The Kennedy years had, as Reeves writes, ``an astonishing density of events,'' from the building of the Berlin Wall to the Birmingham church bombing, and the integration of the University of Mississippi a month before the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy was a quick study, with much to learn.
Astonishingly callow when inaugurated, he was unable to stem or even discern the intragovernmental delusions and deceits that propelled the Bay of Pigs invasion just 87 days into his presidency. Much flowed from that debacle. Kennedy said that in order to reverse Nikita Khrushchev's assessment of him as weak, he had to find somewhere to show U.S. resolve: ``The only place we can do that is in Vietnam. We have to send more people there.'' Soon he was at the Vienna summit, where Khrushchev, impervious to his charm, concluded that he was ``a pygmy.''
Only foreign affairs held Kennedy's attention. His response to the ``freedom riders'' who lit a fuse of the civil rights revolution was to ask his civil rights adviser, who was white, ``Can't you get your goddamned friends off those buses?'' But foreign affairs were plentiful enough.
Plentiful, and a sure cure for boredom. When on May 30, 1961, Raphael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, was assassinated, Kennedy asked Secretary of State Dean Rusk: ``Were we involved?'' Rusk replied: ``I don't think so. There's some confusion.''
In 1963, too, the days were eventful. Twenty-two days after a Saigon coup encouraged by the United States -- it produced regime change through the assassination of South Vietnam's two principal leaders -- and on the day a ballpoint pen containing poison intended to kill Fidel Castro was scheduled to be delivered by CIA agent Desmond Fitzgerald to a potential assassin, Kennedy awoke in Fort Worth. He was to speak there, then fly to Dallas.
Looking down from his hotel room at the platform from which he would speak, he said to an aide, ``With all those buildings around it, the Secret Service couldn't stop someone who really wanted to get you.'' It was Friday, Nov. 22, 1963.