Noonan on JFK: Well Said

Why, after all the historians’ revelations and the stories of the past 30 years—the women, the drug use, the Kennedy White House’s own farfetched efforts to do away with Fidel Castro, the fantastical nature of the Bay of Pigs, the failure of JFK to anticipate and answer the crude communist clichés of Kruschev at Vienna, etc., etc.—why do we continue to hold this special place for JFK? Because in the months and years after his death we fell in love with him as he was presented to us by those who knew and cared about him. Youth, beauty, charm, high intentions, wit, a certain fatalism and, deep down, a certain modesty. “Camelot.” But Camelot isn’t JFK. Camelot is the way we remember America before JFK died. Camelot is the America that existed, for one brief shining moment, before Lee Harvey Oswald began to shoot. a placid-seeming, even predictable place that we have not seen since.
http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2013/11/16/why-we-still-talk-about-jfk/