lacks taste"—the illusion of his greatness could be sustained, in the face of his inconclusive, often disappointing record in office, only by retrospective commentary that dwelled on the unfulfilled promise of a career brought prematurely to a tragic close.

Two themes emerged in the flood of commentary following Kennedy's assassination: celebration of his "style" and speculation about the dark undercurrents in American life, the unsuspected flaws in the national character, that had led to his murder. According to Newsweek, Kennedy "infused [the presidential] office with a youthful, direct and vigorous style unmatched since the days of Theodore Roosevelt." "The key was style," wrote Ben Bradlee. "His style captured the nation's imagination. The country, reflecting its new leader, had a new look.... With his gifts of intellect, purpose, and charm, and his high hopes of winning a second term, what great and lasting accomplishments might he have forged?" Theodore H. White praised Kennedy's "remarkable, astringent candor," his "gaiety, elegance, grace." While historians would argue about the "seminal legislation and proposals of the Kennedy administration," no one could have any doubts about his matchless "style." Schlesinger's eulogy in the Saturday Evening Post celebrated Kennedy's "vitality of personality," his "quick intelligence, easy charm, and laconic wit," his "historical imagination," his "vision of America ... as a noble nation, rising above mean and ugly motives." Kennedy gave the nation a "new sense of itself," Schlesinger wrote, "a new spirit, a new style, a new conception of its role and destiny." Not to be outdone, White published an interview with Jacqueline Kennedy, two weeks after the assassination, that closed with the words from the Broadway musical, as quoted by Mrs. Kennedy: "For one brief shining moment there was Camelot." ^*

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Kennedy's admirers were not wrong to stress the need for a leader who would speak to and represent the "real subterranean life of America," as Norman Mailer put it in his account of the 1960 Democratic convention. There was much to be said for Mailer's contention that "the life of politics and the life of myth had diverged too far" in the postwar years and that the times demanded a leader who could "engage" once again the "myth of the nation" and thus bring a new "impetus ... to the arts, to the practices, to the lives and to the imaginations of the American." Mailer's mistake lay in identifying Kennedy as such a leader. Those who believe that "history is full of heroes"—a

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