In Barack Obama's political memoir on "reclaiming the American dream", there is not one line to suggest that, as President of the United States, Mr Obama would pursue a foreign policy that was markedly different from that of most of his predecessors. Where necessary it would be multilateralist but always first in the service of US national interests, whatever Europe may feel or think. And, yet, the overwhelming majority of polled Europeans would vote for Mr Obama if they could. They see in him, as his slogan says, change they can believe in.
Today he gives a widely heralded speech in Germany. There has been much argument about the symbolically appropriate place where he should give it. When people argue so much about the symbolism of a speech, it has half-entered into myth already. In the trailers, commentators have mused aloud whether Mr Obama will turn out to be comparable to that most myth-soaked of modern US Presidents, John F. Kennedy.
History has been kind to JFK.
By history I mean, largely, the movies and the anecdote-peddling courtiers who survived him. The gilded icon we have is of a political genius cut down in his prime. The historic record, however, has been summed up by Stephen Graubard in his book The Presidents: a mediocre president with little interest in domestic politics and under the illusion that he and his brother Bobby understood the Kremlin and the European leaders better than the State Department's experts.
JFK was shackled by his inexperience. Like Mr Obama, he was a first-term senator when he ran for President. He did not know Washington. When he came to form his Cabinet, some of the men he chose were unknown to him prior to the selection process, while he appointed his brother to the powerful post of Attorney General: two factors that probably affected some poor decisions taken later.
He only had himself to blame on the domestic front. His record in passing important legislation through Congress was modest. Yet, he had a master congressional fixer as Vice-President, Lyndon B. Johnson, a veteran Speaker of the House. LBJ had not lost his touch - as President, after JFK's assassination, he managed to pass one of the most important pieces of 20th-century legislation, the Civil Rights Act that recognised racial equality at law.
But JFK disdained Mr Johnson. He had offered him the Vice-Presidency thinking Mr Johnson would not accept. Thereafter he neglected to utilise Mr Johnson's skills. And, by the way, JFK moved warily on race and civil rights, fearing for his re-election, given a predictable backlash in the South. Later, this prospect did not stop Mr Johnson, even though the electoral consequences were plain to a Texan. Writing in 1997, the historian Diane Kunz concluded that federal civil rights policy would have been "substantially less productive" had JFK lived to see through a second term.
Perhaps Europeans should only care about the foreign policy. Usually, the debacle of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the first troops posted to Vietnam are blamed on others. Emphasis is placed on President Kennedy's "finest hour" - how he averted thermonuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis and the stand-off with the Soviet Union.
Once again, we need to sort the fairy tales from the record. A new generation of historians has been helped, since the end of the Cold War, by access to the Kremlin archives and by the release of White House tapes recording JFK's conversations (yes, he ordered a secret taping system, just like Richard Nixon).
The disastrous invasion of Cuba had been planned by the CIA before he took office. But the fact he knew little about the CIA helped him accept an evidently flawed plan.
On Vietnam, as well, he was hesitant. But he ignored the warnings of the French President, Charles de Gaulle, who reached the conclusion that JFK was "suffering the drawbacks of a novice".
As for the finest hour, according to Mr Graubard what really happened does not match the hype propagated by Bobby Kennedy's insider account. JFK certainly does deserve credit. But the crisis was reached in part because the Kennedy brothers did not understand either the Kremlin or the Soviet leader, Nikita Kruschev (nor he, them). And the crisis subsided, to an important degree, because of a secret quid pro quo: the US withdrew missiles from Turkey.
Unless some dramatic reverse happens, Mr Obama looks set to be the next US President. Like JFK, he has little experience of Washington. With few obligations to it so far, his rhetoric has been anti-Washington, promising the kind of change reflected in the title of his book, The Audacity Of Hope. Like JFK, he faces an international adversary he needs to understand - terrorism camouflaged by Islamist rhetoric, buoyed by real injustices. Let us have the audacity to hope that Mr Obama will be no Jack Kennedy.
ranierfsadni@europe.com