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The Kennedys promoted cultural and social events as if without them life was only partially lived. They made the White House the nation’s model of taste, the celebrant of American culture. Kennedy’s critics would later suggest that this was nothing more than gauze over the camera, softening the harsh lines by which his actions deserved to be viewed. It was all, they sniffed, a triumph of style over substance. The Kennedys’ achievement was to turn style into substance and to celebrate the opening up of broad new cultural and social vistas that would never again be shut down. Unlike any administration since, the Kennedys turned the White House into an inspiring symbol of culture and style without equal.

Kennedy’s style, substance, and savvy came together in his televised press conferences. Since the Kennedy years, presidents have learned to squeeze all the juices of spontaneity out of their media conferences, but Kennedy was the first president to give regular, live, televised press conferences. At the time it seemed a daring departure from the controlled appearances of previous occupants of the Oval Office.

Kennedy had a bemused way of looking out on the assembled press as if no one in Christendom, and certainly not his aides, could ever imagine what questions he might be asked. He played on the reporters, knowing those who wanted their moment of preening time on television, those who had serious questions, and those who had a special cause or area that they always asked about. He used his disarming wit and grace to turn back the more mean-spirited questions on the reporters who asked them. He was at his best, however, when he was asked philosophical questions, the ones he could answer by expressing the existential dilemma of a president dependent on aides and officials and yet standing alone, responsible for his own hard judgments.

“Well, I think in the first place the problems are more difficult than I had imagined they were,” he said when asked after two years how his experiences had matched his expectations.

Secondly, there is a limitation upon the ability of the United States to solve these problems … and I think that is probably true of anyone who becomes president, because there is such a difference between those who advise or speak or legislate and … the man who must select from the various alternatives proposed and say that this shall be the policy of the United States. It is much easier to make the speeches than it is to finally make the judgments, because unfortunately your advisers are frequently divided. If you take the wrong course, and on occasion I have, the president bears the burden of the responsibly quite rightly. The advisers may move on to new advice.

Kennedy looked at everything in his life through the prism of politics, not only the most monumental questions of life and death and the endless array of issues, from civil rights to education, but even the smallest social events and the media coverage of his children. The photo spreads, be they of the children or Jackie or the loving family at play, enhanced his popularity, spilling over onto his political image. He pushed Caroline and John Jr. forward to be photographed by the popular magazines Look and Life, an enterprise that was immensely profitable to their owners and may well have subtly tempered some of their political criticism. Jackie tried to shelter her children from the flashbulbs and the public’s preening obsession, but the president always managed to work around her. As soon as his wife left Washington, it was not only other women who entered the White House to amuse the president but at times photographers to capture images of his children.

A political architect of the emerging media society, Kennedy created a model that his successors would try unsuccessfully to match. He did not believe, as some would have, that image was everything, but he did think of image as a kind of costuming that allowed him to walk where he wanted to walk