The gloss has dulled, the image is tarnished. We even speak now about his rendezvous, not with destiny, but with two White House secretaries known as "Fiddle" and "Faddle." The once elevated and exaggerated reputation of John F. Kennedy as the triumphant diplomatist has collided in recent years not only with the skepticism of journalists, political scientists, and historians but also with the facts, the realities themselves. Rich historical documents and oral histories housed at the John F. Kennedy Library as well as revelations in the Pentagon Papers and congressional hearings on CIA activities have joined the eulogistic memoirs of Kennedy advisers to recommend a critical retrospective view of the years of Camelot.

Getting at the well-springs of the Kennedy foreign policy means confrontations with some heady obstacles. Many of the documents produced by the Kennedy administration remain classified security and hence closed to researchers. But under mandatory declassification procedures, large lots of materials, such as those on the Cuban Missile Crisis, are being opened.

We should not expect dramatic "bombshells" from the writings based on these records, but we should be better able to fathom the roots of modern American diplomacy."We were so eager for Kennedy to defeat the despised Nixon," critic Richard Walton has remarked about the 1960 election, "that we just assumed that what he said was acceptable.... Blinded by our passion to defeat Nixon, we did not really listen to Kennedy." There is no excuse for not listening now.