey, however, is well acquainted with Mr. Taylor's work, and this acquaintance is clearly reflected in her essay, "A View of Peter Taylor's Stories." A fiction writer herself, Mrs. Casey is the author of a-novel, I, Krupskaya, about the wife of Lenin. She became interested in the Soviet leader's wife during a prolonged visit to Moscow. She is the wife of John Casey, whose novel, An American Romance, was cited by the New York Times critic, John Leonard, as one of the best works of fiction in 1977.