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Forget FDR and Lincoln; Obama Is Most Like JFKIt's not just their biographies—it's also the tenor of their times.

By Fred KaplanPosted Friday, Jan. 16, 2009, at 5:09 PM ET

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At the end of that decade of torpor and conformity, there was suddenly a sense of a new dawn. A feeling took hold that the breakdown of barriers in space, speed, and time made other barriers ripe for transgressing—in civil rights, politics, the arts, and pop culture. And a mass audience emerged—aided by the rapid proliferation of televisions and pocket radios—that was receptive to the rebellion.

But the New Frontier had its dark side. Along with rockets and jets came missiles and H-bombs, and the fear (mistaken, as it turned out) that the Russians were ahead across the board. Global power was dispersing, with Castro's revolution in Cuba; the "nonaligned" conference at Bandung, Indonesia; and the first American casualties in the war in Vietnam.

It was this twin precipice—the possibilities of infinite expansion and instant annihilation, both teetering on the edge of a new decade—that gave the period its swoon and ignited its creative energy.

Still, missing from the mix was some coalescing force, some figure who could wrap the array of changes around a theme and stamp it with his signature. And that was where Kennedy came in—talking about not only New Frontiers but the torch passing to "a new generation of Americans born in this century." (Nixon was born in the 20^th century, too—he was only four years older than Kennedy—but he was tied to Eisenhower, the oldest president in history up till then, and besides, he seemed so square.)

Now we whoosh toward the end of our own fretful decade amid a similar tangle of breakthroughs and breakdowns—global power fissuring, cultures fracturing, the world shrinking, and science poised to spawn a new round of once-unimaginable dreams and nightmares. Once again, there's a palpable sense that we're treading on completely new terrain.

And Obama—born in the year of JFK's inauguration—is the one who strikes a consonant chord with this sensation of hope, fear, and change. A man from everywhere and nowhere—multiracial, multinational, multiethnic; a man of the country, the city, the tropical islands, and beyond—he's the sequel to every Kennedy-era dream of smashing barriers and integrating not merely black with white but America with the world.

What kind of president he'll make is a separate matter. Kennedy took almost two years to find his bearings, trust his judgment (against that of his "best and brightest" advisers), and set a course that might have converged with his promise, had he lived longer.

Obama enters the White House with more awareness of its pitfalls (because he has studied Kennedy's record). And he enjoys high hopes and good favor because he's viewed as so resonant with the times; and because the times are so difficult, many will grant him some fumbling and exploration—at least for a while.

In the summer of 1959, as Kennedy pondered his unlikely run for the presidency, Allen Ginsberg, the generation's visionary poet of exuberance and doom, wrote in the Village Voice: "No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control. America is having a nervous breakdown. … Therefore there has been great exaltation, despair, prophecy, strain, suicide, secrecy, and public gaiety among the poets of the city."

He might as well have written it today.