Last year my father ran for president of the United States. Well, "ran" isn't accurate, implying as it does that Dad actually did something. He and a few of his buddies were holding forth about politics in their bar one night when somebody suggested that Dad would make a better president than any of the bums running for the job. One thing led to another and my father was a write-in candidate for president in the state of Florida, courting the disgruntled barfly vote from Tarpon Springs to, well, Tarpon Springs.

The thing about write-in votes is that you can't just tell people to write your name in. A write-in candidate has to file papers and pay a fee to be viable, and Dad and his running mate were apparently the only candidates to do that, making his the only write-in votes that actually counted. According to the Independent Political Reporter website, when the dust cleared, my father and his friend had garnered over 4,200 votes—more than Ralph Nader, Bob Barr or Cynthia McKinney received in the state—without leaving his barstool.

Was it irresponsible of my father to mess with the electoral process for a joke? Not really, as obviously there were at least four thousand Floridians who were just that unhappy about the choices they were given, and were able to exercise their prerogative—much better than not voting at all. And who's to say he wouldn't have made a great president? He's at least as qualified as anyone else in history, which is to say not at all.

Don't let the campaigns fool you—nobody, with the possible exception of Grover Cleveland running for a non-consecutive second term, is qualified to be president. That's because there's no analogous job to it even among world leaders. No one can possibly prepare for the unique pressures and challenges of leading the world's only remaining superpower, shepherding its economy, administering its laws, commanding its armed forces, and wrestling for its soul. If all it took was a résumé, George H.W. Bush would have been our greatest chief executive and George Washington would have been our worst. The man occupies the office, but it's the office that takes the measure of the man.

That's why, almost half a century later, the jury is still out on John F. Kennedy. His fans regard him as a visionary, the symbol and true architect of national progress in the latter half of the American Century. His detractors regard him as a philandering cad who talked a good game but failed to live up to his misguided promise. The assassination and subsequent martyrdom of JFK further muddied the waters, leaving open the questions of just how great Kennedy might have been and whether his moral failings could or should be overlooked. Which JFK was the real one? Or better, can we reconcile Kennedy the war hero, statesman and family man with Kennedy the insatiable horndog? Jed Mercurio tries to answer that question in his new novel American Adulterer (Simon & Shuster, 2009). The results are mixed, but the attempt is fascinating.

Done as a psychological case study (constantly referring to the 35th president as "the subject") of one man's chronic and almost pathological satyriasis, Mercurio follows Kennedy through his presidency, from "Ask not what your country can do for you" to the bullet ripping through his skull in Dealey Plaza, giving us an intimate, over-the-shoulder documentary view of the man. As Kennedy weathers the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Berlin Wall, Civil Rights turmoil and the Cuban missile crisis, we are privy to all the facets of his life that were painstakingly hidden from the public. For all the youthful vigor JFK exuded in his official persona, he was riddled with medical problems—not just his famous back injury but Addison's disease, gastrointestinal ailments, thyroid conditions, chronic migraines—a host of maladies that Mercurio, a physician himself, describes in harrowing detail. Between these issues and the competing efforts of Kennedy's physicians to medicate them into oblivion, that the president could even walk, much less maintain the image of youthful strength and grace, was a miracle.

Here's where it gets interesting. Mercurio's novel (and remember, it is a novel) postulates Kennedy's need for dangerous sex was tied in to his medical pathology. Based on JFK's now-infamous confession to British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan that going three days without a woman gave him headaches, Mercurio makes Kennedy's profligacy a psychosomatic condition, a sex addiction that exacerbates his real ailments. While never denying the aphrodisiacal effects of power, Kennedy's liaisons also provide him relief from his constant pain—in short, Marilyn, Judith Campbell and the legion of young, nubile White House interns were glamorous placebos JFK took to keep functioning. Thus does Mercurio seek to reconcile Kennedy's philandering with a very real devotion to wife and children, and his personal indiscretions with the strong sense of ethics that guided his presidency.

Of course, all of this would come off as a huge load of rationalizing bullshit in the hands of any less-capable writer, but Mercurio's gift here is to make it work with his fictional case-study device. By adopting the dry, clinical voice of the therapist, Mercurio never allows himself nor pushes the reader to pass judgment on "the subject." Mercurio never writes Kennedy as a character with a character's two-dimensional limitations and, instead, presents the unadorned, fallible man, with all his complexity and contradictions, for our consideration. It's a move that pays off in spades.

John G. Nettles