In the last scene of the musical Camelot—which opened when pundits were searching for the appropriate metaphor to characterize the Kennedy years—a boy runs onto the stage and pleads with King Arthur to let him join in the final battle about to take place. Arthur sends the boy back home, enjoining him, "No, Thomas, you must live to tell our story," and the audience realizes that Thomas will grow up to be Thomas Mallory, the chronicler of the Arthurian legends. The Kennedys' over-arching sense of history was reflected in the play's ending, and the Kennedy era had a new name.

The latter-day Thomas Mallorys have the makings of a powerful myth in the beginning and ending of the Kennedy era. Those thousand days opened gloriously in the sunny cold of the inauguration, when a bare-headed young president spoke eloquent words, proclaiming the arrival of a new generation of leaders and offering the prospect of new sacrifices, while a silver-haired poet laureate spoke of traditional values. They ended with a blood-splattered widow and a little boy saluting on the steps of a cathedral in Washington.

Those of us who were part of the Kennedy administration didn't see ourselves at the time as knights of the Round Table. If we accepted any common identification, it was the "New Frontiersmen" label, applied to us by the media. But we did see ourselves as somehow special, and we found an excitement in our work that made our days never long enough. For those who became involved in putting together Lyndon Johnson's Great Society legislative program, the excitement and the chance of satisfaction, if anything, increased because ideas that were only projected in the earlier years became realities, while in the national security establishment the beginnings of progress on outlawing nuclear weapons as weapons of war were overshadowed by the deepening tragedy of Viet Nam.

For me, and I believe for many others, Camelot only ended when Robert Kennedy's funeral train arrived in Washington's Union Station. As I took a turn standing over the coffin to brace it against the swaying of the train, now slowed almost to a walking pace, and watched the silent crowds lining the tracks, the strongest emotion I felt was wanting the trip not to end. Whatever it was, we knew it was over. Three decades later, the pieces that made it what it was may be a little less difficult to sort out.

To begin with, we all knew each other. Not literally, in most cases, but we recognized each other early on. We came from remarkably similar backgrounds. Once when I gave a talk on the Kennedy talent hunt, (which we conducted between the election and the inauguration) expatiating on how wide we had spread the net, a commentator teased me by adding up the number of New England prep school and Ivy League products who had been appointed to key posts on our recommendations. In the talent hunt, we thought we were reaching out because we sought the able, rather than the politically deserving. But the meritocracy was a small and relatively homogeneous class at the beginning of the 1960's. Most of us had experienced quite similar rites of passage, even when our origins were diverse. I remember a lunch with Larry O'Brian, the presiding genius of the Kennedy legislative relations operation, in the White House mess, during the first few days of the new administration. Larry remarked that he had never eaten lunch before in a place where you signed a chit. He (and his luncheon companions) assumed he was joining our club—not vice versa.

Bill Clinton brought his new Cabinet together at Camp David, in the early days of his administration, for a weekend gathering to get acquainted with each other. That was not Jack Kennedy's style. But it was not the style of the times either. Everyone was assumed to have met already, somewhere in the corridors of power.

Then, all of us lived in the shadow of a common danger—or we thought we did—the danger of nuclear annihilation. If we perished, we perished together. True, some of us had been issued helicopter passes, so that we could be spirited away to an impregnable underground fortress in the event of nuclear attack. It was not at all clear whether the passes would be used, leaving families to cope as best they could. But the passes did help to create an atmosphere of unreality. This was a Camelot strong enough in isolation to withstand even a direct hit.

From early on, there was a certain amount of posturing, more reminiscent of Agincourt than Camelot. There were mutually congratulatory slogans: "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." Much was made of "toughness" as a desirable attribute. I know, because I put it in a list of qualities to be measured—or guessed at—in interviews for the talent hunt, along with such obvious criteria as intelligence, energy and integrity. By "toughness" I meant "toughmindedness," but when the list—inevitably—leaked to the press, candidates for appointment appeared in the talent search offices at the Democratic National Committee, flexing their muscles, and proclaiming, "I'm tough, I'm tough!"

