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By Bruce W. Nelan

TITLE: PRESIDENT KENNEDY

AUTHOR: RICHARD REEVES

PUBLISHER: SIMON & SCHUSTER; 798 PAGES; $30

THE BOTTOM LINE: A cool, clear look at the way J.F.K. dealt with his crises.

In October 1963, John F. Kennedy had to decide what to do about the war in Vietnam and, most urgently, whether to back a military coup in Saigon. Kennedy was, writes Richard Reeves, "quietly desperate about the contradictions and misinformation swirling around him. Perhaps half of what he was being told was wrong, but he did not know which half." As he had done before, he dispatched personal envoys -- this time Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor -- to size up the situation.

Their mission failed to clarify the President's thinking. "He's totally out to sea about what to do in Vietnam," said Kennedy's journalist friend Charles Bartlett. Even worse, Kennedy did not seem to know how to formulate a consistent policy on Southeast Asia. His approach was, Reeves writes, often "careless and dangerously disorganized."

Reeves illuminates such policy crunches, the almost nonstop crises of Kennedy's truncated term, with masterly research and graceful writing. He largely succeeds in recapturing Kennedy's perspective, putting the world into the context of "what he knew and when he knew it and what he actually did" as President.

With that focus on what Kennedy had to work with, Reeves has come up with fresh and fascinating material on the confrontations in Cuba, Berlin and Vietnam and on the "chummy" correspondence between Kennedy and Soviet boss Nikita Khrushchev after the Cuban missile crisis (Khrushchev confided, for example, that Kennedy's election victory over Richard Nixon "did not draw tears from our eyes").

Issue oriented though it is, President Kennedy reveals the man as well as the Chief Executive. Reeves finds J.F.K. a talented and intelligent politician, filled with ambition but essentially without a moral center, ideals or strong emotions. He shows Kennedy dealing with civil rights not as a moral issue but as a political problem to be defused. His only visible ideology was a basic anticommunism. Some of the people close to Kennedy thought "he felt almost nothing but tried to figure out everything." He was, Reeves writes, an impatient man who lived as if his life "were a race against boredom."

Most of all, Kennedy was a seducer, wielding his personal charm as a form of power: "Men and women fell in love with him." He was a skilled dissembler and sometimes a liar. He claimed to be healthy and filled with "vigor," but he was chronically ill with Addison's disease, agonizing back pain, a weak stomach and puzzling allergies. He was kept alive by a cocktail of medicine every day, along with cortisone implants in his thighs and feel-good amphetamine injections. Kennedy's secret sexual encounters with dozens of women are now well known. Reeves documents some of them, including one arranged by Secretary of State Dean Rusk at a villa in Italy owned by the Rockefeller Foundation, Rusk's former employer. Reeves also shows Kennedy routinely lying about what U.S. troops were doing in Southeast Asia and about American involvement in attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Reeves doesn't try to soft-pedal the distasteful, but his account of the Kennedy presidency is resolutely matter of fact and not an indictment. At one point he describes the image that J.F.K.'s inner circle tried to project as one of "cool objectivity, pure information gathering, dispassionate analysis." He must have absorbed some of that style during his long immersion in the archives and artifacts of the New Frontier.