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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

John F. Kennedy Inauguration Day brings out the historian in everyone, and the ascension of Barack Obama has spurred debates over which president of other crisis-drenched eras he most resembles. Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt are the main contenders. But let me put in a word for a more obvious parallel, the one that came to most people's minds when Obama first hit the scene: John F. Kennedy.

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The Kennedy model lost favor as the financial crisis took hold (evoking FDR's first 1,000 days in the Depression) and as Obama recruited former opponents to his Cabinet (emulating Lincoln's "team of rivals"). But the JFK comparisons also dwindled, I suspect, because they seemed too obvious—both men being young, glamorous outsiders and masters of lofty speechmaking.

But the obvious should never be overlooked. And besides, the Kennedy-Obama parallels are, in fact, deeper than they might seem.

In 1960, Norman Mailer wrote an article about Kennedy for Esquire magazine called "Superman Comes to the Supermarket." Americans, he observed, had long led "a double life." There was the surface history of politics—"concrete, factual, practical, and unbelievably dull." And there was "a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires" that made up "the dream life of the nation."

In the vapid Eisenhower years, he went on, the "life of politics and the life of myth had diverged too far." Americans needed "a hero central to his time," a leader who could capture their "secret imagination" and re-engage "the myth of the nation" with its "pioneer lust for the unexpected and incalculable." Kennedy was that hero, the "matinee idol" in an age of movie-star heroes who spoke of a "New Frontier" of "unknown opportunities and perils."

Mailer recognized that the country was divided, almost evenly. Not everyone wanted this kind of hero. Many wanted to step back from this frontier, even to indulge in a countermyth of simpler times, small towns, and provincial values, when categories were stark and choices seemed clear. It was a clash of myths that would define much of American politics for decades to come—not least in our own recent election—and the question Mailer posed was whether a majority of voters would choose the man of glamour and mystery who would intensify the myth of frontiers or the odorless company man who would bask in terrain complacently occupied.

Sound familiar? There's something of this chasm between Kennedy and Richard Nixon in the contest of Obama vs. John McCain.

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Obama seems to grasp the connection. In his weekly YouTube addresses, he has placed three leather-bound books just behind him and to his right. Take a close look. They're the three-volume edition of The Public Papers of John F. Kennedy. Clearly this is a man who understands iconography.

But it's not just Obama, the man or the image, that resonates with Kennedy; it's also the tenor of their times. The years leading up to JFK's presidency were as fraught with excitement and danger as our own era, and for many of the same sorts of reasons.

The late 1950s saw the beginning of the jet age, the space race, and a slew of technological breakthroughs—the microchip, the business computer, and the birth-control pill, to name a few—that drastically expanded the possibilities of modern life.