Those who weren't alive during John F. Kennedy's presidency know him as a mythic political and cultural figure. His sudden, violent death has been portrayed as the end of the nation's innocence, as a harbinger of the chaos and violence that marked the late 1960s. Kennedy has been the subject of countless books, movies, and miniseries; many of them portray him as the hero of a lost golden age in the American past. A figure mired in folklore, Kennedy came to represent the era he had a political hand in shaping. During his presidency Kennedy dealt with the burgeoning Cold War, the growing Civil...