http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jfks-berlin-blunder/2011/08/12/gIQAGOcxBJ_story.html

Here is The Great Will at war with the legend of John F. Kennedy, with a generation of historians, mythologizers, political cronies, and all the thousands of hours of television dreck that Camelot and it's violent and bitter end produced. Not to speak of the endless number of books, by a host of friends, who loved the idea, the romance of the Kennedy years and who profited handsomely by their careful loving cultivation of that thousand days, as indicative of momentous historical change. But Mr. Will has drawn a miniature of Mr. Kennedy as a drug addled political naïf, unfit to engage in a battle of wits with Khrushchev on Cuba or Berlin. Was Kennedy a weak man, sometimes given to tears, a man completely unequipped to do battle in the Cold War, against more cunning and amoral men, as Mr. Will portrays him? Mr. Kennedy may have been inexperienced and something of a novice and maybe an ineffective leader; but if we are to take his portrait as drawn by Mr. Will, as a reflection of the man, it is rather a portrait of the politician, as viewed by one who hopes to change our view of that man, as reflecting the act of political revisionism, of redrawing the past in the political lens of present, to meet certain ideological ends, certain felt political necessities. Mr. Will provides the counter myth to Camelot in polemical terms, because his column is pure polemic, from first to last. There is a certain pathos that is evoked by Mr. Will’s seemingly gratuitous act of political revisionism, which is in sum not at all gratuitous, but a calculated act of rewriting history for political ends. This is, of course, his right as a political commentator, but Mr. Will has deformed the practice of polemic, to the extent that it seems the mere bandit attack of a party hack. Yet the savage hatred at the core of this text evokes a haunting dark music.

Political Cynic