As William Attwood observes in this issue's lead essay, few Americans over 30 years old have forgotten where they were and what they were doing on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. Nor are they likely to: such was the dimension of the tragedy that ended the 1,000-day term of the youngest citizen ever elected to the nation's highest office. Today, however, two decades after Kennedy was killed, both his life and the legend that grew up around him—"Camelot" and all that—are more often ridiculed than revered. Kennedy's New Frontier is now widely regarded as the route which took us into Vietnam, and whatever he may have accomplished is obscured by lurid stories of sexual scandal. It is almost as though a noble Henry V had turned into a foppish and foolhardy Falstaff. Withal, though, the fact remains that millions around the world mourned Kennedy's passing 20 years ago, and, however much his reputation has diminished since, one can still recall his vigor, vibrance, and valor. This is particularly true for those who, like Mr. Attwood, knew Kennedy and served in his administration.

A journalist by profession and a longtime Democrat by persuasion, Mr. Attwood graduated from Princeton in 1941, served with the U. S. Army in World War II, rising to the rank of captain, and was a New York Herald Tribune correspondent in Paris (where he was born of American parents on Bastille Day, 1919) and at the United Nations between 1946 and 1949. He was the European correspondent for Collier's magazine from 1949 to 1951, when he joined Look as its European editor. He later returned to this country, where he was successively national editor and foreign editor for Look. In 1961 he was appointed by Kennedy to be the U. S. ambassador to Guinea, a position he held until 1963, when he became a special adviser to the American delegation to the United Nations. After a two-year stint as our ambassador to Kenya (1964—66), MR. Attwood became editor-in-chief of Cowles Communications, Inc. He ended his distinguished journalistic career as president and publisher of Newsday.