We were astonished to discover the strength and depth of the resources available to us to do our work. At the simplest level, there was the White House telephone operator. If you were fortunate enough to be part of the White House telephone system, which extended beyond the White House itself to cabinet and key staff liaison offices, you could pick up the instrument (appropriately white) on your desk and say to the operator, who appeared instantly on the line, "I'd like to speak to a Mr. Williams or Williamson, I don't know his first name. He runs a company that designs computer programs, and I think it's in Chicago, or maybe one of the suburbs." You would hang up, and a few minutes later the telephone would ring and the operator would say, "Mr. Williamson is on the line." The availability of enough operators, superbly trained, plus the power of "The White House calling" was enough to make a connection.

And it wasn't just at the apex of the pyramid that resources abounded. If you needed a briefing on any imaginable subject, there were people in government who had spent their lives gathering information, and were waiting by their telephones for a call, so they could tell you more than you wanted to know about their subject. I remember, too, the colonel who came into my office at the end of a long day to take on a fact-gathering assignment overnight, and introduced himself by saying, "Just tell me what you need, sir, and I'm all arms and legs."

For those who seek the outward signs of power, high government service can minister to their basest emotions. But for those with intellectual curiosity, it can be a dream come true, a sense of multiplying one's individual effectiveness several times over.

We were bound together also by stronger ties. We believed that the business of government was central, not only to the survival, but to the quality of life in American society. And we believed that energy, intelligence and compassion, applied in the service of government, could overcome inertia, stupidity, and cruelty.

What makes Primary Colors, the novel about the Clinton nomination process, more than a parlor game to identify the (no longer) anonymous author, or a lesson in how Great Men escape the consequences of their appetites, are the occasional glimpses of the presidency as a fulcrum on which to lever social change. When Governor Jack Stanton (the Clinton look-alike) embraces a local adult literacy program that might be applied on a national scale, or engages in a rational discussion with a rival candidate about the shape of a middle class tax cut, the presidency comes to life as a challenge, not just a race.

President Clinton has had few opportunities over the last three years to be a president, rather than a perpetual candidate, or a punching bag. His greatest opportunity, the attempt to reshape the delivery of health care in the United States, he muffed by keeping the congressional leadership out of the planning stage. But then other presidents didn't distinguish themselves on that issue either: FDR ducked, Harry Truman failed, and LBJ with Medicare and Medicaid built a magnificent bridge halfway across the ravine.

Presidents generally save their best shots for their second session of Congress, or even for the hoped-for second term of office. Clinton was cut down in mid-course, facing a bunch of wild men who were prepared to negotiate nothing less than a full surrender by the other side. After only 21 months, too much of which were spent staffing up, he was forced into a reactive mode, like no president since Herbert Hoover.

At present writing, prospects for a truly presidential second term are no brighter. Clinton may well win the right to reign but not the opportunity to rule.

Life was not always rosy, even in Camelot. President Kennedy tried to dispel the February gloom, a third of a century ago at a press conference by observing wryly:

"If you ask me whether this was the "winter of discontent," I would say no. If you would ask me whether we are doing quite as well this winter as perhaps we were doing in the fall, I might say no, too."

Kennedy could be completely stymied in pushing legislation, as when Judge Howard Smith, who chaired the House Rules Committee, chose to go down to his farm in southside Virginia and hole up there for weeks at a time. It was not President Kennedy who finally broke the logjam, but Congressman Dick Boiling, leading a grassroots rebellion in the House. The coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats was not as fierce as the Gingrich Gang, but more formidable, and probably more persistent. They had a good deal more seniority, in a time when seniority counted. And finally, and inevitably, the shadow of the Cold War fell over every dispute, giving it an ideological tinge, more or less pronounced, that often bore no rational relationship to the subject at hand.

