When John F. Kennedy launched his bid for the presidency, Robert Drew was there, always a step behind him, catching history on camera as it happened. In the years that followed, Kennedy continued to allow Drew and his team unprecedented access-to his family, to the members of his administration, and to his highlevel briefings on such signal matters as nuclear disarmament and civil rights. Though much of that footage has been seen before, this new, tightly edited cull of the Drew archives provides a timely update of the Kennedy mythos. Not since 1968, when his brother Robert ran, has the John F. Kennedy name been so endlessly or meaningfully invoked in a presidential election. Whatever viewers' takes on the 2008 race, A President to Remember offers an insightful reminder of what an unlikely candidate JFK was all those years ago: an eastern seaboard millionaire seeking to lead the party of the working class, a Catholic subject to generalized suspicion of his faith, a lightly pedigreed upstart running on a platform of change at a time when Cold War paranoia seemed to demand the steady hand of Humphrey, of Johnson, of Nixon. Of course, Kennedy beat them all. But A President to Remember is a film for those who already know the broad outlines of this history and of the events that followed. Narrator Alec Baldwin provides a minimalist gloss on the Bay of Pigs, the rise of the Berlin Wall, and the desegregation showdown with Governor George Wallace, but Drew's camera remains in the back rooms with Kennedy, reading his face as history is being written. For those who know the legend, here's the man.

Robert Drew