Our long national retrospective on the assassination of John F. Kennedy has left us with more sentiment than clarity. The man himself seems as hard as ever to bring into focus. He was at once principled and cynical, elegant and cheesy, coolly analytical and painfully self-absorbed, purposeful and adrift. His foreign policy was the same uneasy jumble. Kennedy oversaw a massive nuclear buildup and then brought off the cold war’s first arms control treaty. He created both the Peace Corps and the elite commando unit that decades later killed Osama bin Laden. After the tolerant humanism of one speech came the rousing and pugnacious anti-communism of the next. At the Bay of Pigs, he seemed a near-incompetent; in the Cuban missile crisis, a skilled and patient statesman. Just before he died, the coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam had the look of incompetence again.

All these qualities and more have been recorded in the many books published to mark the anniversary of Kennedy’s death. But the milestone brought new perspectives, too. The most interesting and ambitious interpreters, it seems, are no longer content to leave John Kennedy a puzzle. They have tried to sharpen up his features and give his story a clearer shape. Robert Dallek’s Camelot’s Court describes a president deeply suspicious of professionals and experts, and fighting a constant rearguard action against the conventional (and often highly militarized) wisdom offered up by his advisers. Jeffrey Sachs, in To Move the World, argues that in his last year Kennedy finally found a way around rigid generals, anxious allies, and congressional critics. His famous we-all-breathe-the-same-air speech at American University in June 1963 launched a “quest for peace,” and within weeks it produced the limited nuclear test ban. In JFK’s Last Hundred Days, Thurston Clarke tells a still more dramatic story, a redemption narrative about “the emergence of a great president.” In the months before Dallas, says Clarke, Kennedy began a concerted effort to bring an end to the cold war. With Soviet officials, he broached the idea of a fuller “détente,” to include substantial U.S. troop withdrawals from Europe. He became more convinced that there was no significant American interest at stake in the defense of South Vietnam. Back-channel communications with Castro aimed at breaking Havana’s ties with Moscow. Even Kennedy’s personal life settled down a bit. After the death of their newborn son, Patrick, in August, he and Jackie became visibly more devoted to each other. When Marlene Dietrich visited the White House in September 1963, the president did not even have sex with her. A year earlier, Clarke reports, he did.

These are very different books, all of them serious and interesting. No matter how much you think you know about the New Frontier, there is plenty to learn from them. As for the inevitable simplifications that occur when we try to neaten up the past—well, half a century after Dallas it is time to get beyond history’s first and second drafts. Perhaps a clearer picture of Kennedy’s aims and achievements would even hold some lessons for another young president who has struggled to develop a coherent foreign policy. If so, Barack Obama could use those lessons now, not fifty years down the road.

There are good reasons, then, to try to understand John Kennedy better. But it is hard to escape the feeling that the new view of him is really an old one. It is closer to Camelot than anything we have heard in years. America’s travails in the 1960s—especially the Vietnam War—seem about to become all Lyndon Johnson’s fault again. In the new view, even some of what went wrong while Kennedy was still president is not quite as much his fault as we used to think. Was his policy, at least in his early years, sometimes too belligerent or provocative? For this, the military and the CIA now take the blame. Was the process of reaching decisions sometimes too secretive, or disorderly, or inconclusive? This, too, can be traced to the president’s lack of confidence in those around him. If the administration often lacked clear direction, it was because Kennedy was trying to neutralize his more trigger-happy advisers.

In tidying up the story, we risk losing much of the New Frontier’s genuine contradictoriness, not to mention the complexity of America’s global role at the height of the cold war. It used to be, after all, that the Kennedy White House was seen as the source of hyperactive policy, not as a check on it. (That is why, shortly after his death, The New Yorker rhapsodized that “he did not fear the weather ... but instead challenged the wind itself.”) Visiting 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue early in the administration, Adlai Stevenson complained about what he called “the damnedest bunch of boy commandos running around.” Kennedy insiders had similar qualms. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. labeled the “addiction of activism” as the “besetting sin of the New Frontier.” John and Robert Kennedy, he admitted, were “not planners” but “improvisers.” They were “impatient with systems.” Impulsive policymaking was the costly result. It left the president, Paul Nitze lamented, “in a perpetual state of reaction to one crisis after another rather than working toward long-term goals.”