Even within the executive branch, Kennedy's room for maneuver was strictly limited. When he observed a lily-white contingent of Coast Guard midshipmen in his inaugural parade, he could order the integration of the Coast Guard Academy. But he could not sign an executive order to eliminate discrimination in federal housing programs, although he had campaigned on the president's ability to do so "by a stroke of the pen," without alienating Southern senators and congressmen whose votes he needed on even more important issues, including other civil rights issues.

He couldn't even integrate the Navy Steward's corps, which seemed to consist entirely of Philippine citizens recruited under an ancient treaty arrangement. I know, because I tried, at White House direction and failed miserably.

Yet we persisted in the belief that if we tried hard enough, and dug deep enough, we could make a difference. We practiced the 60's injunction, "Question authority" before it became a bumper sticker.

In one of his last speeches, at Amherst College in October 1963, President Kennedy said: "The men (sic) who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation's greatness, but the men who question power, make a contribution just as indispensable. ... for they determine whether we use power or power uses us." Kennedy wanted the critical questions asked, and he wanted to find the answers so that he could use the power the country had given him in the most effective fashion.

What gave more weight to the questions we asked was that they were a prelude to action: it was McNamara's "99 trombones," 99 questions that Secretary of Defense McNamara addressed to his civilian and military staff on every aspect of military operations and policy; it was Robert Kennedy's questions to the Foreign Service establishment on how they were keeping in touch with the rising generation of leadership—often opposition leadership—in the Third World; it was the Equal Opportunity Task Force questions addressed to the numbers crunchers in government personnel offices, about how you could find out about discrimination if you were not allowed to identify the ethnicity of employees or applicants.

The answers to all these questions triggered prompt and decisive actions. The answers to McNamara's quiz formed the basis for the McNamara management revolution in the Pentagon. The answers—or non-answers—to Robert Kennedy's question led to his forming an inter-agency group that did influence the behavior of the department towards emerging Third World leadership; and the Equal Opportunity Task Force reversed the established inquiry policies that had obstructed equal opportunity programs.

The McNamara reforms did not prevent the Viet Nam disaster; the Robert Kennedy Committee did not avoid major U.S. blunders in the Third World; and the tabulation of individuals by ethnic background carried with it a whole set of new problems. But they all made a difference.

Often the actions we were able to take were quite limited in their immediate scope and impact, although they mattered as dramatic examples:

When the authorities in Prince Edward County, Virginia closed the public schools, the Justice Department took the initiative to help create an alternative school, and keep it going for more than a year. When James Meredith, after integrating the University of Mississippi in his own person, insisted that he was going to the big game on Saturday, running a high risk of assassination, the president of the United States intervened personally to try to persuade Meredith not to go, and then arranged to have the big game cancelled.

The Peace Corps was such a limited enterprise; it was acknowledged to be more for the benefit of the Peace Corps volunteers than for the populations they served; yet it reverberated far beyond the places that the volunteers touched. The Peace Corps motto, "Not to change the world, but not to leave it the same either," made the point.

Peace Corps enrollees were emphatically not government employees. They and the Peace Corps management insisted that they were not part of the U.S. ambassador's country team, and they made their point effectively enough so that on at least one occasion they had to resist invitations from villagers with whom they lived, to join them in taking up arms against an overbearing soldiery. They were equally rejecting of the usual perks that went with official service overseas.

In a presidency that began with the injunction, "Ask not what your country can do for you ..." it is not surprising that the line between public and private action was a bit blurred. In January 1961, Billy Donnelly, a badly wounded veteran of World War II, closed his skeet shooting range in California, got into his specially equipped car, drove to Washington and announced, "The president told me to ask what I could do for my country." Through friends of friends we found him a place in the water-desalting branch of the Interior Department, where he became the most effective advocate for water desalting plants in the history of the process.

The administration did not hesitate to draw on the resources of the private sector to support public policy objectives. When the opportunity arose to ransom the Cuban refugees who had been captured in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a massive campaign inspired by Robert Kennedy was launched to collect food and drugs, under the leadership of a New York lawyer, and successfully completed, even in the face of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In the same way the administration mobilized funding from private foundations for a voter-registration drive in the Deep South in the